

2027 trends report chapter on the “delegation economy,” where consumers increasingly outsource product decisions to AI agents (from summaries and recommendations to potentially autonomous purchases). It covers market sizing, early category adoption, and what marketers should do to “future-proof” brands amid privacy, loss of control, and trust concerns.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Discussion on the importance of AI in shaping the future of marketing.
“Almost every marketer will have spent a lot of time in 2026 thinking about the implications of AI across every part of the marketing system, from workflows to media planning to headcount.”
Steve Whiteside defines the delegation economy and its implications.
“So to set the foundation for the conversation today, I think it's really important that we put some key definitions in place.”
Exploration of AI tools and their practical applications for consumers.
“So the next logical question is, what are the implications of that for consumers and for marketers?”
Analysis of market data and consumer attitudes towards AI delegation.
“But that study did some market sizing for us, and it suggested that in 2026, over$944 billion of global consumer spend will be facilitated by agentic AI.”
Discussion on the challenges marketers face with AI and potential opportunities.
“So again, trust and transparency are questions there.”
Alicia and Neil share their thoughts on AI trends in various industries.
“And I think that temptation could be very present when we think about AI too.”
Alicia discusses the shift in how marketers are addressing customer needs based on market trends.
“Was there anything that really resonated with you from the off?”
Neil shares insights on how AI and LLMs are changing decision-making processes across industries.
“And so what we see is that compounding evidence and that rich human data being more important than ever and something that you can't really hack.”
Alicia outlines how Trustpilot helps consumers make informed decisions through feedback.
“Yeah, Alicia, just to come back to you, you are the Chief Customer Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer of Trustpilot.”
Alicia discusses the importance of maintaining human-centered experiences while integrating AI.
“and then through the funnel to products, through to locations.”
Neil introduces the priming and proving model developed at 21st Century Brand for marketing in the AI era.
“It's really important to keep the human center in your experiences and those brand promises as an example.”
Alicia reflects on how Trustpilot is restructuring to adapt to AI-driven changes in marketing.
“And then Motorways, one of the UK's leading auto e-commerce sites for selling cars.”
Discussion on how the delegation economy is reshaping marketing strategies beyond traditional methods.
“things to be more cross-functional, not just within marketing, but within the company, I think is a key change that I see that the brands that we work with who are doing best in this era.”
Explore how brands can foster trust and visibility through collaboration and shared accountability.
“And I think a lot of that is because of so many of the ways to win and the things that will drive that trust and discoverability are beyond growth marketing and content and even beyond marketing itself.”
Discuss the anticipated changes in how brands delegate tasks and build consumer trust over time.
“My last question to both of you is how do you foresee the delegation ecosystem evolving over the next few years.”
Understand the complex role of brand differentiation in a rapidly changing market landscape.
“And so when we think about a review platform, that end experience, you're still eating the ice cream or, you know, using the insurance.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On The WARC Podcast, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
0:09Hello and welcome back to The Walk Podcast. I'm Anna Hamill. The marketing and advertising industry is deep in planning season for 2027, so it's perfect timing to get stuck into Walk's annual trends report, The Marketer's Toolkit, where we examine the five big trends that we see shaping 2027 and beyond. The toolkit includes exclusive data from our very own survey of marketers around the world, as well as in-depth interviews with brand leaders and analysis from our team of experts. And today, we're examining the rise of the drive to AI delegation. Almost every marketer will have spent a lot of time in 2026 thinking about the implications of AI across every part of the marketing system, from workflows to media planning to headcount.
0:57And right now, that work is primarily to make sure that the brand is featured whenever consumers search for a product and seek out recommendations using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. But in the future, people could be delegating various parts of the customer journey, including making purchases, to autonomous AI agents. On the flip side, consumer anxiety about artificial intelligence and its impact are very real. So what should marketers be doing now if they want to future-proof their brands for that future? We have some great guests to talk about this topic today, as we're going to be hearing from Neil Barry, global CEO and co-founder of 21st Century Brand, and Alicia Skubik, chief customer officer and chief marketing officer at Trustpilot.
1:43First, I'll be speaking to Steve Whiteside, Wark's head of content for the Americas, who led this chapter for Marketers Toolkit. But before we hear from all of them, a quick word from our sponsor.
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2:36So Steve, thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, thanks for having me, Anna. So to set the foundation for the conversation today, I think it's really important that we put some key definitions in place. So tell me what we mean by the delegation economy. Well, as ever when we're talking about tech disruption or marketing disruption, I think there are a few definitions floating around. I'm a simple man, so I'll try and keep mine as simple as I can. The delegation economy can most easily be summed up as what happens when consumers outsource decisions, whether in full or in part, to AI tools and potentially to what are known as agentic AI tools.
