Soon your customers won't be people. Get ready to sell to a robot.

Here is a thought that should focus the mind. Within a year or two, a decent chunk of the enquiries your business receives will not come from a person at all. They will come from an AI agent, working on a person’s behalf, checking you out before the human ever gets involved.

This is not speculation. At Google I/O in May, Google laid out its vision for agentic commerce, and it is moving faster than most local businesses realise.

What Google actually announced

The headline was Universal Cart, a shopping hub that spans Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail, letting people gather things they are considering into one place with the AI tracking prices and deals in the background.

More consequential for the rest of us is the plumbing underneath it. Google’s Agent Payments Protocol now lets AI agents make purchases on someone’s behalf within limits they set, with signed digital contracts creating an audit trail. Set your conditions, and the agent buys without you touching it.

And critically for local businesses: the Universal Commerce Protocol is expanding beyond retail into new verticals, starting with hotel booking and local food delivery, and rolling out to more countries including the UK.

That last part is the bit worth sitting up for. This is not a distant American thing happening to big retailers. Hotel booking and food delivery are Blackpool businesses. The UK rollout is coming.

What this means for a business in Lancashire

Forget the protocols for a second. Here is what it looks like on the ground.

Someone wants a plumber, a roofer, a hotel room, a table for eight. Instead of ringing round themselves, they ask an AI to sort it. That agent then goes and does what a diligent customer would do, only faster and across every option at once.

It reads your website. It reads your Google Business Profile. It compares you against your competitors on price, availability and reputation. And increasingly it will fill in your contact form, and it will ring your phone, to get the information it cannot find written down.

Then it reports back with a recommendation. Yours, or someone else’s.

The uncomfortable part

That agent cannot recommend what it cannot find out.

If your prices are not published, if your services are not listed, if your website does not plainly say what you do and where, the agent has two options. Work harder to extract it from you, or move on to the competitor who made it easy.

It will usually move on. There is no loyalty and no benefit of the doubt. It is a machine with a job to do.

Which is exactly why this is an opportunity rather than a threat. Most businesses will not get ready for this. If an agent can get what it needs from you and cannot get it from the firm down the road, you win by default. Not because you were cheaper. Because you were legible.

What to actually do about it

If you sell products online

Look into Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and whether you are eligible for the new checkout experiences. If you are on Shopify, much of this is being handled for you already, which is a decent argument for being there.

If you are a local service business

Fill in every single field on your Google Business Profile. All of it, not the bits you got round to. Especially your services, described the way a customer would say them. If you take bookings through a third party, make sure that integration is connected properly.

The profile is often the first thing an agent reads, and a half-finished one tells it you are a half-finished business. I have written a full guide to getting your profile working properly, and it is the same work we do monthly on the local SEO and AI search side.

Put your prices on your website

I know. This is the one people resist hardest.

But an agent comparing three firms will struggle to recommend the one whose price is a mystery. “Contact us for a quote” is a dead end to a machine, and increasingly to a human too.

If you are not the cheapest, that is fine. Say so, and spell out why someone should choose you anyway. The agent reads that argument. It is weighing more than the number. But it can only weigh what you have written down.

Every price INKON charges is published for exactly this reason, and I would recommend it even if it cost me work. If you want the argument in full, I have written about what a website really costs and why quote theatre helps nobody.

Write down everything a customer might ask

Your website needs to contain the answers a person or an agent would want when deciding whether you are the right fit. What you do. Where you cover. What it costs. How quickly you respond. What happens if something goes wrong. What makes you different.

Not brochure waffle. Plain, specific, factual sentences. That is what gets read, understood and repeated. This is the same discipline that gets you recommended when someone asks an AI who to call, and it is why a good FAQ page has quietly become one of the most valuable pages on a small business website.

Answer the phone, even to the robot

Here is the one nobody is ready for.

You are going to start getting calls from AI agents. Within a year I would not be surprised if a real share of your incoming calls are machines gathering information on behalf of a customer.

You need to answer them. If a human cannot pick up quickly, have something that can. This is precisely why every site we build comes with AI lead response built in, answering enquiries in seconds at any hour. And tell your staff, plainly, not to hang up on the AI.

It feels absurd written down. But that call is a customer, one step removed. Hang up on the agent and you have hung up on the job.

Try this yourself, it takes ten minutes

Enough theory. Go and find out what the machines actually know about you.

Open Google’s AI Mode, or ChatGPT, and ask it a simple question: “What do you know about [your business name] in [your town]?”

Whatever comes back, that is roughly what an agent has to work with when someone asks it to find a business like yours. It might be accurate. It might be thin. It might be wrong, or about somebody else entirely, which is more common than you would think.

Then keep going. Ask the follow-ups a real customer would need answering before they part with money:

1. What services do they offer?
2. What areas do they cover?
3. How much do they charge?
4. How quickly do they respond to enquiries?
5. Are they any good, and what do people say about them?
6. Do they do emergency or out-of-hours work?
7. How long have they been trading?
8. Who actually runs the business?
9. Do they guarantee their work?
10. How do I get in touch with them?

Ten questions. Nothing exotic, nothing unfair. Every one of them is something a customer would want to know before choosing you.

Now count how many the AI could actually answer.

That number is your readiness score. Every question it fumbled is a question an agent will fumble too, right at the moment it is deciding whether to put you forward or move on to the next name on the list. And the answers are not missing because you are a bad business. They are missing because nobody ever wrote them down where a machine could find them.

Now do it with us

Same ten questions, but ask about INKON in Thornton-Cleveleys.

I would be daft to invite that if I had not done the work, and it is a fair test of whether I practise what I am selling. Prices, services, areas covered, response times, who runs it, all of it is written down and public, which is why an AI can answer for us.

That is the entire difference, and it is not clever. It is just written down.

The through-line

None of this is really new. It is the same discipline that has always won local work, just enforced by something less forgiving than a human.

Be findable. Be clear about what you do and what it costs. Be easy to get hold of. Answer questions before they are asked. It is the same three jobs a website has always had, only now there is a machine checking your homework.

A person will forgive a vague website because they liked the look of your van. An agent will not. It will just quietly recommend somebody else, and you will never know the enquiry existed.

The businesses that write things down properly are about to get a very large, very quiet advantage.

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Want to know whether an AI agent could actually find what it needs on your site? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.