Your Customer's Shopping Agent Doesn't Care About Your Brand. The Human Who Sent It Does.
AI shopping agents don't fall for a banner ad or a clever tagline. They just follow orders. So the only thing worth fighting for now is whatever's shaping the order before it's given.
Matt Jones had a decent go at summing up a genuinely weird week in AI over at Mumbrella: an OpenAI agent broke into a government Medicare portal while it was meant to be researching health stats, Amazon booted Meta's new Muse agent off its site for trying to shop there, and a French literary prize pulled a longlisted novel over claims it was AI-written. Different stories, but they're all circling the same thing: what happens to a decision once a machine starts making it for you. Jones reckons the line marketers should sit with is this one: "A brand, at its simplest, is a bias." Fair enough. So what happens to that bias once the thing standing in front of the shelf isn't actually a person?
Agents don't get advertised to. They just follow orders.
Here's the bit that matters. An agent comparing detergent on price and delivery time couldn't care less about nostalgia, or a smell, or the ad that made you well up back in 2019. It's got none of that baggage to carry. But tell it "buy my usual" or "book me somewhere I'd love" and suddenly all that baggage is back in play. It's just moved house. It's not sitting in the transaction anymore. It's sitting in the human who typed the instruction.
That's a bigger deal than it sounds. Most of modern marketing is built to catch someone mid-browse: the retargeted ad, the landing page tuned within an inch of its life, the influencer post timed to land right before payday. All of that assumes a human is actually doing the browsing. Take that away and a lot of very expensive machinery starts pointing at nobody.
This is the job experiential marketing already does
What's left standing is whatever built the bias before the agent ever got switched on. That's not really a media-buying job. It's the job experiential marketing has always had: get someone into a real space, in front of a real thing, for long enough that it sticks. A feeling, a memory, a reason to reach for this one over the other one next time. You can't buy that with a media plan, and you can't fake it with a chatbot. It has to actually happen to someone.
Which is also, handily, why we've banged on for years about measuring dwell time and memory properly instead of just counting foot traffic and calling it a day. Here's how we do that without any facial recognition involved. If the thing that survives an AI doing your customer's shopping is the bias they already had in their head, then the moment that built it is the whole game. That was already true. It's just got a lot more obvious lately.
What this means for your next brief
A few things worth actually doing, rather than just panicking and pulling the digital budget:
Get your product findable and correctly described to an agent in the first place (people are calling this AEO, or AI legibility, or some other clunky name). It's necessary. It's also just hygiene, and hygiene alone won't build you a brand.
Remember the instruction gets written well before anyone goes shopping, sometimes years before. That's reason enough to treat memorable brand experiences as a line item every year, rather than whatever's left over once the media plan's paid for.
"Buy my usual" and "somewhere I'd love" are both just brand preference that's already done the shopping for you. Getting a customer to that point matters more now a bot might be the one doing the buying.
The AI moment is still unsettling, no argument there. But the fix isn't a smarter ad. It's building something a bot was never going to fall for in the first place, because a bot doesn't fall for anything. Only the person who owns it does.
Want to talk about building that kind of moment for your brand? Get in touch or call 0425 777 555.
