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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.”