What Rules AI Agents

AI agents are beginning to move from assisting consumers to acting on their behalf. Agentic commerce remains at an early stage, with agent-mediated transactions currently representing only a fraction of global e-commerce, but the trajectory is significant.

McKinsey estimates that AI agents could mediate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030, while Gartner projects the broader market for standalone AI agents and assistants to grow thirteenfold between 2025 and 2030.

But when agentic commerce enters beauty and fashion, men and women are not necessarily situated in the same way. Beauty is already one of the sectors in which AI-mediated discovery, recommendation and purchasing are expected to expand rapidly. McKinsey expects e-commerce, including social and agentic commerce, to account for the majority of beauty-market sales growth through 2030.

Gender imbalance in algorithmic power

The case of women is particularly relevant not because algorithmic influence is unique to women or because men are absent from the beauty market, but because beauty and fashion intersect with several documented gender asymmetries.

Women encounter more prescriptive appearance norms. Those norms can carry distinctive social and economic consequences for them. And many of the commercial markets built around appearance are highly gender-segmented, with important categories disproportionately targeted toward women. Research has found that the appearance normsencountered by women in everyday life tend to be more rigid, homogeneous and pervasive than those encountered by men.

Other research has documented that appearance expectations can translate into distinctive social and professional penalties for women. Experimental studies on what researchers call the “prescriptive beauty norm” found higher appearance requirements imposed on women seeking powerful positions and identified a “beauty tax” that targeted women more than men.