The Future of CRO: Optimizing for AI Agents

By 2028, 68% of all customer service and support interactions with technology vendors are expected to be handled by AI agents. These agents are essentially software programs that can make decisions and take actions on behalf of users. While they’re still early-stage co-pilots for now, they are quickly becoming autonomous actors within the digital landscape.

What does that mean for the future of CRO?

As of now, it appears that we’re heading toward a future where the primary user of your digital products and services might not be a person at all. Instead, it could be an AI agent that engages to evaluate your services, browse your APIs, and decide (based on programmed preferences) whether or not to suggest, or even make a purchase.

And the shift is already in motion. For activities such as booking travel and managing shopping carts, AI agents are already stepping in to perform tasks for users. The future of CRO will require preparation for these agents, which might soon bypass the frontend entirely.

In this post, we’ll explore the rise of AI agents, the possibility of shifting from human-first experiences to AI-focused service ecosystems across your platforms, and how SiteSpect can help you prepare for an AI-first web.

The Rise of AI Agents in Online Interaction

AI agents are still in the early stages, but they’re far from hypothetical. Major players like OpenAI, Google, and Amazon are already starting to build a new internet experience in which agents plan, decide, and transact independently.

In the near future, a user might ask an AI tool to “plan my night out.” In seconds, an AI agent could book a dinner reservation, buy concert tickets, hail a rideshare, and recommend an outfit. How? By transacting with various digital services completely behind the scenes. That means all of these tasks can be accomplished without a user having to enter separate queries and navigate through five or more different websites.

A future like this won’t fully eliminate human activity online, but it has the potential to redefine how decisions are made and how services are delivered.

Implications for CRO

Your current A/B testing and experimentation program is likely optimizing for human interaction by adjusting elements such as button copy, banner placement, or step count in a checkout flow. In the agent-driven future, that approach will undergo a major change. One of the most noticeable differences will be in your audience, which could become a form of AI.

Your CRO teams might currently be focused on improving metrics like clicks and impressions. However, to meet the wave of incoming tech changes, they will need to start thinking about data accessibility, service availability, and API performance. Websites will soon be designed to serve agents along with users, which changes the scope of what’s testable, measurable, and impactful.

From User Interfaces to Service Interfaces

Historically, websites and apps were designed to be operated via graphical user interfaces (GUIs), which respond to clicks, scrolls, and taps. The difference? AI agents don’t need interfaces. Instead, we could see a model where AI agents call APIs, pull data, and trigger transactions directly. Instead of reading your homepage, an AI agent will query your pricing, check availability, and assess return policies programmatically.

In the future, a purchase journey might look like this:

1. An AI agent parses its user’s preferences
2. It queries inventory, pricing, and shipping endpoints
3. It compares options
4. It finalizes the order without a screen or user ever visiting a website, or it creates a temporary “pop-up” UI for the user to review options and make decisions.

For CRO teams, this means that more traditional A/B tests on buttons or hero images will eventually lose priority in favor of experimentation on data structure and API logic.

SiteSpect’s Advantage

SiteSpect is already built for the future of CRO by supporting testing of the elements that will matter most as AI agents become increasingly commonplace. It operates in the flow of traffic between servers and clients, and its server-side experimentation and API testing capabilities let CRO teams choose and optimize how data is exposed to AI agents. With it, your organization can:

• Test API response formats and logic
• Determine how AI agents interact with your site or services
• Evaluate the way different prompts, data structures, or responses impact agent decisions
• Run experiments at the service layer without impacting performance

Having that level of flexible, advanced testing is critical, especially as you adapt to (or build) a digital ecosystem where your “visitor” doesn’t even open a browser. Pursuing dual-optimization by preparing interactions for both humans and AI could be a key step in embracing the future of CRO.

The AI-Heavy Future of CRO

What happens to traditional CRO tactics when humans pull themselves out of key parts of the journey?

As humans opt to have AI agents take over some amount of decision-making, conversion optimization will revolve around an important new consideration: the AI agent experience. Instead of optimizing navigation flows or search algorithms, you’ll need to focus on:

• Structuring your content so agents can easily parse product, pricing, and availability data
• Ensuring APIs deliver fast, consistent, and secure responses
• Exposing metadata and trust signals that AI agents can understand

Once users have AI agents start selecting and acting on their behalf, your team will need to figure out which factors they prioritize. These could include price, shipping speed, availability, or verified trust signals. For the best advantage, your organization should:

• Surface these inputs clearly
• Make them machine-readable
• Optimize their presentation for AI consumption

With SiteSpect, you’ll have the ability to test which formats perform best, deliver personalized responses to agent queries, and control the data that is utilized across services.

What Happens to Brand, Loyalty, and Personalization?

In a world where AI agents are making purchase decisions, does brand loyalty still matter?

The reality is that the concept of loyalty will change. It may become programmatic, with AI agents optimizing for price, convenience, delivery speed, and return policies over emotional brand affinity. Fortunately, there will still be room to differentiate through loyalty.

Here’s how:

• Users might set preferences with their AI agents such that perceived quality, an alignment of values, or emotional attachment to a brand can still influence algorithmic decisions.
• Explore how and where trust signals like “eco-certified,” “same-day shipping,” or “no restocking fee” should appear in the data layer.
• Find out whether preferential APIs (e.g., faster or richer data for loyalty members) lead to more frequent selection.
• Discover more about the way AI agents interpret social proof or brand authority.

SiteSpect’s control over data presentation and delivery logic makes it ideal for testing next-generation personalization techniques. With it, your team has a path to build algorithmic brand preference—even when a human isn’t directly making the decision.

Final Thoughts

By 2028, 93% of tech leaders believe agentic AI will drive more personalized, proactive, and predictive services. That shift will start by changing how customers interact with your brand, and it will possibly end by redefining who your customers are in the first place.

Preparing for the future of CRO means preparing for a new kind of “user.” Forward-thinking CRO teams can get started today by:

• Thinking beyond humans and designing for agentic interaction
• Experimenting at the service level with APIs, data, and logic, not just UX
• Using SiteSpect to conduct both human and non-human optimization in a single platform

Soon, intelligent agents will be evaluating your products, comparing services, and making decisions—all without a single click. Brands that begin optimizing for this future now will gain the advantage.

With SiteSpect’s server-side architecture and powerful experimentation tools, your team can get ready to meet imminent changes and optimize for an online environment that’s increasingly intelligent, automated, and agentic.

Ready to prepare your organization for the future of CRO? Request a personalized SiteSpect demo today.