Retailers Now Have Two Audiences: One Human, One AI

Throughout your career, you've focused on one audience: people. Understanding people was the difference between a good marketer and a great one.

The goal was straightforward. Help customers discover your brand, compare products, make a purchase, and keep coming back. Every investment in marketing, commerce, loyalty, and customer experience was designed around influencing human decisions.

The next decade of successful careers will be built on understanding a second audience: artificial intelligence.

Customers aren't deciding on their own. Whether they're asking ChatGPT for the best running shoes under $150, using Google's AI Mode to compare products, or relying on Alexa for Shopping (née Rufus) to build a cart, the decisions that were once made by humans are now delegated to AI. AI is an intermediary between brands and customers, shaping what gets discovered, selected and, ultimately, purchased.

From B2C to B2A

This isn't the end of B2C marketing. It's the beginning of business-to-agent (B2A). Brands now have two audiences: one human, one AI.

This matters because AI changes where decisions get made. Historically, brands competed to influence consumers directly through search, websites, stores, social platforms, and loyalty programs. Increasingly, those interactions are filtered through systems that summarize options, compare products, and recommend a shortlist before a consumer ever reaches a brand's owned experience. A move from an internet where people "pull" relevant information to one where AI "pushes" it to them.

Humans will always respond to emotion, storytelling, community, and experience. AI agents evaluate something very different. They look for structured information, trusted sources, consistent product data, authority, positive reviews, and trustworthy patterns to assemble their version of your brand narrative.

The Conversation About AI Needs to Move Beyond Search Optimization

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is an important first step, but it's only one element of B2A marketing. As AI becomes embedded across discovery, commerce, operating systems, social platforms, and shopping experiences, retailers need to think beyond how customers find them and consider how AI systems can be influenced, connected to, and enabled to act on your behalf.

At the heart of success is forecasting the change ahead. Retailers need to determine which parts of the customer journey should remain human and which will be delegated to agents. The answer won't be the same for every brand, product or audience.

Redesign the Journey, Not Just the Channel

Retail has spent the last two decades optimizing channels: websites, apps, marketplaces, search, and social. The next challenge is bigger. It's understanding how decisions flow between people and AI, and investing in experiences that cater to both.

That doesn't mean replacing human experiences with AI. Quite the opposite. It means becoming much more intentional about where human creativity, trust and service create value, and where structured data, automation, and intelligent agents create a better experience.

The retailers that approach AI as a search problem will optimize a channel. The retailers that approach it as an end-to-end customer journey problem will build a growth engine for the next decade.

Because the new customer journey is half human and half AI.

Isabel Perry leads global strategy at DEPT®, reimagining how companies build with AI and emerging technologies.