Why Agents Will Buy, But Marketing Must Stay Human

30:08Like it's not a thing. They don't become motivated. The instruction behind them is their motivation. So going, all right, well, if that's the motivation, what can we infer, understand, interrogate about the instructions that they've been given as marketing people to understand our customer better? Let's again, take it and distill it down to marketing essentials. What we do with humans is we deeply understand who the customer is and what they're all about, what motivates them, what's their worldview, all of those kinds of things. We have to take that same set of skills and apply it to this new customer, not expecting to find the same things as we would find with a human customer.

30:49That's not going to work. But if you look for motivation, but in this instance, you describe it as these are the instructions and the governing constraints around this agent that I can understand it will operate within. Disintermediated motivation. Okay, so that's as much as I can know there. And then knowing that can help me serve it better. The ability is where we really have strength and power because making something easy for a human is, it's table stakes and it's user experience 101. you know creating the conditions in marketing for people to easily take up your trigger offer your trigger that you're putting at the moment in time that's where we get some the traction with humans it's the same it's the same with an AI agent it's the same with an embodied AI if you can make it easy to do the behavior that you are intending as the outcome from the marketing exercise then you're already like you know 80 % of the way there and with that it looks different when you're dealing with an AI agent or an embodied AI, a car that wants to buy something than a human.

32:02So you have to create the connectors that it needs. You have to create the clean data that it wants to interrogate. So this is where I think that discoverability does come in as part of that marketing layer, but it's bringing the mindset of the marketer to that, which is, all right, we're giving it the ability to do something so we can get it to do the behavior. It's not a technical problem to solve in its purest form. It's kind of an everybody problem to solve because you're going to need the people for whom this is their specialist skill to make that all work. So getting them to do that behavior through friction-free ability is really crucial to the whole conversation.

32:42And then the third thing is, again, it's a marketing conversation, is that trigger. Where do we put the trigger in the journey that this agent, this machine customer is having with our organization in order for it to, in the motivation part of it. So in that third part of the equation, the trigger part of the equation, this is a marketing conversation. This is a marketing expertise moment. Where do we put that trigger in the journey that this AI agent is having with our business in order for it to bring into play all of those motivations that we've come to understand, the parameters that it's operating within, the constraints, the things that it's been told is the outcome it has to get, and create that easy ability for it to do the behavior.

33:34so like your your technology people are not going to think about it in these terms they're going to think about it in terms of the pipes the utility the data is it all there okay great and this is an everybody problem to solve and an everybody opportunity but it's the marketing mindset that can bring all of that really strategic thinking to this to go this is the outcome and the behavior that we want to get this is our understanding of what's motivating the behavior from the human or the business behind the agent and how it's manifesting in the agent, in its parameters, in its behavior and its operating.

34:11This is our ability to, this is how we can create the ability for it to do the thing without friction so that we're the chosen party that they want to work with because we make it easy for them. And then this is the way we're going to trigger it to come in and execute on the instructions that it's been given with our products and our services. So this is where the marketing conversation needs to be, not down in the weeds of like, you know, how do we make ourselves discoverable? Because the more discoverable you are, the more interchangeable you are. Every customer tells you who they are and what they browse, what they buy, when they come back, and when they don't.

34:52Attentive helps brands turn those signals into personalized messages across SMS, email, RCS, and push. So every interaction feels relevant, not random. not more marketing better marketing that's marketing made personal that's attentive to learn more visit attentive.com now i'm thinking about how you just explained it is making me think that okay from a consumer perspective because if i think about ai agents let's say from like finance high frequency trading of course they're just going to go out they know the rules they're going to be making the trades and doing all the things that makes total sense to me that like you need speed and you know they can act on your behalf and that's the goal but when I think about consumers right now I don't there's definitely obviously not enough trust now to do that and how it's being used right now is go out and do all the research and then bring it back to me and I want to take some time to make a decision that maybe back in the day I would have just gone on Google only had two links went with the more the one with the better story, the brand that I know, the one that has a bigger emotional tie to it.

