From Gateways to Gatekeepers: When Generative AI and Agentic AI Search Engines Own Your Customer Journey

This IDC Market Perspective examines the implications of this shift across key technology categories: website front ends (front end as a service [FEaaS]), content management systems (CMSs) and digital experience platforms (DXPs), product information management (PIM) and product experience management (PXM), voice of customer (VOC) tools, marketing/martech and personalization, digital commerce platforms, and customer data platform (CDP) systems. As search platforms evolve into agentic commerce systems, traditional customer experience (CX) software categories face a strategic inflection point. Discovery is shifting away from interfaces and toward machine-mediated decision environments. To remain competitive, vendors must reposition their platforms to support structured, context-rich, and AI-readable content. The analysis outlines where disruption is happening, which industries are most exposed, and how vendors can adapt to stay relevant in an answer-first economy. "If machines can't read it, customers won't see it," says Heather Hershey, research director, Worldwide Digital Commerce Strategies, IDC. "In an AI-first discovery landscape, visibility is earned through structured knowledge, authoritative content, embedded trust signals, and the machine-readiness of product and brand data. This shift will reward vendors that enable machine-readable enrichment and syndication tailored to their platform's functional domain while disadvantaging those still optimized exclusively for human-centric engagement in lieu of machine-led decisioning."