How Ulta Beauty is winning the agentic commerce revolution: Key insights from NRF 2026
Agentic commerce is here, and it's reshaping retail faster than most anticipated. At NRF 2026, Mirakl CEO Adrien Nussenbaum sat down with Josh Friedman, SVP of Digital and eCommerce at Ulta Beauty, and Anne-Claire Baschet, Mirakl's Chief Data and AI Officer, to discuss how leading retailers are preparing for the AI-driven shopping revolution.
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The session, "Winning in the Agentic Era: Ulta's Take on the Commerce Roadmap to Success," revealed critical strategies that retailers need to embrace now — and how marketplace expansion plays a pivotal role in staying competitive in the age of AI agents and large language models (LLMs).
The agentic commerce shift: From keywords to intent
The numbers shared at NRF tell a compelling story: 60% of shoppers are already using AI in their shopping journey. AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity have seen explosive growth, with ChatGPT alone reaching nearly 6 billion monthly visits — demonstrating the massive shift in how consumers search and discover.
This represents a fundamental shift from keyword-based search to intent-driven discovery. Shoppers want to solve problems, not just find products. They're moving from transactional searches to conversational guidance, with AI acting as a trusted advisor.
Why UB marketplace strategy is an agentic commerce advantage
One of the most striking insights from the session: research presented by Mirakl revealed that one major U.S. retailer would only be mentioned 50% of the time in AI recommendations without their marketplace assortment. With marketplace expansion, their mention rate jumped to 75% — surpassing even the top platform in the U.S.
This is the marketplace advantage for agentic commerce: expanded assortment dramatically increases your discoverability. AI agents can only recommend products they know about — and the marketplace multiplies what you can offer.
For Ulta Beauty, the Mirakl-powered UB Marketplace launched in September 2025 has already grown to 150 brands, exceeding the initial goal of 100. What Ulta Beauty internally calls "the digital mezzanine" was designed to meet guest demand for expanded categories like wellness, men's grooming and beauty tech — but it's proving invaluable for agentic commerce visibility.
"We're all making sure that our products are where our guests want to be, that our solutions are very obvious to them, and that they can shop with Ulta Beauty whenever they want," Friedman emphasized.
Three pillars of agentic readiness from the NRF session
1. Master your product content first
"Structured product content is gold," Josh Friedman told the audience, revealing that Ulta Beauty invested in using AI to improve their product content in 2024 — a move that has already paid dividends in AI overview rankings on Google.
Anne-Claire Baschet built on this insight, emphasizing that both structured and unstructured content matter for agentic commerce success. Retailers need to optimize content to match shopper intent, not just keywords. Her recommendation: get your content right before making products transactable on new AI platforms.
This is where the marketplace delivers exponential value for agentic commerce.
Ulta's partnership with Mirakl brings 150 sellers, each contributing product descriptions, reviews and rich data signals that AI agents can leverage. This expanded content ecosystem doesn't just add assortment — it multiplies Ulta's visibility and relevance across AI platforms.
Every marketplace seller becomes a content contributor, enriching the total dataset AI agents can access. More products mean more relevance signals. More reviews mean more context for recommendations. The result: Ulta Beauty appears in conversations that wouldn’t be reached with first-party inventory alone.
2. Execute core operations flawlessly
New agentic commerce protocols like Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), announced at NRF and of which Ulta Beauty is a partner, require retailers to share real-time operational data that agents will use to determine which retailers to trust.
The panelists emphasized that AI agents prioritize delivering the best outcome for users. Three operational areas become critical for visibility:
Competitive pricing — Agents surface pricing transparently, making competitiveness more important than ever
Inventory availability — Consistent stock-outs can reduce your visibility in agent recommendations
Delivery performance — Meeting promised delivery dates influences how agents rank and recommend retailers
Friedman shared how Ulta Beauty’s approach addresses these challenges. Their invitation-only marketplace model — built on Mirakl's enterprise platform — partners with curated sellers rather than opening to third-party resellers. This maintains the quality standards and operational consistency that both guests and AI agents expect.
3. Build for discovery before transactions
While headlines focus on agent-to-agent transactions, the session emphasized that the near-term opportunity is in discovery. McKinsey projects the agentic commerce market will reach $1 trillion in the U.S. and $3 to $5 trillion globally by 2030, with 50% driven by discovery that leads to purchases on retailer sites.
Baschet presented the winning strategy: "Optimize for major platforms like Google Gemini and ChatGPT first, where traffic is already flowing, then build toward agent-friendly transactions."
Ulta Beauty is already executing on this roadmap. During the 2025 holiday season, Friedman noted they saw significant crawling from AI platforms. "Some of it turns into traffic, some of it not yet, but we're all expecting it to happen very soon," he shared.
With UB Marketplace expanding their discoverable assortment and the platform's rapid integration capabilities, Ulta Beauty is positioned to capture discovery-driven traffic as it scales. The marketplace doesn't just expand what Ulta Beauty can sell — it expands where and how they can be discovered.
What you should do in 2026
Based on the session discussion, the panelists recommended retailers prioritize three initiatives:
Establish clear ownership — Designate a leader for agentic commerce strategy and build cross-functional alignment.
Optimize data before transactions — Invest in product content enrichment, especially for top platforms like Google and ChatGPT, before making products transactable.
Audit core operations — Identify gaps in pricing competitiveness, inventory management and delivery performance that AI agents will expose.
What sets Ulta Beauty apart
Ulta Beauty’s success with the Mirakl platform demonstrates what's possible with the right technology partner. The retailer reduced brand onboarding time from 12 to 26 weeks down to just four to six weeks — the kind of agility that's critical in the fast-moving agentic commerce landscape.
With over 46 million loyalty program members, Ulta Beauty is ensuring AI agents can recognize and leverage customer relationships, beauty profiles and purchase history. Marketplace purchases earn Ulta Beauty Rewards points just like first-party purchases, creating a unified experience that both guests and AI agents value.
"If you do what's good for the guests, you're probably on the right path," Josh noted during the session. This principle has guided Ulta Beauty through every digital transformation — and now agentic commerce.
The path forward
The NRF 2026 session made one thing clear: the agentic commerce revolution isn't coming. It's already here.
Ulta Beauty's partnership with Mirakl demonstrates how forward-thinking retailers are preparing for this future — not by guessing what's next, but by building the foundational capabilities to succeed regardless of how quickly the landscape evolves. Marketplace isn't just a growth strategy anymore. It's an essential component of agentic commerce readiness — expanding discoverability, enriching content at scale and maintaining operational excellence as AI agents reshape how consumers shop.
Ready to accelerate your agentic commerce strategy?
Watch the BCG + Mirakl webinar: Your Agentic Readiness Roadmap — Get the framework for preparing your organization
Meet with the team who built Ulta Beauty's marketplace strategy — Discuss your marketplace approach with the experts behind one of retail's most successful launches
