BY
January 8, 2025
Say you need a new pair of sneakers with good arch support for less than $200 that’s guaranteed to arrive by Sunday. Instead of hopping from tab to tab in a tedious comparison game, you turn to an AI assistant. In seconds, it analyzes reviews, confirms availability, and selects the perfect pair. You’ve barely lifted a finger, but your decision is made, and your shoes are on the way.
This isn’t a hypothetical. AI personal shoppers like Perplexity Pro are already delivering this kind of convenience, collapsing the effort of decision-making into a single command. This distinction is more profound than it seems: AI is no longer just a tool we wield; it’s becoming an active partner in how we search for information, engage with content, and make decisions. And for brands, this changes everything. Just look at data from Salesforce: AI-driven personalization already accounts for 17% of global orders, with a 7% lift in average order value. As AI agents become more sophisticated, the need to cater to them will only intensify.
In many ways, we’ve been building toward this moment for a while. Bots have been crawling on the digital landscape for years, deciding whether your content was discoverable, and pushing it (or not) towards real humans. Take social media as another example. At first glance, posts are crafted for people — the ones scrolling and double-tapping. But beneath the surface, algorithms determine how widely those posts are distributed, who sees them, and when. (Or, if you subscribe to the dead internet theory, the digital world is just bots talking to each other — but that's a topic for another time.)
The difference is that AI isn’t just deciding who sees your content. It’s consuming your content, too, interpreting your brand in ways you might never have imagined. And unlike a typical human audience, AI doesn’t care about glossy visuals or emotional appeals; all it needs is structured data, clarity, and precision. Think of it this way: if an AI assistant can’t parse your content easily, your human audience may never even know you exist.
The rise of AI agents calls for us to rethink connection — and expand our conception of “audiences.” The digital world is no longer a series of destinations (websites, social channels, and ads) designed solely for humans to navigate. Instead, it’s an ecosystem, where people and intelligent systems interact in fluid, dynamic ways. To succeed, businesses, organizations, and brands alike must embrace the idea that your audience isn’t only human. Each audience group (people, bots, and AI) has its own needs, and each plays a role in how your brand is discovered, interpreted, and shared. While AI performs best with clarity — structured data, clear formats, precise language — people need brands to double down on what makes them valuable at a human level. The AI assistant deciding between two products may not care about in-place experiences or emotional storytelling, but the person on the receiving end of its recommendation might. Put simply, AI recommends, but we’re the ones who decide whether to click “buy” — and to engage more deeply.
For challengers and smaller players, this new playing field presents a clear opportunity. AI lowers the barriers to discovery, offering a chance to compete on clarity, credibility, and creativity rather than scale. But it also raises the stakes. If your content isn’t optimized for AI — or if your brand identity is too generic to stand out in a crowded market — you risk being filtered out of the conversation altogether. The brands that will succeed in the coming years are those that can balance these competing needs — delivering the clarity AI requires without losing the emotional resonance people crave. The key is to remember this: designing for AI doesn’t mean we stop designing for people; it means engaging a specific (and, yes, automated) audience to reach them.