Microsoft’s Lynne Kjolso on commerce media’s next chapter: ‘It’s fun to be delivering some reality’

Kjolso spent the week deep in conversations about the future of commerce media and what she heard was less wide-eyed optimism, more impatience. “There’s a high annoyance factor with all the hype,” she says. “Advertisers and agencies are like, ‘Stop talking to me about this until you have something real to show me.’”

That tension is defining commerce media’s next phase. And at CES, it was clear the industry is fast running out of patience for abstract visions of ‘agentic commerce’ without tangible ways for brands to show up, get paid and measure value.

When the journey collapses, so does the funnel

Commerce is becoming more conversational at the same time the traditional consumer decision journey is collapsing altogether. And that shift is already forcing brands to rethink how – and where – they compete.

At CES, Microsoft made that future feel more immediate with the launch of Copilot Checkout, which allows shoppers to research, compare and purchase products directly within Copilot without being redirected elsewhere. The move effectively turns AI assistants into transactional environments, shrinking the gap between inspiration and action to a single conversation.

“You’ll now be able to do the entire consumer decision journey within Copilot, including checking out and payment,” Kjolso says. “It’s fun to be actually delivering some reality.”

For marketers, that reality raises uncomfortable questions. If intent is expressed, explored and converted in one place, what happens to the familiar mid-funnel tactics that commerce media has been built around?

Commerce media is no longer a side hustle

Part of the challenge, Kjolso argues, is that retail media has grown faster than its strategic foundations. “Retail media has become this huge side hustle that then becomes a really powerful accelerator in your P&L,” she says. But as agentic experiences reshape discovery and search, those economics may no longer hold.

That’s why she believes retailers need to stop treating commerce and media as separate businesses. “CMOs really have to start thinking about those two pieces holistically,” she says. “What’s going to drive profitability as agentic commerce starts to take off might be different from the economics of today.”

The implication for brands is equally stark. Proliferation and fragmentation remain a drag on confidence, with hundreds of retail media networks competing for budget.

“What’s a media buyer to do? They can’t possibly care about all 200 retail media networks out there,” Kjolso says. “They really have to choose the ones that work for them.”

From networks to moments that matter

Rather than chasing scale through ever more bespoke activations, Kjolso believes the focus needs to shift to presence and relevance.

“How do you show up in the moments that matter?” she asks. In a world where AI increasingly mediates discovery, that question matters more than which network a brand buys into.

That thinking also underpins Microsoft’s expansion of Brand Agents, AI-powered shopping assistants that live on brand websites and are trained on product catalogs and brand voice. While Copilot Checkout pulls commerce upstream into conversational environments, Brand Agents aim to strengthen brand-owned moments closer to conversion.

Together, they signal a broader recalibration: commerce media isn’t limited to the shelf any more – it’s influencing decision-making wherever it happens.

Measurement over noise

A consistent theme to run through conversations at CES was measurement – something Kjolso advises brand leaders to “double down” on. “Know who gives you the most value and where you can find your audience most effectively. That’s job number one.”

That focus also explains why data collaboration dominated conversations this year. “All of my advertiser and agency meetings – we didn’t talk about media at all,” she says. “We talked about data, targeting and measurement.”

As commerce journeys become harder to see – let alone attribute – the ability to connect signals across platforms, partners and environments will increasingly define who wins.

Stop building everything from scratch

Perhaps Kjolso’s most controversial advice is also her most practical.

“Stop investing in bespoke campaigns for each specific network,” she says. Fragmentation, she argues, is holding the entire ecosystem back and making AI far less useful than it could be. “If brands don’t have to do everything so bespoke, they’re going to be able to scale and engage with so many more networks.

“That is ultimately going to help the industry more than anything else,” she adds. “It’s going to help us solve the fragmentation problem, solve the proliferation problem [and] it’ll make AI tools so much more useful.”

Standardization may not sound exciting, but in an era where AI thrives on repeatability, it could be the unlock that commerce media needs.