• by Shirley Marschall , Featured Contributor, March 27, 2025

Ad tech has one obsession: personalization. More curation, more identity solutions, more signals, more AI-powered everything (creative, targeting, content).

All to deliver better ads to people.

But who’s actually seeing them?

AI as the Consumer: The Digital Shift

A recent MIT Technology Reviewarticle highlighted a seismic shift in commerce and advertising: AI itself is becoming the consumer.

• Consumers are delegating tasks to AI: shopping, research, and decision-making.
• AI filters content before humans even see it, deciding what’s relevant and what gets ignored.
• AI-powered assistants are becoming the first point of engagement with brands.

If AI is the new gatekeeper -- searching, filtering, and deciding what’s relevant before a human ever sees it -- who is digital advertising actually influencing?

And if AI is the next big consumer online, where does that leave human customers?

The Human-AI Divide: Two Customers, Two Strategies

For years, digital advertising has dominated media spend, taking budgets away from traditional channels like linear TV, print, and out-of-home (OOH).

The assumption was simple: people spend more time online, so brands should follow.

But AI is reshaping this assumption. If AI agents handle more digital interactions, browsing websites, making recommendations, and even completing purchases, then brands might no longer market to humans in the digital space.

Brands will need to adopt a dual-strategy approach:

1. AI-first advertising: optimizing for machine-driven interactions, ensuring brand messaging is discoverable, aligned with AI-driven algorithms, and favored by autonomous agents.

2. Human-first advertising: reshaping strategies to reach actual human audiences outside the AI-intermediated web, leveraging offline experiences, emotional storytelling, and environments where real people, not AI, make decisions.

The Great Rebalancing: Finding Humans Again

This is not about “going back” to traditional advertising or rejecting digital advertising. It’s about recognizing that AI is reshaping the digital audience.

It’s about adapting to a world where AI and human customers coexist, to rethink where and how brands engage with real people.

We’ve seen this trend before. As digital media expanded, traditional media shrank. But today, we’re at another shift: AI is consuming more digital content, meaning human-focused advertising must find human-first touchpoints.

That’s where channels like CTV, digital out-of-home (DOOH), programmatic audio and in-store retail media are more important than ever.

DOOH and programmatic audio don’t rely on cookies, tracking, or digital identifiers, just real humans engaging with real-world content. In physical spaces and screenless environments.

CTV, live experiences, brand activations, and community-driven marketing tap into emotional storytelling, something AI isn’t set up to experience.

Retail and commerce-based advertising can still reach people where decisions are being made by humans, not just algorithms.

This Is Not a Return to the Past -- It’s a New Dual Future

This is not about nostalgia. Linear TV isn’t making a comeback, and print isn’t the next big thing. But the rise of AI-driven consumers isn’t speculation. It’s happening.

AI might research and recommend. AI might automate purchasing. But humans still hold the emotions, experiences, and decision-making power that brands ultimately rely on.

The brands that win won’t be the ones blindly chasing AI optimization. They will be the ones mastering the art of reaching both AI and human consumers—without losing sight of the people who actually buy.

Because an AI may watch an ad -- but only a human can be moved by it.