36:01But now it feels like because we have so much information coming, there might be a bigger pause that marketers aren't used to because consumers aren't going to say, hey, go and buy that thing for me. I don't think as of now, they might, they probably have need some time to develop trust to say like, I want you to start executing on my behalf, but instead bring me a lot of options that are the best ones based off what I told you. And now I need time to wait and think about it. And then how you get chosen in that space. That's the part I'm curious about, like, because it feels like the brands who used to show up there, let's say Nike, Patagonia, like they built their brand based off emotions, the human element.

36:40I mean, they spent so much time there. And so I might think that still matters because people look at it and they're like, well, I still, as of now, in this generation have a lot of trust for whatever it might be, Nike, because it's so top of mind. So like, how do you think about maybe a pause? And I will also say I've saw this with enterprise companies too, with them evaluating SaaS and looking and being like, now I have a lot of good options. And there was like the great pause of buying into new enterprise SaaS companies, which is probably for the best at this point, since many of them are gonna be obsolete.

37:14But yeah, so this pause, I'm just curious about how you think about that. Yeah, I think you're kind of describing the moment of decision paralysis where you have so many options. Amazon has tackled this with a feature in Rufus called Help Me Decide where you just give it back to the AI and say, oh, this is too much. Please just help me decide. But the thing with Rufus is you think that maybe it's working on your behalf, but Rufus is motivated to deliver brands to your front door that have paid to be surfaced. And so you're not actually getting that neutral viewpoint on that one. There is a moment there where people are going to go, oh, wow, that's a lot.

38:02Okay. I don't really know what to do or how to, I need to, I need to process because we don't process at the speed of AI. we just don't um our brains they work differently and they parse data in different ways and the amount of data that we can parse all together at one time is different so I did some experimentation particularly around brand voice coming up in that co-buyer um scenario and I did an experiment going you know I'm looking for some running shoes I don't run very often um I'm a woman what have you got for me and it came back with you know three different options with three different brands and just describe the features of the brands.

38:42And I asked it, you know, did you actually represent the brand voice of these brands when you presented this information to me? And I was working with Claude at the time on this one. It was like, well, actually, no, I didn't. And I was like, well, can you do it again, but actually represent the brand voice properly? And it went very much from like, you know, EV foam souls to marshmallow-y soft souls that will propel you forward into the whole world. And so it is capable of representing brands to differentiate. And I think that the theory that I have about this to take it more above that foundational discoverability level and even above that operational trust level is that we actually have to be having a stratospheric conversation.

39:32about the values that our organizations stand for because that is a differentiator in the marketplace, particularly as younger generations and even older generations are buying in alignment with their values and statements about their values are becoming part of the descriptor that they're giving to their AI agents to go and find them options. And an AI agent has got all of the patience and time in the world to interrogate your supply chain about its sustainability credentials or its ethical sourcing credentials than a human does. So we're going to need to start encoding our values as organizations in machine readable data.

40:15Patagonia is a really good example of this because they have their footprint chronicles which showcase how they participate in the circular economy, the amount of reuse and repair that they do, the level of recyclable materials that are content of their products. And they showcase all of this in data. And so if I say I want a sustainable mountain climbing jacket, Patagonia is going to show up there as the option for me. And so these sorts of methods of filtering out the noise in those conversations are going to be more and more apparent for marketers to start taking advantage of. And again, it's not just that make your data machine readable, put a txt file at the front of your you know your website to explain to the agents what you do honestly most agents if you're a big brand they already know about you from their training data like it's already in their training data who nike is who you know um who patagonia is and so they're going to be taking it out of their training data before they start hitting your website in order to determine whether or not you're a fit for what they do again looking at it from a behavior design perspective all right well people are they're motivated to to find the thing that matches up with what they want and have inferred that that motivation to um to their agent um have you made it easy for the agent to to make you the the choice there and are you getting the right trigger the right information in front of them at the right time so how well or poorly you have described your brand out into the marketplace with the differentiators that are really clear in machine readable data-backed format.