3:13So there's a little bit to unpack there because that's quite techie. Most of us are familiar with AI chatbots where you input a prompt or a query and it feeds you some information back. So that could be asking it, what are the best shoes for me to wear to the gym to protect my knees, for example. And I say most of us will probably be familiar with that, but the agentic side of the equation is a little bit more complicated. And those are AI tools that if you give them permission, can autonomously complete a task on your behalf. So it's a little bit more than a chatbot. It means if you give it a job to do, it'll go away and it will do it for you.
3:49Now, I say that's quite techie. So the next logical question is, what are the implications of that for consumers and for marketers? And I think a useful way of thinking about that is Meta's Muse, which was a personalized AI agent that it launched in September, and it got 10 million downloads in about 40 days. So a lot of interest from consumers on that. and some of the use cases for news when it launched are really interesting as we think about what people can use AI delegation for so a couple where you could connect it to your email and if you've not been in touch with an old friend for a while it could draft you an email to send to them and suggest getting together soon on a date that works for you both or if you connect it to your tools at work it can summarize previous meeting notes you've got and give you a briefing for the next meeting you're about to go into on a topic.
4:39So as that suggests, not all use cases for delegation and AI are going to be marketing and commerce related, but a lot of them will be. Other examples that were floated when Muse was launched that are more relevant to what we're thinking about as marketers were, it might be able to book flights and book accommodation if you're traveling soon. It might be able to cancel unused subscriptions if you have them, or it might be able to recommend and negotiate prices for products that you like the look of. So there's quite a lot going on there. And I don't know if eagle-eared is an expression, but our more eagle-eared listeners will have picked up that that's going to require connecting a tool like Muse to a lot of other different services to be able to pull in all that information.
5:24And that might come with some privacy worries for some people, but also some worries about loss of control. There's been lots of big news stories about AI agents going rogue at a much higher level than what we're thinking about, that you could see how individuals might start to pull that down to the personal level and start to worry about that. So there's some trust building that's needed there. But hopefully what I've got at is there's a bit of a spectrum of the delegation economy. It starts at one end of using AI tools to lift the cognitive load of trying to make choices when you're trying to, in our case, buy something.
5:57But it could go all the way through to letting an autonomous AI tool actually make an entire decision for you if you trust that it knows what you want and it will get it right. Yeah, it strikes me just based on what you've said that the delegation economy is clearly still under construction, right? So, you know, brands are very kind of early in their development of these products and these types of things. But also from a consumer perspective, as you mentioned, there is a lot of weariness around this technology, around the impact of artificial intelligence. and time will tell how much uptick there's going to be in using these for all sorts of different delegation purposes.
6:31Do we have an idea of how big this is right now within the context of all of those factors? Yeah, a few months ago, Walk, PhD and Lions Advisory published a report that focused on the delegation economy and we did a separate podcast episode on that. So I would encourage you to go and listen to that after you finished this episode. But that study did some market sizing for us, and it suggested that in 2026, over$944 billion of global consumer spend will be facilitated by agentic AI. So the word facilitated is doing quite a lot of work there, but what it meant in the context of the report is that AI tools will independently curate product comparisons or identify the right prices or provide product recommendations or a mixture of all those things.
7:17that then goes on to support a purchase choice that a consumer makes. By 2030, the report said that figure should reach$3.35 trillion, which is obviously a very big number. There's another useful study from Bain & Co., the consultancy. It was looking at e-commerce in the US, and it suggested that in 2030, between$300 billion and$500 billion worth of e-commerce purchases will either be initiated, influenced, or completed by AI tools. So again, that broad spectrum that we've just been talking about. And that's between 15 % and 25 % of the predicted value of the U.S. e-commerce market at that time.
7:57And Morgan Stanley have got similar figures. So we've got a fairly good dollar basis for what we're talking about. But I think there's a couple of other ways of getting into that question. And one of them is to understand what marketers think about it and how they think it's going to evolve. And our Marketers Toolkit Survey addressed that question. And it found that 77 % of marketers think that in the next three years, consumers will often use AI summaries rather than clicking on search results. And I think from what we know of Google's recent results, as well as what publishers are talking about, that trend is very much underway.
8:31Our survey participants also were quite confident that consumers will use these tools more often for product research and discovery. So 69 % thought that will be much more common in the next three years. But that figure fell below 10 % when it came to people enabling completely autonomous transactions. So it seems that for marketers, the narrower idea of what the delegation economy will look like is going to be in the near term where we're headed. On the consumer side, Accenture did a really useful survey of 25 ,000 consumers in 16 markets. And it broadly matched up with what we said in the marketers' toolkit survey.
