In today’s digital commerce space, visuals are everything. Jehan Hamedi, founder and executive chairman of Vizit, a visual AI platform that predicts, measures and optimizes the effectiveness of digital commerce imagery, said the online product page was where shopping occurred. But that’s no longer true.

Here, Hamedi explains what’s changed and how AI is redefining the online shopping experience and the role of visual content.

Sourcing Journal: How is AI moving the moment of purchase influence upstream and changing how consumers discover and evaluate products before they ever reach a retailer’s website?

Jehan Hamedi: For twenty years, the retailer’s product page was where shopping happened. That is no longer true. A shopper now forms an opinion about your product long before they reach any site, inside a search result, a social feed, or a conversation with an AI assistant. The moment of influence has moved upstream, into places brands do not fully control and often cannot even see. What makes this urgent is that these early impressions are almost entirely visual.

Before anyone reads a review or checks a price, they have already reacted to an image. AI has compressed the funnel, and the top of it is now the part that matters most. Brands still pouring their energy into the last click are optimizing the end of a decision that was effectively made at the beginning.

Sourcing Journal: How is AI reshaping consumer behavior?

J.H.: There is a fear that AI is taking the decision out of human hands. I see the opposite. AI is not replacing the shopper’s judgment; it is speeding it up. When an assistant recommends three products, the person does not accept the first one on faith. They glance at each, and in a fraction of a second they decide which one feels right. That reaction is human, instinctive and visual, and it happens before conscious reasoning catches up.

So, the machine narrows the field, but the person still chooses, and they choose the way people always have, with their eyes. What has changed is how fast it happens. There is less deliberation and more instant reaction, which means the weight resting on that first visual impression is heavier than it has ever been.

Sourcing Journal: Why has visual content become the deciding factor in the AI shopping era?

J.H.: In beauty and fashion, the image is not marketing for the product. Online, the image is the product. It is the only sensory information a shopper has. AI has made that more decisive, not less.

When an assistant surfaces a recommendation, that is only an introduction. The image is what closes the sale. A shopper can be handed the perfect product by an algorithm and still scroll past, simply because the visual did not earn a second of their attention. That is the gap most brands are missing. They fight to be recommended, then lose it the instant the shopper actually looks. The recommendation opens the door. The image decides whether anyone walks through.

For anyone selling online today, that makes imagery the single highest-leverage asset in the business.

Sourcing Journal: What are the new rules for brands competing in AI-powered commerce?

J.H.: The old goal was visibility. Get surfaced, get seen, get on the shelf. In AI commerce, being surfaced is table stakes. It puts you in the consideration set and nothing more. The real contest starts after that, in the instant a shopper sees your product beside three others and decides who earns their trust. Trust in that moment is not built with words. It is built with clarity, credibility, and a visual that signals quality and fit before a single line of text is read.

So, the new rule is easy to state and hard to live by. Do not just be findable. Be immediately convincing. That means knowing, before you publish, whether your content will hold a shopper for that half second, rather than hoping it does. The brands winning right now have stopped guessing about that and started measuring it.

Sourcing Journal: How do retailers and brands prepare for the next evolution of AI shopping, as AI assistants become the new front door to e-commerce?

J.H.: Assume the AI assistant becomes the front door to your store, because it already is. Preparing for that means two things at once. Your content has to be legible to machines, structured so an assistant can understand and represent your product accurately. And it has to be persuasive to people, because a human is still on the other side making the final purchase decision. Most brands and retailers today are thinking about only the first half.

The winners in agentic commerce will treat every image as a performance asset rather than a creative deliverable, and they will measure it the way they already measure price and media. My prediction is that scoring product images for their conversion power will soon be as routine as auditing a brand’s financial statements.