41:55Like the data backing of this is really crucial, especially third-party data. The internet decides what's good and what's bad and agents take a lot of steer from places across the internet that surface those sorts of opinions. So those are some of the things that can be brought into play into that pause moment. The other thing that is worth noting here is this is a country by country thing in terms of how much people trust AI to buy on their behalf. WorldPay did a really great survey just at the end of 2025 with about 8 ,000 people across all sorts of different countries. And in China, 65 % of people said, I'm already shopping with an AI agent, or I would be happy to shop with an AI agent.

42:42So they are the most progressive market in terms of trusting this and wanting to use this as a way to participate in the economy. Whereas if you look at the very lowest end of the scale, France was at 53 % of the French people who responded said, I would never shop with an AI agent ever. The highest resistant market to this. So there isn't like a stereotypical approach that you can like say carte blanche across the whole thing. One size just does not fit all in this scenario. And different countries, different markets, different cultures are going to come to this at different speeds with different levels of trust and resistance.

43:24And this is again, another marketing conversation for your particular territory and understanding what the culture is that the AI agent is operating in, which will determine the types of instructions that it's being given. That comes into play and your ability as a marketer to bring that layer and lens to how this works is also really, really crucial. So I think that marketers, if they're spending all their time trying to figure out how to make their data machine readable, they're operating at the wrong level and they're using the wrong talents to do the wrong thing. I guess that's where I'm going with this one.

44:09That's a clip right there. That's good. Yeah, I mean, what I like about this conversation, and the one thing that's really hitting for me, especially I'll just say in the US market, is so many companies have, in the past, many have cared about showing their values and showing the things that they care about that maybe are counterintuitive to making a profit. And many of those companies have kind of gone unnoticed And they just did it because they wanted to, which is amazing. But now what's cool is I see consumers and maybe I'm in a bubble in Austin, but even in the Bay Area and certain areas like consumers actually are starting to care about what are the materials in this and like health consequences of things.

44:52And I think it's because we have so much information now. It is like, hey, where is things like diamonds coming from? Like that might not feel good anymore. Now that I've seen where it comes from, I can't unsee it. And like, so there's a whole new revolution of data and information that I think is making a more conscious customer rising up. And so thinking about that, like if that's like one takeaway from this interview is like being able to instill your values and really get clear on what are your values? What do you want to stand for as a company? And how do you want to make it known? Because now it actually matters in a way that you're going to be found because of it, which is a pretty cool reality to be in now.

45:30And I also, I want to expand that one, that it's not just a B2C conversation. This is a B2B conversation as well. So Walmart has had AI procurement operating since 2022, starting in pilot and now operationalizing, where they negotiate with their more than 2000 vendors using an AI platform called Pactum. They're getting great results from that for Walmart. I think maybe not so much for the vendors, but definitely Walmart is getting great results from that. but Walmart's procurement runs on a responsible sourcing set of governing guardrails. The things that that organization states as its values in terms of who it will source from and what the parameters are around that in terms of sustainability, in terms of modern slavery, in terms of all of the ESG credentials, they're going to be expecting their vendors to be able to articulate.

46:21Now, when it's the AI that is interrogating your supply chain in this way, you better be ready for it. You better be ready with everything that you need to signal as something that is machine readable, machine understandable, but not only that, verifiable in third party credentialing databases. Like if you say that you're organic, you need to be proving that through the registration with a third party organic supplier database in order for you to be able to go, okay, it's not just what we say. I can show you that we're living our values. And here is also the receipts for where our values have showed up.

47:03And so this is an important B2B story as well. So I want people to be coming to this with both lenses in play. So now that you're talking about third party, this is relevant because I was just on an interview with an amazing human and we were talking about brands having their own media platforms. And the question that came up for me was, yes, Marc Andreessen has said every brand, every company needs to be a media company. He's been saying that for a long time. And so it's always in the back of my mind. But then when I hear this, and this is something I kind of pushed on a little bit, I'm like, but if LLMs are favoring third party content, should you instead be focused on having others talk about you instead of even if you have a media platform that's arm's length and people know it's from you?

