I’ve been thinking a lot about where AI is actually taking the marketing landscape. And I don’t mean the obvious conversation about AI replacing copywriters or designers or developers. That’s the tactical layer. I’m more interested in the strategic future, the futurist view of what AI is going to do to how buyers and sellers find each other.
I believe the marketplace is heading toward a split into two very separate directions, and the sooner business owners see this divergence clearly, the better positioned they’ll be to choose the right side of it.
The AI-to-AI Market
We are moving toward a reality where AI agents buy from other AI agents, and the technology for this already exists today. The agents we’re building right now are learning personal and business preferences, shopping the internet, evaluating pricing, and making purchase decisions within approved spending limits. On the other side, companies are deploying agents that represent their products and services, hold conversations, and even negotiate on their behalf.
Today, most of this is still hybrid, with humans involved on one or both sides. But the direction is becoming hard to ignore. Agents will be transacting with other agents at scale, and when they do, that marketplace will become deeply commoditized. Think of it like B2B or B2C, except with no human in the loop. The agents will sort it out on their own, and margins will compress toward zero.
If your business model depends on being found, being compared, and being selected based on features and price, you are playing in a market that AI will eventually own entirely. And if your only value proposition right now is being discoverable by AI, consider that eventually everybody will be found. Once that happens, there is no differentiation left. A bot is never going to pay a premium. Bots will be the ultimate generic white-label shoppers, driven by preference data and cost efficiency. Multiple brands will still exist within that AI-to-AI marketplace, but the margin available to any of them will keep shrinking.
If AI can replace some of your business today, it will replace all of it tomorrow. And it won’t feel bad about it. That is not a long-term sustainable position unless you are truly in the commodities business and can make money at volume. For most of us, it is a race to zero, and not a place where I’d want to play.
The Human-to-Human Market
Everything that can’t be replaced by AI falls into the other market, and this one runs on a completely different currency. Trust.
Humans will decide for themselves which products and services they will only buy from another human. That includes high-dollar purchases where the stakes feel too significant to hand over to an agent, high-emotional services where the relationship itself is the value, and offerings that are inherently human-centric, like physical therapy or in-person advisory work, where AI simply cannot substitute for presence.
This is what much of today’s business already looks like in many ways, whether B2B or retail. Two humans transacting, building relationships, and making decisions based on confidence in the person across the table. But as the AI-to-AI marketplace grows, the human-to-human market will become increasingly distinct and increasingly valuable.
We’ve seen this play out inside our own business at yorCMO, the fractional CMO company I founded that has become one of the fastest-growing in the country. Trust is the number one factor in winning and retaining fractional clients. You do not have daily proximity or regular in-person interaction as a fractional leader, so credibility has to be proven and trust has to be earned quickly. That reality pushed us to build specific human-first steps into our process, including in-person collaborative sessions within the first 90 days of every engagement. No amount of AI can replace what happens when people are in the same room, reading the energy, building a real connection. That kind of trust compounds, and it becomes the moat that protects the relationship over time.
The companies that will win in this market are the ones building that kind of human connection now. In-person events, sales teams getting in front of more people, referral networks, word of mouth, community. Everything we associate with human interaction today will carry forward and become more important, not less.
What Business Owners Should Do Now
I am not suggesting anyone abandon AI or slow down their AI investments. AI is not going away, and there is real value to capture in the hybrid period between where we are now and where we’re heading. Using AI to assist on one side of the equation, or both sides, while keeping humans central to the experience can still generate meaningful margin today. At yorCMO, we took a crawl, walk, run approach to building AI as an in-house core competency this year. We hired a fractional CTO, assembled a small engineering team, and within 90 days had functioning AI agents supporting our fractional CMOs and their clients. I believe in investing deeply in AI, and I also believe that investment has to be strategic and clear-eyed about where the long-term value actually lives.
Think seriously about how much of your current business model could be disrupted when AI agents start doing the buying and selling. Think about where your blind spots are. Think about what services you offer, or could offer, that are deeply human-centric. Some of those services may have been undervalued before, or even set aside years ago, and may now become absolutely necessary for survival.
Maybe that annual event you’ve been putting off starting should launch this year. Maybe the additional budget for your sales team to have more face-to-face conversations should go in now. Maybe your next new offering should be an in-person service that AI cannot replicate, rather than another digital product that will eventually be absorbed into the AI-to-AI marketplace. There is a certain irony in the fact that the best response to the AI revolution might be putting more humans on airplanes.
The services and businesses that lean into the human-to-human market are the ones that will sustain above-average margins. The AI-to-AI solutions will trend toward below-average, commoditized returns.
The divergence between these two markets is coming. And the companies that recognize it early and start placing bets on the right side of the split will have a significant head start over those that don’t.
Your competitors are already making that decision. Make yours.
At least, that’s my take.
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Joe Frost is a Decentralized Entrepreneur, University Professor of Entrepreneurship, and 6X Founder. He is the Founder of yorCMO, the first Decentralized Leadership franchise business, and the Founder of the Fractional Professionals Association. Joe is passionate about engineering ideas fueled by simplicity and creativity, and about bringing the fractional and decentralized leadership model into the future of work.
