AI search is changing how consumers discover brands and products. But Profound CEO and co-founder James Cadwallader believes an even bigger shift is coming, with personal AI agents eventually taking over the entire process of searching, comparing options and making purchases.
Rather than simply answering questions or recommending products, these agents could trawl multiple sources, identify the best option, seek the consumer’s approval and ultimately complete the transaction themselves.
Cadwallader, who is based in New York, is visiting Sydney for Profound’s Zero Click event, where the business is introducing its AI marketing platform to the Australian market.
He co-founded Profound with chief technology officer Dylan Babbs in the summer of 2024, building the business around the idea that AI agents would increasingly act on behalf of consumers, fundamentally changing how brands market themselves. The company works with about a third of the Fortune 100, with clients including Nestlé, Estée Lauder and Walmart, as well as Australian fashion brand Princess Polly.
Last month, Profound raised $180 million (A$275 million) in a Series D funding round at a $1.8 billion (A$2.75 billion) valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
Speaking with B&T on Monday, Cadwallader said the shift was already underway, with the lines between traditional search and AI-powered discovery beginning to blur.
“I think it’s all just going to converge,” he said.
He pointed to Google increasingly encouraging users to enter longer, more natural-language queries, with responses incorporating AI Overviews or leading into AI Mode conversations.
“The search bar becomes a kick-off for an AI Mode conversation or an AI Overview,” he said. “The AI Overview is just AI search. It’s no different. It’s just an agent that’s gone to a bunch of websites and is summarising it into an AI Overview.”
Rather than Google simply losing ground to ChatGPT and other AI platforms, Cadwallader expects the two experiences to increasingly overlap.
However, he believes the next stage will be the emergence of “long-running personal agents” that could represent the next major growth curve in consumer technology.
“We’re going to see these personal agents really abstract away the entire paradigm of search entirely because the agent will just go and do all of the searching for you on loops until it finds the product, gets your approval, and then buys it for you.”
The implications go beyond how people search for information. Cadwallader expects agents to eventually handle transactions from beginning to end, rather than simply returning answers or recommendations.
“What will happen over the next few years is the flight, for example, will be booked by the agent, so it won’t even just be an answer anymore,” he said. “The actual purchase itself will be carried out by the agent.”
For marketers and advertisers, that would mean competing not only for consumers’ attention, but also to be selected by the systems making decisions on their behalf.
Marketing for the machines
Cadwallader said the growing influence of AI search meant brands need to think beyond traditional search engine optimisation (SEO).
AI systems draw on information from across the internet, including company websites, earned media, social channels, corporate communications and discussions on platforms such as Reddit.
Improving how a brand appears in AI-generated responses therefore requires more than tweaking website copy or chasing visibility in another search interface.
“If you want to change or improve or update what ChatGPT says about your brand, you just need to do loads more marketing, basically,” he said.
However, the type of marketing required will also change as more purchasing decisions are delegated to machines.
While a human consumer might be influenced by a celebrity wearing a particular brand of running shoes, an AI agent is more likely to assess a product’s features, materials and points of difference when comparing alternatives.
Cadwallader pointed to the influence of high-profile campaigns featuring celebrities such as FKA Twigs, arguing that the cultural cachet that makes a product desirable to people may carry less weight with an AI agent.
“As humans we pay attention to the fact that FKA Twigs is in the Nike campaign or wearing the shoes, but an agent doesn’t really factor that into their decision-making,” he said. “What an agent cares about is the specificity of what makes those sneakers different – and what makes them special.”
What role do websites play in all this?
The shift also raises some questions about the future of brand websites, particularly as consumers increasingly receive answers without clicking through to individual pages.
Cadwallader believes owned websites will remain critical, especially if personal agents are eventually responsible for booking flights or selecting products on a consumer’s behalf.
“The brand’s own website becomes incredibly important because that is where all the information can exist for the agent to be able to make its decision,” he said.
An agent cannot independently experience a flight, assess its comfort or judge the quality of its service. Instead, it must rely on information published by the brand and other sources, including third-party reviews and online discussions.
He believes the challenge is making sure those details are available in a form that “AI systems can accurately interpret”, while clearly communicating why a product deserves to be chosen over its competitors.
Ultimately, Cadwallader expects the growing use of AI agents to change the mechanics of marketing rather than eliminate the need for it. As more tasks become automated, marketers could spend less time manually producing reports, writing routine content and assembling presentations, with AI agents taking on more of that work.
Humans, meanwhile, will increasingly focus on creativity and directing the systems doing the work.
“I think we’re going to see this kind of bifurcation of marketing,” he said. “[We’ll see] agentic marketing become really, really big and really, really important. But at the other end of that barbell, we’re going to see human-centric marketing become equally important.”
Cadwallader said the future won’t just be about getting a brand into an AI-generated answer, but about ensuring that when a consumer hands over the entire search and shopping process to an agent, the brand has the information and differentiation needed to be the one that gets chosen.