47:53Like eventually the LLMs will come in and be like, well, these two are connected. So like, I'm going to go and like look at what's on Reddit instead. And I'm going to go and look at this podcast where someone talked about they were actually a good, you know, platform they were using. so how do you think about this of like using third parties to like verify that you're good versus like having your own own channels to tell your story yeah I guess it depends on who you're trying to talk to um and we still have to talk to humans we definitely still have to talk to humans and humans are you know they like brand narratives and they get emotional about brand narratives And I was exploring a paper that came out just, I think just this week about how chatTPT refers people to e-commerce websites.

48:42This is a very dense academic paper. Give me the TLDR because I definitely didn't read it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the TLDR on this one is that at the moment, it is a pretty small subset of referrals because it was comparing search to ChatGPT, specifically just ChatGPT, saying that, you know, the referrals are still pretty small and search actually still outweighed ChatGPT in terms of e-commerce referrals. The other aspect of that in some of the other literature that I've been reading is the ability for the LLMs to infer the emotions of people. Because I mean, the narrative of logic replaces emotion in this, I think is true if we have a pure just AI agent doing something.

49:35but that AI agent just looking at what I saw in BYD about the emotional inference that the agents are able to do as the intelligent cockpit of a car agents are going to be able to infer from humans the emotions that we're bringing to an instructional conversation and use that as part of the buying parameters I just saw some stuff come out of thinking machine labs which is a group of people who left open AI to go and do some more research-based work in AI their AI is able to use cameras to sort of infer more about the emotional state of the human or the physical state of the human. Like they've got some demos around helping somebody not slouch at their computer and also inferring where people's emotional states are.

50:21As the machine gets smarter, it's going to be bringing all of that emotional baggage with it as well. So I don't think, and I'm really sorry because this just makes it more complicated. I don't think we can take a pure view in marketing and go, all right, well, logic replaces emotion. So now I'm going to do things like that. This is a really tough space for marketing. And if people are feeling like confused and stressed, I, I, I'm here for you. I see this and, and it's right that you should feel this way because this is really, really tough. So you were going towards like LLMs picking up on emotions.

51:00And so then the logic piece around it might not be the way to go. I mean, all I'm hearing and what I keep hearing with this is like, I don't know if anyone knows where we're headed because I even look at just the past six months to a year. And there's been many CMOs that I talked to who are like, yeah, I threw out my entire annual plan at the end of January. Like I started with one in January 1st and January 25th, it was dead. And I look at like what's been happening. I'm like, no one last year was predicting that AI agents would come in, change commerce, kill off a ton of SaaS companies or continue to kill them off.

51:36Like no one predicted that. And even when people saw what was happening with Claude. I definitely predicted the AI agents coming to shop. Yeah, I wrote a book in November. Okay. So, okay. I will say people on the show have said that for a long time. Yeah. I'd say maybe two years ago, I've heard people saying that, but I was like, okay, that didn't come true quick enough. It was a Gartner trend from 2017. Yeah. Yeah. So I have heard people saying that, but not one person said, hey, Claude's going to come in here and like rip apart SaaS companies and they're going to die. And then we're just going to make what we want easily.

52:05Like no one, at least from people I talked to, I didn't hear anyone predicting that. So then I'm like, what? I don't even know if we know where we're going. Yeah. And like what to even prepare for fully. I know, I know. I remember what you're asking about. So on that sort of, you know, brands being their own media companies and storytelling and, you know, language models, large language models being biased towards what third parties have got to say about brands. I think the connection that I'm trying to make here is that because of this ability that's coming through with some of the research level works, so the thinking machine labs work around inferring how a person's feeling and their physical state as well.

