©Kittipong Jirasukhanont via Canva.com
May 22, 2025
Is Marketing to Bots a Big Deal for Retail’s Future?
With Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and others building out AI agents that will discover, search, and purchase products for consumers, retailers and brands may be increasingly tweaking their marketing messages to appeal to bots.
“We’re heading toward a future where AI assistants help people make complex purchase decisions — comparing products, managing subscriptions, booking travel, even filtering out marketing that doesn’t align with personal values or goals,” wrote Jeremy Lockhorn, SVP of creative technologies and innovation at the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As), in a recent blog entry. “That means agencies may soon be marketing to AI agents as much as to human audiences.”
Lockhorn said brands will have to figure out how to get recommended by a personal shopping assistant AI, including rethinking how to make product descriptions online more relevant and persuasive to algorithms acting on a consumer’s behalf. He wrote, “Human purchase decisions are made on a somewhat unpredictable combination of logic and emotion, but will AI agents eschew all emotion and focus entirely on the rational?”
The bots are likely to bypass traditional online search and promotional tricks, including emotional appeals, aimed at attracting human beings.
Patrick McFadden, founder of Indispensable Marketing, a consultancy supporting small businesses, wrote in a LinkedIn article that AI agents “prioritize structured data, transparent pricing, and measurable value over emotional branding.”
Shelly Palmer, an advertising and technology consultant, at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show predicted consumers will increasingly have multiple AI personas making decisions on their behalf and shaping customer profiles. He said, according to The Drum, “We already know how to make bots love us. SEO [search engine optimization] and SEM [search engine marketing] are proof of that. But we need to adapt. The workflows of the past are obsolete. The future? Super-automated processes and multi-agent systems.”
Walmart is building its own shopping agents to handle repetitive tasks like grocery re-orders and offer suggestions based on prompts such as, “I want to plan a unicorn-themed party for my daughter,” Walmart U.S. Chief Technology Officer Hari Vasudev told the Wall Street Journal.
Vasudev suspects third-party shopping agents might communicate with retailers’ own agents, but the article also noted that third-party agents may ultimately gain greater control of the discovery process, including checkout.
Paul Low, head of search at PMG, a digital advertising agency, told MediaPost that as AI agents increasingly guide more of the shopping journey, shopping could also become “purely transactional,” making it harder for brands to connect emotionally. On the other hand, Low said AI “also has the potential to create more personalized, efficient, and convenient experiences. Consumers will spend less time on tedious searches and more time enjoying what truly matters.”
Discussion Questions
Do you see tailoring marketing messages to AI agents becoming more important as bots increasingly perform tasks, including shopping, on behalf of humans?
Will the approaches for targeting algorithms have to differ greatly from those targeting humans?
Poll
Loading …BrainTrust
Carol Spieckerman
President, Spieckerman Retail
Lisa Goller
B2B Content Strategist
John Hennessy
Retail and Brand Technology Tailor
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I am not quite sure that marketing to bots is quite the right term. However, retailers need to ensure that the tools that control search results and guide consumers are likely to consider and, preferably, prioritize their brand. This is very similar to the challenge of optimizing search in Amazon or other platforms but, arguably, is far more complex and nuanced. Of course, there will be shortcuts such as paying to be boosted – which will raise all kinds of questions as to the impartiality of AI and its recommendations.
This is the next major disruption in retail and the handful of viable diversified retailers are rightfully freaked out about it. These retailers have spent years creating platforms to sell products online, in stores, in marketplaces, and through social commerce, platforms that are increasingly weighted toward solutions and services (e.g. advertising) to weather the product-based headwinds hitting retail with hurricane force. Optimizing content to woo shoppers and search engines across these dizzyingly diverse platforms, only to be derailed by heat-seeking retailer-agnostic bots that aren’t impressed? It’s an entirely new ballgame. “Tailoring marketing messages”? If only it were that easy!
No. Marketing to bots is not a thing and will not be a thing. We make good progress, though, considering the issue in a different way. There’s serious risk that AI will replace traditional search — at least it has already begun this process. Just as marketers have had to learn to create content with search engines in mind, they are beginning to need to re-jigger their content so that AI based searches will bring customers to their doors. Shahin Khan and I discussed this issue in our latest podcast episode. Starts about halfway through the episode (or can be read via Apple’s podcast transcription).
I’m seeing this firsthand. The traditional linear marketing funnel is obsolete. Now the product detail page experience can take place anywhere, including ChatGPT and among AI agents that shop across platforms to satisfy customers’ personalized needs. This year more retail stakeholders are adjusting their marketing strategy and messaging to align with agentic AI applications.
The marketing of AI agents will be focused more on data-driven efficiency and algorithmic preferences as opposed to marketing to humans that relies on emotional appeal and brand storytelling. In making decisions, AI agents prioritize factual information, such as price, quality, and user reviews. Thus, businesses may have to optimize their offerings for machine-readable formats and ensure that their products meet the criteria favored by these algorithms.
Product attributes is a big issue in online search and will be a bigger issue in AI search. If the way someone describes or considers your product isn’t part of your product attribution set, you’re out of stock online. Even though you’re not.
With AI’s ability to look at more data points more quickly, things like product weights, dimensions, packaging, proximity to requestor, return policy, payments accepted and other data attributes not typically considered in a search become relevant to a recommendation.
There is a possibility we will not see a major disruption or change to how the marketing is presented to the consumer, but there may be ways to optimize for agents the consumer does not see. Think meta-names in use today adapted for personal agents.
We’ll figure out how to sell it if it’s measurable and effective.
We’re not there yet.
I see a world where people have bot-like personal assistants. The assistants will understand their human, know what to screen out, make suggestions, and more. There’s good and bad for marketers. The bad is that it will be harder to connect with the human customer. The good is that if the marketing message makes it through, it means the customer may truly be interested.
There is high sales and ROI upside in packaging up product and service benefits, and customer outcomes to AI agents over marketing messages. Shop any grocery store today, and you’ll immediately have access to ingredients, prices and how/where something was grown/raised. But cost-quality benefits and life/health benefit processing is all on the shopper unless there is an available employee who knows the products and business well. AI agents will be able to quickly and thoroughly sort value-quality equations, price-value equations and speed up benefit decisions for customers, especially when humans aren’t available.
Marketing strategies will need to evolve. Structured data, clarity, and measurable value will matter more than ever. Brands will have to rethink how their products are presented to ensure they’re found and favored by automated systems. But saying that machines will fully replace human decision-making oversimplifies the reality.
A brand is more than product specs, it builds meaning, identity, and long-term trust. People don’t remember a price tag, they remember how a brand made them feel. These emotional connections are built through storytelling, values, and experiences. Automated systems might influence buying behavior, but they can’t recreate human memory or attachment. That’s where strong retail brands will continue to hold their ground.
Whenever there is discussion about personalisation there is often conversation about matters such as privacy and ‘spookiness’. However there is another way to think about this.
There is an argument that says that the more relevant a marketing message is to the individual the better. The logic here being that as an individual you have to expend less energy filtering out messages that are not relevant to you.
For consumers a major focus of the past 10+ years has been to reduce buyer friction. An agent that undertake research on their behalf in terms of price and capabilities presents an incredible opportunity to save time and reduce friction even further.