The rise of agentic commerce is forcing retailers to rethink their entire data strategy — not as a future concern, but as the immediate prerequisite for competing in a world where AI agents make purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers.

Rewards platforms sit at an unusual intersection of this shift: They hold rich transactional data on consumer behavior while also serving as a discovery and engagement layer between brands and buyers. That position creates both an opportunity and a mandate to build for agentic commerce before the window closes, according to Gowtham Gundu (pictured, right), chief AI officer of Fetch Rewards Inc.

“Fetch’s data platform is purpose-built for scale, and Snowflake is at the center of it,” Gundu said. “We see almost 13 million active users every month in our platform. Every single day, we see almost 13 million receipts. Only after Walmart and Amazon, we are the third biggest in terms of the transactional [Gross Merchandise Value] data that we actually see on our platform.”

Gundu and Paul Winsor (left), head of retail EMEA at Snowflake Inc., spoke with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight at Snowflake Summit 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Fetch Rewards is using AI and Snowflake’s data platform to scale its rewards marketplace, personalize consumer experiences and prepare for the agentic commerce era. (* Disclosure below.)

Agentic commerce demands a data foundation built for speed and scale

The concept of agentic commerce — where personal AI agents conduct product discovery, comparison and purchasing on a consumer’s behalf — is accelerating far faster than most retailers anticipated. According to Bain & Company, full agent-to-agent commerce could eventually bypass traditional retail websites altogether as consumers delegate purchasing decisions to AI. While Snowflake has been pushing that model through its AI Data Cloud, Winsor noted that the real breakthrough is how quickly knowledge workers can get answers and context from operational data.

“If you wanted an answer to a question way back when it was just the batch era, it would take you weeks to get that answer,” Winsor said. “What we’re now seeing is this opportunity to be able to ask a question, get an answer [and] get the context of that answer before you’ve even pretty much started your day’s work.”

AI agents are already changing how Fetch handles routine customer interactions. When a user fails to receive points for a scanned receipt, an AI agent can now automatically investigate and resolve the issue — a task that previously required manual ticket submission. But the longer-term ambition extends far beyond support automation, reaching toward a fully automated marketplace that rewards consumers for behaviors they are already performing, according to Gundu.

“The future holy grail is like [an] unimaginable amount of automation,” he said. “You get up in the morning and we automatically [reward you] for certain kinds of activities like walking and then watching your favorite show. Or you go to a grocery store and we know that based on your history of purchases, you actually need to buy some stationery today, and we are going to automatically give you that kind of suggestion.”

For Snowflake, the larger pattern is clear. Across its retail customer base, data readiness is becoming the gating factor for every AI initiative. For Fetch and every brand on its platform, natural language access to data is no longer a nice-to-have. Gundu described Fetch’s work to build a natural language interface so a brand such as Pepsi can instantly query buyout rates, basket sizes or trend shifts — a pipeline that converts a question into a SQL query, retrieves the data and returns a readable response in real time.

“Your inventory data … your customer data in terms of understanding everything about the customer behavior and the purchasing and the history, as well as all of your product data,” Winsor said. “Your data is going to be absolutely critical to the next evolution, which is going to be agentic commerce.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit 2026:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Snowflake Summit event. Neither Snowflake, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE