I've been noodling on something that I think is going to become the central brand strategy question of the next decade, and it started with a mundane moment: I asked Claude to recommend me a restaurant for a friend's birthday dinner, and it gave me three options I'd never heard of.
No Google search. No Yelp spiral. No Instagram research. An AI just... chose for me. Based on criteria I specified. And I went with it.
Now multiply that by a million decisions a day, across millions of people, and ask yourself: what happens to brand when the decision-maker isn't human?
OpenAI just launched o1, their reasoning model. The AI agent hype cycle is peaking. Every tech company is racing to build AI that can act on your behalf: book travel, order groceries, choose products, schedule services. And every one of those agentic actions is a purchase decision that bypasses the traditional brand funnel entirely.
Every tech company is racing to build AI that can act on your behalf: book travel, order groceries, choose products, schedule services.
Think about what we lose when an AI agent chooses your hotel. The agent doesn't see your billboard. Doesn't feel nostalgia for your jingle. Doesn't notice your beautiful packaging on the shelf. Doesn't get swayed by your influencer partnership. The agent sees: price, reviews, location, availability, and whatever optimization criteria the human specified.
In an agentic world, brand as emotional preference might matter less. Brand as structured data quality might matter more.
This is terrifying for the creative industry and fascinating for strategists. Because it means we need to think about brand in two parallel tracks:
Track 1: Human-facing brand. Still essential. Humans still discover, desire, and advocate. The emotional, irrational, beautiful parts of brand building don't disappear. But they might become more important at the top of the funnel (awareness, consideration) and less important at the bottom (decision, purchase).
Track 2: Agent-facing brand. How does your brand appear to an AI making decisions? What data is available? How are you rated and reviewed? What's your structured information quality? Are you optimized for the criteria that agents will use to filter options?
This isn't SEO. It's something newer. It's... AIO? Agent Input Optimization? I don't know what to call it yet, but whoever figures it out first is going to have a massive advantage.
The scary version of this is a world where brands that are beloved by humans lose to brands that are better-structured for AI. Where the best product with the best story gets filtered out because its reviews are unstructured or its availability data is inconsistent.
The optimistic version is a world where brand quality matters more than brand volume. Where you can't just outspend your way to the top of the funnel because the AI doesn't care about your media budget. Where genuinely good products with genuine customer satisfaction win because those are the signals agents optimize for.
I don't know which version we get. But I know that any brand strategist who isn't thinking about this is going to be surprised by how fast it arrives.
My restaurant recommendation, by the way, was fantastic. The AI chose well. Which is either a relief or an existential threat, depending on how you look at it.