Agents buy where you can’t watch. So what’s left?

At a round table on analytics and privacy, the room was asking how an agent should react to a cookie consent banner. I was more bothered by the question than by any answer. We never needed consent to sell something. We needed it to watch people buy it. A website is the surface we chose to deliver a service to humans, and the stack around it follows from that choice. The journey needs tuning, tuning needs analytics and CRO, and observing users means reading or storing something on their device, which is where the ePrivacy consent comes in.

Put an agent in the customer’s place with an API or MCP and the journey becomes a request and a response. There is no funnel to drop out of and nothing written to the device. Content stays but gets a different reader. The order, the invoice and the renewal never depended on the surface, so they stay too, and they become the last first-party signal you have. Two things follow. The cookie rules end up covering a shrinking share of what actually happens, and UX, CRO and analytics people have to ask where their skill is needed once the choosing happens inside the agent.