52:46The stuff we saw in intelligent cockpits with emotional inference and then adjusting your environment to suit the emotional mood. I think it's impossible to see a situation where we have AI agents that are able to infer the emotional state of their human and then perhaps pull on the storytelling that a brand is doing in its own media channels as part of its consideration set to match against the instructions that it's been given. But this is just me predicting something that I can see as a possible future. I have no experimentation on this and I just don't think we're in a place with AI where we have it in a good enough state to showcase whether or not this would or wouldn't work to definitively say to a brand, hey, yeah, keep spending your money becoming your own media company.

53:41I can only say that I can see a possible state where it could be useful, which I'm sure is not the definitive thing that people want to hear right now. Everybody wants to know what the hell to do. Yeah, yeah. Which I think anyone who, I don't know, when I look at a lot of the actions being taken, a lot of people are moving really quick and shipping things really quick, which is amazing. And what comes up too is like, man, what if people are moving too quickly in a direction that's not where things are headed? And like, you know, we talked about with just going in and adding certain TXT files on the website and changing the whole structure of your website and like moving so quick where then you look up and you're like, oh, wait, that's actually not the direction that things are heading anymore.

54:20And I just, you know, put my budget and my I campaign for this to happen. And now it's already gone. And so, yeah, it feels like we're in a space of like also maybe pause for a second and like using your own intuition to also be like okay me as a consumer if i'm on chat gbt or claude or gemini like how am i seeing things play out because that's usually probably the best place to discover what's happening with the market it's just like getting in there and like seeing how things are going hands-on so i would say that our marketers need to start behaving like scientists here and running experiments.

55:01So we can bring in a lot of things that we learned from doing lean user experience design for this, which is form your hypothesis. Be really clear about what you believe to be true. Make the statement. We believe that if we keep running a media company, that AI agents will be able to use emotional inference to add that to the instructions that have been given by the human or by the business and our brand storytelling will still land and we will see measurable results. So like be clear on the positions that you're taking and then go, all right, what experiments can we design to prove out whether this is true or not true?

55:47and this is what's really quite powerful in terms of the way that you can think about this. Then run the experiment and measure the results and see whether you're right or wrong. Run lots of experiments, small experiments, but be very intentional about the experiments you're running. Don't just throw spaghetti at the wall and hope that something's going to stick. Have a hypothesis, what you believe to be true. Make the statement. Write it down. Figure out the experiment. Run the experiment. look at the results, see whether or not you are right or wrong, then either keep doing it or scale the experiment if you are right and measure again or go, oh, yikes, that wasn't what we wanted to do.

56:29Let's toss that, start on something else. Now, I know that a lot of organizations, you know, they've got all these AI efficiency gains they're apparently getting, which is allowing them to let go of all this headcount. Rather than do that, perhaps keep the people that you thought you might want to get efficiency gains by having them head out of your organization and redeploy those people into running these experiments, doing innovation. Let's take an abundance mindset to this rather than an efficiency mindset. If we keep on taking and stripping people out to do exactly the same things we've already done, just faster and cheaper, then we will perpetuate the status quo, which is ultimately a slow slide to mediocrity and irrelevance.

57:08if hell yeah if we take these amazing people we have in our organizations and go hey the AI is going to do that thing that was administrative and annoying that you used to do let's take your brain power and we want you to start coming up with hypotheses about things that we could be doing running experiments showing what's working and not working innovating then we're probably going to get to something that is net new and when we have things that are net new we have net new revenue which is a better outcome for a business because we're selling new things to different people or the same things to new people and that's how we grow our businesses otherwise we're just going to become anorexic businesses that can't support ourselves so this is absolutely my plea is redeploy these humans into your innovation space to run these experiments and start figuring out for your business what's going to work what's not going to work and then please you know share what you find so that the rest of us who are scrambling around in the dark can can can help can be helped yep yep i love that it also makes me think it'd probably be very interesting to just have claude quickly look up the companies who have done that i mean there was huge headlines for a while they're like so and so lays off 70 of this and that and you're like whoa oh it'd be interesting to go and look and be like what happened because oftentimes we just see those headlines and then no one ever looks back and is like, whoa, what happened?

