Shopflo stated that Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) brands do not need to build an in-house artificial intelligence specialist team to achieve growth and increase brand awareness.
As consumers increasingly turn to AI-powered assistants like ChatGPT and Claude to compare products, search for options, and make purchasing decisions, D2C brands face a new question: how to remain visible amid changing consumer behavior without hiring a staff of AI specialists?
At the TechSparks 2026 event, Mihir Shah, Director of Business Development at Shopflo by Pine Labs, presented two areas where the company helps brands solve this problem: agentic commerce, which connects product catalogs with AI-based search and purchase surfaces, and AI agents that help improve operational efficiency and business growth.
Shah emphasized: 'You don't need an AI team to figure out growth or efficiency issues. You need Shopflo.'
Previously, brands spent years increasing their visibility through social media, search engines, and marketplaces. Now, AI assistants add another discovery channel, allowing customers to describe their needs and receive relevant product recommendations.
According to Shah, Shopflo's agentic commerce offering makes participating brands' catalogs accessible on platforms originally built for AI, including ChatGPT and Claude, as well as on other new interfaces. Through integrations, the company feeds product catalog information to these platforms, enabling customers to find desired items and proceed to checkout with system support.
For example, a customer looking for festive gifts under 2000 rupees can find items from a participating brand via an AI assistant. Shopflo's integration with Pine Labs' payment infrastructure is designed to support transactions within these scenarios.
Shah noted that as consumer behavior evolves, brands must look beyond traditional discovery channels. However, he clarified that AI visibility does not replace Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which continues to drive traffic to websites.
Discovery is only one part of D2C business operations. According to Shah, brands also have to balance metrics such as conversion rate, average order value, return rate, customer retention, and profitability, often using separate tools for each function.
Shopflo's Growth Orchestrator system, presented in beta, aims to unify these solutions. Brands can define their priorities—whether it is striving for growth or protecting profitability—and receive recommendations based on their store's performance data.
During the demonstration, Shah showed how the system could detect a drop in conversion between address entry and payment, suggest placing a banner about commission transparency, and propose an experiment to test whether this change would improve conversion. Brands have the option to review these recommendations, set constraints, and approve experiments before scaling them. They can also decide the degree of autonomy to grant to the agents.
Shah concluded: 'How much or how little to use agents is up to you.' For D2C enterprises with small teams, this means less about implementing every new AI tool and more about simplifying the management of existing growth solutions. The Shopflo approach combines AI-driven discovery with tools that help brands achieve their own business goals, leaving the final decisions to them.