• by Joel Daly , February 20, 2025

Say you need a pair of sneakers with arch support for less than $200, 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 the digital landscape for years, deciding whether content is discoverable and pushing it (or not) toward people.

Take social media as another example. At first glance, posts are crafted for people. But beneath the surface, algorithms determine how widely those posts are distributed, who sees them, and when.

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 human audience, AI doesn’t care about visuals or emotional appeals; it only needs structure, 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 embrace the idea that our audiences aren’t only human. Each audience -- people, bots, and AI -- has its own needs, and each plays a role in how brands are discovered, interpreted, and shared. And while AI performs best with clear information, people need brands to provide clear value. The AI assistant deciding between two products may not care about in-place experiences or emotional storytelling, but the person who receives its recommendation might. Put simply, AI recommends, but we’re the ones who decide to click “buy” -- and engage more deeply.

For challenger players, 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 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 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.