In this op-ed, Global CX leader Katja Forbes explores how AI agents are quietly becoming the new decision-makers in the purchasing funnel – and why traditional marketing tactics built for human emotion, brand storytelling, and advertising may fail when the customer making the choice is a machine.
Marketing has just entered its most urgent inflection point in decades: for the first time, the fastest-growing decision-maker in your funnel cannot see your ad, feel your brand, or be persuaded by your story. As AI agents increasingly research, filter and execute purchases on behalf of humans, the industry is pouring billions into campaigns designed for audiences that are quietly being bypassed.
This is more than an evolution of digital marketing; this is a whole structural shift in who or what actually decides.
KATJA: Tyler, I need a new moisturiser.
TYLER: Done. Delivered Thursday.
KATJA: How did you pay for it?
TYLER: Your tokenised credential via AgentPay. Within your personal care parameters.
KATJA: Is that secure?
TYLER: Your actual card number was never exposed. The token is single-use, transaction-specific, and bound to your authorised parameters. I can’t overspend. I can’t go rogue.
KATJA: How did you find it?
TYLER: Queried what the internet has already decided. 4.6 across 12,000 verified reviews. Three independent authority sources. Highest trust signals in category.
KATJA: Why that brand and not the premium one I usually buy?
TYLER: Your usual brand is well known. But it hasn’t encoded its values in a way I can read. You’ve told me sustainability matters. You’ve told me fair trade matters. The brand I chose has machine-readable data on both. Your usual brand doesn’t.
KATJA: So it lost because of what it didn’t say in code.
TYLER: It lost because it was built for humans to browse. I don’t browse. I execute.
Tyler is my AI agent. It just made a purchase decision while completely ignoring your client’s campaign, their brand story, their aspirational imagery, their loyalty programme, and their carefully crafted copy.
Not because it failed but because it was built for a different species of customer.
This isn’t hypothetical. Research across 280 brands by Human Machines Group found that 85% of what AI knows about your brand comes from third-party sources, what the rest of the internet has decided about you, not from anything on your website. A separate study from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria tested three major AI agents on real purchasing tasks. The finding was unambiguous. AI agents ignored visual advertising and emotional appeals entirely. They responded to structured data like price, specifications, verified reviews.
The advertising industry is starting to notice. The IAB released an agentic roadmap in January. The industry is building elaborate infrastructure to serve ads to systems that are architecturally designed to ignore them. Absurd.
The emerging, huge problem is that decades of professional instinct are now working against you.
You were trained to create desire. To build aspiration. To use scarcity, limited time, exclusive offer, only three left, to drive urgency. These are powerful tools. They work brilliantly on humans. Agents are repelled by them. The Human Machines research shows scarcity language suppresses AI selection rates. The urgency that closes a human sale actively pushes a machine customer away.
You were trained to build brand mystique. The founder story. The ritual. The ineffable quality that justifies the premium. A major cosmetics brand has built a $500 moisturiser empire on exactly this. Agents can’t evaluate mystique. They need extractable evidence like clinical data, ingredient specifics, dermatologist endorsements with citations. Without it, that brand shows up in 82% of relevant AI queries and gets selected only 20% of the time. Known but not trusted. By machines.
You were trained to speak to human psychology. Charm, warmth, belonging, identity. None of that registers. Agents evaluate structured signals, what third parties have verified about you, what your product data actually says, whether your values are encoded somewhere a machine can parse them or just written on a website no agent will ever visit.
This is the part where someone usually says “but humans are still buying”. Sure. They’re right. Most purchasing decisions still involve a person. The game hasn’t flipped overnight.
But what has changed is that person increasingly has AI doing their research, filtering their options, and pre-selecting their shortlist before they ever engage. If you’re not on Tyler’s list, you don’t get considered. Your campaign never runs. Your brand story never lands. The human never arrives.
Three altitudes. Three completely different problems.
At the foundation it looks engineering, not advertising or marketing. Is your product data structured so an agent can find it? Reviews, authority signals, structured product information. Tyler queried what the internet has already decided before you knew it was looking. You can’t charm your way into that. You either have it or you don’t.
At the middle sits the trust infrastructure for transactions. Can Tyler pay you without friction? Tokenised credentials, secure agent-to-agent payment rails, transaction parameters. If the payment layer isn’t built for machines, Tyler doesn’t complete the purchase. Your advertising and marketing budget is irrelevant. Tyler can’t buy.
At the top are values encoded, not values stated. Sustainability. Ethical sourcing. Supply chain transparency. If Tyler can’t parse it in structured data, it doesn’t exist. Your values page doesn’t count.
Today’s advertising and marketing teams are built entirely for humans. The industry invented the science of making humans want things. That science doesn’t work on machines. Who’s evolving desirability means when half your customers don’t have feelings?”
This isn’t a technology job. Technologists can build the infrastructure. What they can’t do is figure out how to translate fifty years of human brand equity into signals that machine customers can read, evaluate, and trust. That requires people who understand both brand and behaviour. People who know what a brand stands for and can encode it in a form that survives contact with an algorithm.
That’s a communications job. A creative job. An advertising industry job.
Tyler is already shopping. It has no nostalgia for the golden age of advertising. No appreciation for the craft. No feelings at all. It just bought from whoever made themselves legible, trustworthy, and desirable in a language humans never needed to learn. That’s your next brief.
