AI-driven traffic is poised to favor brands by delivering higher margins, better data access, and closer connections with consumers, potentially reducing the dominance of wholesale-based retailers.

Brands will retain control over post-search experiences—site navigation, basket building, cross-sell/upsell, and checkout—opening deeper margin opportunities.

Apparel brands today rely heavily on multi-brand retailers, which limits data, pricing, and customer-experience control, with retailers currently capturing roughly 40–50% of GMV.

Even as some traffic shifts to AI-driven direct-to-consumer models, wholesale still offers broad reach and discovery that can fuel future high-margin sales.

AI agentic shopping is projected to become the primary mechanism for search, discovery, and purchase decisions for most US adults by the 2030s, with positive implications for apparel brands.

Analysts at Bernstein SocGen likewise forecast AI agentic e-commerce as the dominant mode for search, discovery, and purchasing in the US by the 2030s.

By the 2030s, AI-driven agentic shopping is expected to reshape online search, discovery, and purchase decisions for most US adults, redefining the apparel industry.

Even with some revenue shifting to wholesale, brands gain broader reach and improved discovery, which can enable higher-margin sales in the future.

For premium brands, online DTC could yield margin improvements of 15–20 percentage points versus wholesale, with an additional ~150 basis points if 10% of customers use agentic search to steer them to DTC.

The potential 15–20 point DTC margin uplift over wholesale is augmented by about 150 basis points if a minority of customers (around 10%) use agentic search to direct transactions to DTC.

Brand traffic costs (15–25%) and marketing on multi-brand sites can be optimized through AI agents that route transactions and ROI across channels like Amazon, Dick’s, Macy’s, and others.

Under agentic AI, transactions will be routed via agents, enabling brands to optimize ROI across multiple customer acquisition channels, including AI agents themselves.