9:08So they found that 85 % of consumers were open to using AI to find products and potentially negotiate deals, but only 9 % wanted to enable autonomous transactions. And there are a number of reasons for that. Privacy and loss of control that we mentioned a bit earlier, but also they were worried about price gouging. So this idea that the product that an AI engine might recommend to you isn't actually the right one for you, but it's the one that's right for the advertiser or for the platform. So again, trust and transparency are questions there. And one quick final point, and then I'll be quiet.
9:42Deloitte found that almost 40 % of business-to-business buyers are already using AI for a range of different tasks as well, like product evaluation or configuring orders or price benchmarking. So this isn't just a business-to-consumer problem. It's a B2B question as well. Some really interesting data there that really kind of underlines just the white space opportunity around AI delegation, both in B2C and B2B, as you mentioned, Steve. So what are the categories where delegation is likely to take root first? You mentioned B2B, but what else? Yeah, the Walken PhD report got into that too. And I'll be really interested to hear from Elshir and Neil on this as well.
10:22But I wanted to take a quick step back to frame some of it before we get into the exact categories, because I think there's some interesting thinking in that report that can help shape how we approach this. So the report noted that both as consumers and as marketers, we're living in an age of abundance. So that means we've got more choice and more content than ever, but also more complexity than ever. and a lot of consumers have been left feeling really overwhelmed perhaps ironically partly because of the flood of AI content that now exists but the temptation to delegate either in full or in part your choices is being encouraged by that feeling of it's really hard to know I'm making the right choice for me when I'm trying to find a product or buy a product so it's pushing consumers in that direction and that's a concern for marketers in every category I think but there are some categories that it feels like this move will happen faster than others.
11:10And the Walken PhD report pointed to categories like financial services, telecoms, utilities, travel and transport as the categories that may see the fastest shift. And our eagerly listeners will again be thinking, well, those are categories where online search often plays a heightened role at the moment. So it feels like a continuation of that trend. And I think I'd probably agree with that, which is good because I set the premise up. But those categories have some other things in common too. They're quite complicated. There's a lot of information to sift through. And also, I think they can feel a little bit undifferentiated and interchangeable to consumers at times.
11:48We as marketers would obviously bristle at that suggestion, but I think the perception nonetheless remains. So marketers in those categories may have to think about how they're approaching the AI delegation shift more quickly. But I think there's also another point there that is probably worth doubling down on before I hand over. And that is that, and we've published a lot of research around this and the multiplier effect and the multiplier playbook as well. It's going to be really important not to hyper-focus on AI. We saw when performance advertising really took root that a lot of brands over-focused on performance and forgot how important brand building is.
12:25And I think that temptation could be very present when we think about AI too. It could be that marketers want to delegate their own thinking, their own strategies to getting the AI optimization right, just like they often focused on getting the clicks or the ROAS numbers right. Doesn't mean that's not a task you absolutely need to do, but you can't forget the bigger job of who will be building brands for, and that is people as well as AI, and why are we doing it? And I think that would be the last thing I would say is we need to remember that as marketers, that's always going to be our number one job, no matter what tech we're using.
12:57Thanks, Steve. That was really interesting. And this seems like a great point to bring in our experts. So thank you, Steve. Thank you.
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13:50Welcome to the podcast, Alicia and Neil. Great to be here. Yeah, great to be here. You just listened to what Steve had to say around some of the data that we pulled into Marketers Toolkit. Obviously, there's a lot happening in this space. Was there anything that really resonated with you from the off? Alicia, I'll start with you. Yeah, I think we've really seen an abundance of marketers, CMOs really asking questions, seeing trends in their data. That shift is happening with their customers and trying to understand how they improve and fix it. But, you know, I think when you look at markets and industries, it's definitely a trend with the industries you mentioned, like finance, insurance, definitely, I think, more commoditized.
14:32I know it's a bristly topic, as you said, Steve, but it's those areas where it's complex, maybe where the brand doesn't resonate as much, where there's a trend for that outsourcing of the purchasing decisions. And what we see very often is, you know, the mistake that some marketers and businesses make is trying to hack through that in the way they might have in the era of SEO. And I think what we see in the way that the systems are making the choices in the same way that consumers make choices is really that availability of data. So the brand is critical and they all talk about that, but also that proof, that human proof that really tells them that the brand promise is a reality.
15:15And so what we see is that compounding evidence and that rich human data being more important than ever and something that you can't really hack. So that marketer and the CX leader are much closer together than they've ever been. Really interesting. Neil, what did you take away from that data? The first thing was relief that Steve had a very nuanced take on this topic, because I think there are a lot of people really hyping up the sort of the agentic sort of future of commerce. And, you know, we just also have to be aware of a lot of those people with VCs, larger tech companies and so on, have a very vested interest in that future materializing.
