Affiliate Marketing Gets AI Makeover With Firmly-CJ Deal

Agentic commerce company firmly.ai has launched a partnership with affiliate marketing provider CJ.

The collaboration will offer CJ’s network of publishers and merchants turnkey access to “seamless shopping experiences” for consumers and thus open “new revenue streams, real‑time attribution, and frictionless checkout across every emerging channel,” the companies said in a news release provided to PYMNTS Wednesday (Sept. 10).

“As publisher referral traffic continues to decline and consumers increasingly transact within new channels, publishers, affiliates and merchants face the same challenges of engaging and converting consumers,” the release added.

The companies said their integration solves this via a native checkout solution for CJ’s merchant partners that lets them convert consumers at “the moment of inspiration” with no technical implementation required.

That means publishers now have access to a “scalable native checkout solution” that keeps the consumer on their platforms to increase engagement and better understand what their audience is buying at a customer level.

“Affiliate marketing is no longer just about the click—it’s becoming the backbone of a new era in commerce media,” said Santi Pierini, CEO of CJ. “Our partnership with firmly.ai helps to accelerate CJ’s transformation from a leading affiliate network into a true commerce media network, enabling publishers and advertisers to monetize and transact wherever their audiences are—inside editorial content, on social platforms, through AI chatbots, in email, digital ads and even shoppable CTV experiences.”

The partnership follows firmly’s collaboration earlier this year with Perplexity.ai, designed to let the artificial intelligence (AI) company’s users browse and buy products without leaving the platform, “preserving consumer attention while streamlining the journey from inquiry to checkout,” as PYMNTS wrote in March.

More recently, PYMNTS spoke with firmly co-founders Scott Hendrickson and Kumar Senthil about the rise of agentic AI in eCommerce.

“What consumers really want is for commerce to happen immediately,” Hendrickson, who is also firmly’s chief revenue officer, said in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “People’s time has never been more valuable, and they expect things to be frictionless.”

He and Senthil argued that the move from search to suggestion to settlement is eCommerce’s logical next step in eCommerce, given that social media feeds already steer users to one-click purchases of impulse items.

“Agentic AI extends that concept to any venue where a shopper starts research, whether it’s an email thread, a mapping app, even a voice assistant in the kitchen,” PYMNTS wrote. “Wherever the conversation starts, the agent can surface suitable products, verify availability and finalize the order in-line.”