From the early days of advertising, brands had immense control over their narrative through advertising, owned media and platforms. AI is changing that equation entirely.
As we move into this Agentic AI Era, AI is becoming the interface and that control is shifting. Increasingly AI systems – not the brands – determine which companies appear, how they are described or recommended. In these new venues, brands are not defined by what they say about themselves, but by what AI systems can confidently say about them.
This shift represents the fastest and most profound transformation to businesses since the rise of the internet and social media.
The Shift From Generative AI to Agentic AI
In just a few years, AI shifted from novelty to necessity, reshaping how organizations create, operate, and connect with customers. With Generative AI, progressive brands develop systems to drive personalization at scale, dynamically creating campaigns and content. Brands still hold the pen and control the system design, the guardrails and governance to control how their story is told.
As we move from a Generative to Agentic AI Era, that control is shifting even further. A critical new question emerges for brands: How does your business react when AI controls the narrative and shaping answers, content and experiences on behalf of brand?
Within five days of launch, ChatGPT hit 1M users. Within months, it topped 100M users ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, CoPilot and many others are racing to become a consumer’s agent of choice. The speed of this behavioral shift is remarkable. Instead of exploring options, consumers increasingly delegate decisions to intelligent systems. They ask for recommendations, product comparisons, summaries, and even complete a transaction.
AI-Powered Commerce Is Already Here
Commerce platforms are already transforming around AI-enabled discovery. Amazon’s Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, already services over 300M consumers while Walmart’s Sparky processes 3M AI interactions per week. These are not experimental features, they are becoming the front door to product discovery and purchase.
Brands that don’t have their product information and content structured for machine readable visibility risk becoming invisible to users altogether. Machine readable assets must be the new minimum. And progressive brands are getting beyond the basics to explore AI action (allowing for interactions / purchases). For some categories, an anticipatory level will emerge, when their brand is the preference and consumers are comfortable with automation and trust the brand and platform.
Search is facing its largest disruption in the last 25 years. Generative answers (i.e. embedding AI answers into the search result page) have had two direct impacts. The first is Zero Click: when audiences get the answer they need immediately, there’s no need to click beyond. Studies from 2025 were showing as much as 60% of searches resulting in no click or action needed. The secondary impact is a significant drop in organic traffic to owned websites. Brands that have relied upon search and DTC online transactions as a core of their business and sales are racing to find alternative means to drive visits and means to improve conversion on the human traffic coming to their digital front door.
Why Structured Data and Credibility Matter More Than Messaging
As AI adoption increases, these impacts will continue to rise. This shift from human exploration to delegation to a machine, compresses decision-making and reshapes how brand stories are told and how trust is built. If you’re not in the answer, you don’t exist. In practice, this means businesses need to be both a marketer AND start operating like data sources, requiring a fundamental reset across three fronts:
- AI doesn’t pull from ads or taglines, it pulls from signals: product data, reviews, structured content, credibility and consistency. To influence the agents that influence its consumers, brands must feed the systems that shape audience access and perception. Some of these will be owned datasets that a brand can carry alone, but other sources of influence will be earned — social, influencer, news and 3P editorial, voice of your consumer. These are all secondary sources that can build credibility and improve visibility in generative responses.
- Communication will adapt to require clear, machine-readable information, a consistent presence across platforms, and third-party validation that AI can trust. Organizations will need to abandon the illusion that messaging or paid strategies alone can carry you.
- Brands that win will be the ones that design for how they’re interpreted, not just how they present. If your digital footprint is fragmented or unsubstantiated, no amount of positioning will fix it. In a world of LLM answers, influence comes down to what the machine can confidently repeat.
From SEO to GEO: The New Optimization Era
Winning brands will be agile, data-fueled and experiment-driven. They must be continually curious and perpetually testing and optimizing. The shift from SEO to GEO is bringing new tools forward, but it’s similar to the early days of social media monitoring where some are more qualitative, others more quantitative (or even synthetic), so know what you can see and where you have gaps. And watch for new tools and platforms that can assist.
Finally, although we’re focusing on the impact of AI and the technical implications, this does not mean that brands go away. Arguably brands will matter more in some ways. Brands stand to win if they can earn their way into the prompt. Just ask your LLM of choice “best electric vehicle for me” vs. “help me find the best Ford electric vehicle” and you’ll immediately see the difference in a generic answer vs a Promptable Brand.
We are still emotional humans on the other side of the LLM that care about what other humans think about the car they are driving, the clothes they wear and the brands that they care about. And there will still be experiences customer seek out. Websites for humans won’t disappear, but they’ll evolve to maximize the experience. When companies have the honor of a person’s attention — they’ll need to maximize the value — both business value and customer value — through more relevant experiences that drive ease or joy.
The Central Paradox of the AI Era
The challenge and the paradox of this AI Era is this: brands must build real strength, but as AI becomes the interface, generative models (not just the brands) are building the stories and control the narrative.
Companies and brands will absolutely need to be more technical — and serve the agents that become the point of contact on behalf of their customers and potential customers. Winning AI organizations will have multi-tiered systems and agents, tuned to growth, enabling their teams, delighting their customers and anchored in the story of their brand to differentiate and deliver growth.
