Marketing in the Agentic Era: Reaching the Human Through Their AI Proxy
As AI shopping agents take over the first steps of the buying journey, marketers must evolve strategies to influence both the agent’s logic and the human user’s final decision.
The rise of personal AI shopping agents fundamentally alters the marketing landscape. Since these agents handle the initial shopping process on behalf of the human user, traditional marketing strategies designed to directly engage human emotions, browsing behavior, and impulse purchases face a new challenge. In the agentic era, the goal is to reach the human through their AI proxy. This requires an evolution in marketing automation, retargeting, and advertising optimization.
AI is already a powerful tool in e-commerce marketing, enabling personalization at scale, automating tasks like audience segmentation and campaign timing, and personalizing product recommendations. AI helps marketers make data-driven decisions and increases the accuracy of predictions. AI tools can also monitor social media conversations and analyze sentiment.
When a personal AI agent is conducting the shopping, the primary "interaction" is between the agent and the e-commerce platform's data and systems. The human user might only be involved at the initial instruction phase or the final purchase approval. This changes the marketing funnel significantly. Marketing efforts need to adapt to influence both the agent's decision-making process and the human's ultimate choice.
Strategies for marketing in the agentic era include:
Optimizing for Agent Discoverability:
As discussed in our previous blog: Optimizing Product Discovery and Search for Personal AI Shopping Agents, ensuring platforms are easily navigable and that product data is structured for AI agents is a prerequisite for even being considered by an agent. This is the new top-of-funnel marketing priority.
Influencing Agent Preferences (Indirectly):
While you can't appeal to an AI agent's emotions, you can influence its decision-making by ensuring your products meet its programmed criteria. This means having competitive pricing (relevant for price-comparing agents), comprehensive and accurate product data (for agents searching specific attributes), and potentially optimizing for factors like shipping speed or return policies if agents are programmed to consider these.
Retargeting the Human User:
If a personal AI agent interacts with your site but doesn't complete a purchase, the human user might still be a valuable prospect. Retargeting campaigns need to evolve to recognize this scenario. AI can help make retargeting ads personalized in near real time, potentially reminding the human user about products their agent considered or offering incentives. This requires sophisticated data integration to link agent activity back to a user profile. Bloomreach offers marketing automation solutions that personalize, automate, and convert, with integrations to connect data across systems. Personalized ad targeting has shown significant increases in purchase events.
Personalized Messaging Based on Agent Activity:
Marketing messages sent to the human user could reference the activity of their AI agent, highlighting the products or categories the agent explored. This requires businesses to understand and track the agent's journey on their site.
Leveraging AI-Assisted Marketing Tools:
AI-driven tools can automate repetitive marketing tasks and use AI-generated insights to design campaigns and strategies that resonate with customers on a deeper emotional level. This is crucial for efficiently managing marketing efforts in a complex agentic environment. Customer segmentation tools powered by AI can analyze behavior, preferences, and psychographics to craft highly targeted segments and detailed customer personas for personalized campaigns.
Proactive Communication:
AI marketing suites can enable proactive interactions with shoppers in real-time, which might be necessary to engage agents or notify human users about relevant opportunities their agent might be interested in.
Marketing in the agentic era is about understanding the mediated relationship between the business, the AI agent, and the human user. It demands a blend of technical optimization for AI agent compatibility and sophisticated, AI-driven marketing strategies aimed at influencing the human through the agent's interactions.