The brand era has changed.
82% of adults globally have used AI assistants in the past 6 months.
Today, AI is becoming a powerful new influencer, shaping recommendations, content and choices, while brands must work harder to maintain meaningful connections, pricing power and impact across fragmented touchpoints.
In our latest analysis, we bring a strategic perspective to Intelligence for Brands in the AI era and answer the key questions we keep hearing from CMOs:
- Are Meaning and Difference visible to machines, or only humans?
- Are you building pricing power, or training AI to see your brand as interchangeable?
- Are you engineering for AI selection as well as human browsing?
- Where is AI revealing new space that your brand has right to win?
Download the new perspective
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Establish brand equity in the machine mind, as well as human mind AI prioritises functional signals like price and reviews, meaning brands that don’t encode their differentiation risk being optimised out of choice. As a CMO, You must actively engineer how your brand is represented in AI environments, not rely on traditional brand building alone. |
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Three actions for CMOs in the AI era:
- Predispose more people: strengthen Meaningful Difference in both human and machine contexts
- Be present in AI ecosystems: shape the signals that drive visibility
- Find new growth space: identify where AI is expanding demand
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Which sources influence your brand presence in AI answers? Reddit alone can drive up to 9% of AI citations, showing that influence is no longer concentrated, but distributed across hundreds of sources. Brand control has shifted from channels to ecosystems, requiring active signal management. |
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Consumer comfort with delegation to agents varies by category We asked consumers across 12 markets how comfortable they are with agentic commerce across a range of categories. Around a third are comfortable with an agent selecting products on their behalf, as long as they retain final approval at checkout. The real divide emerges when choice is fully delegated. This creates a clear direction for brands: identify where to pilot and experiment first, and closely track how expectations are evolving as agentic commerce develops. |
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Meaningful Difference is what separates brands that are visible from brands that are chosen.
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