Opinion
What happens to brands when AI helps consumers choose?
"I believe AI search and purchasing through AI agents will become the dominant way people decide which products to buy," writes Brandlight CEO Imri Marcus. "For some smaller decisions, after a while, you might not even want to be an active part of the process. You will trust your agent to do the research, knowing your needs and your preferences, and come back when it needs you."
For years, when we needed to buy something we didn’t know enough about, we went to Google. We searched, opened a few websites, read reviews and tried to figure out what was right for us. We got used to doing quite a lot of research ourselves.
Take buying a family car. On Google, you might start with “best SUV 2026.” With an AI assistant, you start by explaining my situation: there are six of you, you have a budget, and an electric car is preferable but isn’t a must. Then you have a discussion. It suggests something, you explain why it won’t work, and eventually you get somewhere. Much like talking to a friend who knows cars.
The appeal is easy to understand. You have someone helping you work through the decision. But for the brands trying to reach you, a lot has changed. The assistant is helping decide which cars you should consider, and you might never see the others.
This is how people are starting to choose products with AI. And for the brands that have spent decades learning how to get our attention, it changes a lot.
There is already real money behind this behavior. In September, visits from AI sources to U.S. retail sites grew 71% compared with the year before, according to Adobe. Those visits generated 83% more revenue per visit than visits from non-AI sources. This is only the part we can see when someone clicks through from an AI answer to a retailer.
This is shaping up to be the biggest marketing shift of our lifetimes. Partly because of how quickly it is happening, but mostly because of how much of the decision people are starting to give away.
At the end of 2024, when I spoke to Fortune 50 CMOs, I still had to explain why AI visibility was an important channel for them to invest in. It felt so novel to them. Today, it would feel disrespectful to even hint that they aren’t fully aware of the repercussions.
This has happened so fast. And the unbelievable thing is that we’re still in act one.
With the web, companies needed a digital storefront. With Google, they needed to make sure people could find them. Facebook and Instagram gave them a way to reach people before they even thought to search. Each of those changes took years of work for marketing organizations to understand and adapt to.
AI is bringing another change while many companies are still trying to figure out the last ones. You now have a consumer explaining exactly what they need, in their own words, to a system that can work through the options with them. By the time that person visits your website, a lot of the decision may already have been made. Your brand might not have been part of it at all.
And it goes much further than asking for recommendations.
Think about planning a trip. “We’re going to Rome for five days, four people. We love Italian food and have two young children, so not too much sightseeing. Will you find flights and hotels for me?”
You can see where this goes. A short discussion about the budget, a few options, some changes, and then: “Great, book it.”
A travel agent and a personal assistant, available whenever you need them, with more and more context about what you like.
The fastest-growing product in the world right now is Muse, a personal agent by Meta that lives “beside you”. In a few short weeks since launch, millions of people have already gave it their credit card information and started to delegate real decisions to it. We are already moving from a product that answers questions to one that can do things on your behalf.
So where does it go from here, for consumers and for brands?
The honest answer is that no one knows exactly. But I believe AI search and purchasing through AI agents will become the dominant way people decide which products to buy. For some smaller decisions, after a while, you might not even want to be an active part of the process. You will trust your agent to do the research, knowing your needs and your preferences, and come back when it needs you.
There are plenty of things I would still want to choose myself. There are also plenty of things people buy because they need them and would happily spend less time thinking about. That is a very large part of commerce.
For brands, this is as dramatic as it gets. What marketers call the full funnel can happen in one environment. You had a need. You discovered a product. You had some back-and-forth about whether it was right for you, and you made a purchasing decision right there.
The brand now has to understand what happens inside that discussion. Why did the assistant suggest its competitor? What does it believe about the product? Does it understand who the product is for? Is it using information that stopped being true a year ago?
These are questions I spend my time on while building a company in this space. We analyze millions of prompts to understand how brands and their products are being presented. Once you start looking at this across different questions and situations, you realize how little a single answer can tell you.
A brand can look well positioned when you ask about it directly and barely appear when you ask for help choosing something in its category. It can be recommended for one type of customer and overlooked for another. Even when it appears, the explanation matters. Being mentioned as an expensive option with poor service is hardly a marketing success.
Understanding what to improve and how becomes critical. Sometimes the problem is information the company owns and can fix. Sometimes it is what other people are saying about it. And sometimes the answer reveals a real weakness in the offer itself.
This is why I don’t think companies can hand the entire thing to the SEO team and consider it covered. It touches product information, PR, reviews, social and commerce. Someone has to look at the whole picture, and the teams responsible have to be able to act together.
New companies are emerging to help businesses do this, just as they did around search and social. There is a lot to build. Brands need to understand where they stand, what is influencing their position and whether the changes they make are actually helping.
They also need to accept that the consumer has a good reason to want this. Researching a purchase can be exhausting. If an assistant can understand what you need and take a few hours of work off your hands, you don’t need much convincing.
That is what makes this shift so significant. Consumers are getting something they want, and they are starting to trust it with more. Brands have to learn how to compete for those decisions, including the ones their customers no longer want to make themselves.
Imri Marcus is the co-founder and CEO of Brandlight.
