• by Thomas Pulliam , Yesterday

Marketing is entering its most pivotal rewrite since the invention of mass media—and it’s happening quietly, one AI decision at a time.

While many brands continue to obsess over attention—fighting for views, impressions, and engagement—a deeper shift is underway. AI agents, LLMs, and recommendation engines are rapidly becoming embedded across the entire customer journey. From discovery to evaluation, purchase to usage, loyalty to advocacy, machines are increasingly deciding what gets surfaced, what gets recommended, and what gets selected—on behalf of customers.

We’ve entered what many have long predicted: the Intention Economy. First theorized by Doc Searls, it imagines a system where demand is driven not by exposure but by clearly signaled need. With the rise of generative AI, that system is no longer speculative—it’s operational. And marketing leaders must urgently reframe how and where they compete.

This isn’t just a top-of-funnel disruption. It’s a full-stack reset. AI now mediates what shows up in a product search, which tutorials a customer sees post-purchase, which services are pre-vetted for a business buyer, and what loyalty incentives are triggered—or ignored. That means AI isn’t just influencing discovery—it’s influencing the full experience.

If brands want to remain relevant in AI-curated journeys, they need to move beyond visibility and optimize for interpretability. That means products must be structured semantically. Messaging systems must work across contexts and channels. Value propositions must be consistently expressed, both to humans and to algorithms.

Recent research from Meta’s Intentonomy initiative shows how platforms are now parsing user queries for underlying motivations to generate ranked responses. Bain and Datos have both published data showing that consumer reliance on AI assistants is surging—especially among Gen Z and Millennial users. And Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence is investigating how these systems may soon act preemptively on behalf of users.

In this environment, the traditional 4Ps of marketing—product, price, place, and promotion—don’t go away. But they must be dimensionalized. What makes a product competitive in an AI-mediated moment of truth isn’t just pricing or creative—it’s how clearly the offer aligns with context, intent, and structured knowledge graphs.

To keep pace, marketers need to treat AI not as a tactic, but as infrastructure. That means rethinking go-to-market models, brand systems, and measurement frameworks. Because in the Intention Economy, the question is no longer just “Did the customer see it?”—it’s “Did the system choose you?”

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