58:32Now that company is hiring again and they're missing a lot of people. So it would be interesting just to do a quick look back on that. Yeah. I think they've already walked back the AI is taking your jobs narrative. I mean, even Sam Altman and the people at the top of all of this have walked that back and said, well, actually, it's just a correction for some hiring that we did, some overhiring that we did. But they've got a very convenient scapegoat there, which is point at the AI and say, oh, AI is doing all the jobs now. And I think that if you go inside, scratch underneath the surface of any of those organizations, you will find they probably don't have AI capable of doing even one human's job.

59:08I'm sure that there is AI that can do some jobs, but at the level that it's being presented, no, I don't believe it. Yeah, there you go. I mean, I think what is beautiful about the time period that we're in right now is that humans get to actually take a step back and be like, what do I like doing? And like, what am I best at? And what makes me human? Because yeah, a lot of jobs, a lot of things can now be done. I mean, I'm watching it for myself where I'm like, whoa, I used to have many people doing this one thing. And for me, it used to take this much time and I don't have to anymore. So that's amazing.

59:42So like now, what do I get to do that's uniquely me? And that's like a fun place to be in. So it's a resurgence of humans and doing human things and figuring out what that actually is because for a while we were just many people were put in roles that you had to be in that like you had to choose certain jobs and doing the same thing over and over again and that was just how things were and so now you really don't have to and you get to choose in a very different way which is pretty cool yeah and this is a big mindset change that I think has to happen which is okay well now that I've offloaded all of that administrative task that took me three hours and it now gets done in less than three minutes.

1:00:20What am I going to do with my three hours? And being super intentional about repurposing our time to try and do something net new, to explore, to experiment, to find something that's meaningful, useful and interesting to do with those three hours that have been gifted back to us. I mean, what a gift. Time is such a gift. So if we're not intentionally using it, I think we're missing out on it. such an incredibly valuable opportunity. The thing that's interesting around that one as well is that while that sounds like a hand-wavy future and it's coming in Chinese cars, and maybe that doesn't necessarily land as much for a US audience, like Mercedes has got Mercedes Pay already in the car.

1:01:07It's had it since 2023. You can, like the car can pay for its own parking. The car can pay for its own charging. It can buy third-party apps off its platform. so like we already have you know to in the words of the ceo of of um mercedes pay you know agentic commerce started on the internet and it's coming to the car that that's his his main intention is to bring agentic commerce to the car and so we have got in market today vehicles that are able to to buy mercedes doesn't have an intelligent cockpit i don't think yet to be fair i haven't research that explicitly so I was just looking at the BMW China and the other China examples they definitely have the intelligent cockpit coming in so when you couple that idea of agentic commerce in the car with the emotional inference you kind of get something that if you wire it together it has the ability to to buy based on people's emotional states depending on the governance and constraints that are around it.

1:02:12I don't know. And the consumer trusting to allow that. I tested some of it out and like, I tested putting these out, um, on LinkedIn and wrote a Substack article about it. Um, and one of the comments that I got back was, yeah. And it could tell that like my daughter got into the car when I picked her up after school and she had a total meltdown and drove me crazy all the way home. And then by the time I get home, it will have bought my favorite chocolate bar and it'd be waiting for me and I can eat it when the kids go to bed. And I was like, whoa, okay, that escalated quickly. You actually took this and made an experience out of it.

1:02:47So I see that some people immediately see the benefit and how this could help them. Katya, thank you for joining Marketing Trends. This was a super enlightening conversation. I feel like it sparks so many new ideas and thoughts. So thank you for coming on and sharing everything. Where can our listeners and our viewers find out more about you and your work? Oh, thank you. It was a really terrific conversation. Made me think of some new things. So thanks for asking those questions. I'm very easy to find. So I work out loud on this. I work out loud on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find there as well as on Substack, where I write as the CX evolutionist.

1:03:26My book obviously is available for people if they feel like they could use a field guide to start navigating this. That one's available on Amazon in every market around the world. So I'm happy to have conversations, please. If you're interested in talking about this, I'm always interested in talking about this. So reach out and let's chat about it. Amazing. Thank you so much.