Grocery Buyers Still Live in the Binder. Agents Are Already Searching It
A grocery buyer still builds the bid from a spreadsheet, an email and a trade-show binder. The search for who makes the product, what the barcode is, what is on the label and whether it has been recalled is the slow leg. The purchase is not. An agent can finish the search. It cannot award the line, and it cannot decide whether the ad sold against that barcode is the same decision as the order. That split is the operational problem. The hub that claims to close it has not yet shown a buyer and a media team acting on one file.
WARC's Future of Commerce Media 2026 report put worldwide retail media ad spending at $200.4 billion in 2026, rising to $223.4 billion in 2027, or 15.2% of global ad investment. Growth is cooling. WARC expects 11.5% growth in 2027, and 9.8% if Amazon is excluded. Food brands are forecast to put 54.9% of media investment into retail media by 2027. The money is moving faster than the purchase order.
The First Task Is the Search, Not the Award
Matthew Keddy, chief executive of GreenCore Solutions Corp., said in written comments to The Supply Chainer that the grocery-procurement tasks that move first are supplier search and product checks. Buyers already live in spreadsheets, email and trade-show binders. On A2A-Grocery.ai, he said, the agent does that leg-work in seconds: who makes it, the barcode, the label, any recalls, in 20 countries. "The buyer still buys. The agent just gets them there faster." On the maker side, the move is to list once, so every buying agent in 20 countries can find the product. He put the file at 8,619 grocery chains and nearly 2 million stores, with agents already shopping it at 9 transactions a second, around the clock.
The same limit is already on the record in procurement. In The Supply Chainer's piece on data and execution, Kristian O'Meara, chief commercial officer at Pairsoft, said: "Visibility does not automatically translate into action. The biggest disconnect between insight and execution occurs when organizations treat data as something to analyze rather than something that can actively drive business processes."
The Ad and the Order Still Sit in Different Buildings
Keddy said retail media is the fastest-growing money in grocery. Stores grow 2 to 4% a year, he said, and the ad side 10 to 40%. Today it lives in a different building from procurement. GreenCore's claim is to put them in the same place. A maker lists once. A buyer's agent can order it, and the chain's media team can sell ads on it. Same product, same barcode. The early result he cited is scale, not a named chain: 5 billion grocery data points on the record, and 100 million-plus AI agent transactions on GSC's stack this year. Sales reps, buyers and media teams keep their jobs. They get a tool that does a week of searching before lunch.
Alex Brownsell, head of content at WARC Media, said the retail media landscape is maturing and consolidating, forcing marketers to rethink their approach. That is a budget fact. It is not proof that the buyer who awards the line and the team that sells the slot are working the same exception.
Nine Searches a Second Is Not an Award
Keddy called grocery the biggest shelf on earth, $2 trillion a year of buying across the US, Canada, the EU and the UK, and said its buyers now shop with AI agents. He described A2A-Grocery.ai as the first place built for those agents to shop B2B, with retail media in the same hub. GSC does not replace the buyer or the rep, he said. The tools are already busy: 9 agent transactions a second, 100 million-plus this year. He did not name a chain, a maker, a cycle-time cut, or an ad dollar tied to an order the agent found.
A search that returns the barcode and the recall removes the binder. It does not award the line, and it does not tell the media team whether that barcode will be on the shelf they are selling against. Until a buyer and a media lead can point to the same exception, closed in the same file, the hub is a faster search sitting next to an ad product. The purchase is still a person. The ad is still a different building, unless the chain has already decided they are one decision.
