• by J. Walker Smith , Op-Ed Contributor, 6 hours ago

Consumers are using AI as a brand hack. Which says as much about consumers as AI. None of which is good for brands absent significant innovation.

In the past, there has been an inherent -- and exhaustively studied -- asymmetry of information, access and accountability in every sort of exchange, especially the consumer marketplace. One party to an exchange has always known or controlled more than the other party, giving rise to opportunities and risks.

Marketers have long used such inefficiencies to build value. For instance, retail deals to monopolize shelf space make it difficult for consumers to access competitive brands. Similarly, it is difficult for consumers to track and compare prices across brands, stores, geographies and time. And emotional appeals in ads often build loyalty for brands that are not functionally different, or even functionally inferior, to competitive brands.

In other words, marketers control and know things about competition, pricing and performance that consumers do not because consumers lack information, access and ways to hold marketers accountable.

Asymmetry has been the traditional cornerstone of brand value, enabling marketers to both sell more and sell for more.

AI changes that.

AI is not the first technology to threaten the asymmetric advantage of marketers. The digital era ushered in a host of websites and phone apps for price comparisons. Superstores and online retailers have opened up access, including the promise of an infinite shelf. Social media put comparisons, reviews and complaints in public view.

Consumers have more power and control than before. But AI is now breaking things wide open.

Pricing, in particular, is under pressure, as manysurveys of consumers have shown. It is simple to ask a chatbot to locate the lowest price for a brand you want to buy. It is equally simple to ask a chatbot to tell you the lowest-priced brand among a set of brands you’re willing to consider.

With Rufus, Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant, you can get a price history to see if the price quoted in this moment is a good price or not, and you can set an alert for Rufus to let you know when the price drops again.

Applications like Rufus will also be used by consumers as a brand hack to counter AI-driven dynamic pricing that tries to maximize what consumers pay.

Big brands have invested a lot in building perceptions and attachments that are relatively insensitive to price. However, price inelasticity like this will be difficult to sustain with AI providing instant access to information.

Brands may try to hold the line on pricing by leaning into perceptions of quality and performance as a justification for a higher price. But this, too, is threatened by AI.

One observation that many have made is that AI is revealing just how little difference is present across brands. LLMs ignore emotions in favor of facts, reviews and video demos. AI favors evidence of performance over emotional storytelling. And based strictly on performance, many brands are the same. There is no difference.

Not only does this level the playing field. It undercuts pricing. The asymmetry of information that gave other things the power to command consideration and choice is eliminated by AI. Of course, consumers could have learned this for themselves already, but doing so up until now has meant a lot of time and effort to do the research. An AI chatbot is almost no time and effort at all.

One of the important things that retailers have done for consumers is curation. Shoppers like and visit certain stores because they trust them to sort through options and stock the best. This has driven retail value. But now AI can curate, and AI can do so without the financial constraint of physical inventory to warehouse, merchandise and monetize. AI can search across stores and since AI isn’t investing in inventory, it is under no financial pressure to promote one thing instead of another.

As AI agents come of age, AI curation will progress from responsive answers to proactive suggestions. Curation will become ever more personalized and real-time. Value will shift from retail and brand to the curating AI agent. AI will be pointing out what’s meaningful and relevant, not the brand.

Disintermediation like this is built into AI. It’s how AI works. AI sits between consumers and brands as the controlling interface of engagement. AI takes its orders from consumers—it works on behalf of consumers. Brands are subordinated to the evaluations and ratings of LLMs.

AI cuts through advertising-ese. But more than a marketing codebreaker, AI changes the basis of engagement. Asymmetries are flattened and communications shift from media channels and marketing messages to AI engines answering lifestyle questions.

This turns out to be exactly what consumers want, as is clear from the ways in which consumers are using AI. Consumers don’t want AI as a better way to engage with brands. They want AI as the way to get untangled from brands. Consumers don’t want AI for deeper brand engagement. They want AI for a cheaper price, arms-length recommendations, faster delivery and better customer service.

In effect, consumers want better products not better brands. They care about products; they could care less about brands. Which is to say that consumers want better solutions.

In years past, branding provided a decision-making shortcut in a marketplace where information and access were hard to obtain. It was presumed that the better the branding, the better the solution. AI has pulled back the curtain.

Brands have not been rendered irrelevant. Indeed, many brands are fighting disintermediation by buying ad space in chatbot recommendations and making emotional benefits part of the underlying knowledge graphs that inform LLMs.

But here’s the rub. Consumers are using AI as a brand hack because there is no reason not to hack brands. As consumers are demonstrating in the ways in which they are using AI, brands in and of themselves are not important enough to consumers to deter consumers from hacking brands.

Consumers want a better price. Consumers want something that is superior, different and personally relevant. Consumers want fixes and good customer service. Not the brand per se. For consumers, it’s the brand hack that guarantees all of that, not the brand.

As if trust in brands isn’t low enough already, AI is making it worse. Because AI is giving consumers a way to cut through the branding and get directly to price, performance and service. Consumers are not lamenting the loss of the brand. Instead, they are celebrating it.

What AI is telling us is that the brand relationships of the past were born of necessity not choice. Consumers are happy to move on now that AI is available as a brand hack.

The only way for brands to sustain brand value is innovation—offers that are truly different and better. Otherwise, parity prevails and choice will devolve to the cheapest option.

More innovation, and more breakthrough innovation, would be a good thing for the marketplace. Good for consumers. Good for the broader economy. Good for brands—better solutions, better margins, better for AI.

As a brand hack, AI is going to cull a lot of categories. But that will clear space for innovation. The worst thing for brands could well become the best.