15:56and there's still so as as you're saying steve it's a spectrum of delegation not just some sort of slightly dystopian delegated future so that was my first really because i'm a big believer in these changes but i'm also very suspicious of things people are trying to make cmos jobs even harder and get them to spend money on things that aren't proven yet so that was the first thing i liked and and then yeah i think what we're trying with me is this just different it's very it's moving very differently in different categories right now isn't it some of the investors we work with they They have sort of three types of companies that we see are being affected by this.
16:29One is existential threat to their business model. Like, for example, if you're an aggregator, and so the LLMs are potentially replacing your role in helping consumers make decisions about, say, what insurance to buy or, you know, there's a second group, which is more of a go-to-market pivot, which is a huge group of people where it's significantly impacting the way people are taking decisions about their brands and their categories. And then there's another group, probably quite a lot of the CPG companies probably, Whereas people aren't yet necessarily deciding what chips to buy or, you know, what soda to buy or what beer to buy using an LLM.
17:01But they know it's coming and it's sort of coming at more lateral, like occasion based authority. They may not be deciding what chips to buy, but they may be trying to understand how to throw the best barbecue. And so it's like figuring out how that changes their go to market. So it's quite complex and nuanced. And I really appreciate Stephen's diligence that you've gone to on that. Yeah, Alicia, just to come back to you, you are the Chief Customer Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer of Trustpilot. Are you able to just give us a very quick overview of, for those who may be less familiar with the work that you're doing, about your brand and also how some of these topics and themes around AI are impacting your business at the moment?
17:41Yeah, sure. So Trustpilot is the world's largest open customer feedback platform. and for since 2007 we help consumers have a voice so they are able to give feedback on any of their experiences good or bad but also it helps them to make good choices and so they're able to come onto the platform and look at the experiences of others and it helps them to make those decisions and for businesses it helps them they're able to kind of build that trust for customers and then grow their business using that trust and then most importantly one of the areas we're most proud of is how it helps businesses to become a better business, to improve their business through the insights and the feedback that they're getting.
18:20And so what we've seen over, I would say, the last year or two, it's been profound in terms of the models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini, when they evaluate a company, whether it's legitimate, reliable, worth buying from, and then through the funnel to products, through to locations. So they're really looking for that rich human data to help them make decisions. Content that is fresh and recent, that is relevant to their search and gives them the right information and is correct and authentic every time. And so that's for us has been a huge pivotal shift. And so we were always fundamental in SEO and ads brand copy or television ads, but now we're sort of fundamental in that citation piece of it.
19:01And we're the number one cited source for reviews on LLMs and we're the 10th in the most cited domains in the popular LLM. So it's been really meaningful for us working with CMOs and CX leaders on how they manage that shift. Yeah, it's really interesting. As a leader in this area, how do you make sure that you remain focused on the people as well as the ability for these agents to do their thing? How do you keep that balance? Is it a balance? Yeah, well, I think like, you know, there's me as a marketer, and I'm kind of building a team and building an agentic like marketing organization. And then there's the advice that we give our customers on how do they get that balance.
19:42And I think importantly, when we talk to CMOs around AI and citations, it can, like I mentioned earlier, tempting to try and treat it like SEO, that it's a content to hack versus really like a business optimization. So I think that bridge from marketing leader and CX leader, and lucky for me, I have both titles, is closer than ever before where the brand proof and the brand promise and what actually happens are closer than ever before. And so we always talk about a bad review being the start of a better business. And that bridge is even more profound now. You can't really hide bad experiences.
20:18And if you aren't living up to those promises, it really becomes clear. And so we're really advising our customers to be very thoughtful when they bring in bots in their own purchase funnels. When they think about customer support, when we look at reviews as an example, the 60 % of reviews that mention AI and service are one star because people are getting lost in those infinity loops. It's really important to keep the human center in your experiences and those brand promises as an example. Neil, I want to come to you because 21st Century Brand has developed a model called priming and proving to help brands navigate that kind of challenge.
20:55Can you walk me through what that means and how it can be applied? Yeah, so we started looking at this around two years ago. You know, part of my role is make sure we're solving CMO insomnia problems. And we started getting the signals about both seeing the shift of consumers to using LLMs for decision making and then the challenges that the traditional funnel the CMOs were having was not so useful for predicting and organizing around. And so from a lot of that work, exactly as Alicia was saying, the first thing that became clear is the brands that are sort of winning here are that they're treating as a company thing.
21:30It's about company optimization. We're getting questions around, well, what is a new go to market model? how do you manage brands to be successful in this era and looking out there and it felt like people were quite clear that the funnel sort of has collapsed it's not fit for purpose it's been around for like you know 150 years or something but there was a lot of complicated alternatives being proffered by a lot of the big the big sort of consultancies and holding companies you had like 25 stage consumer journeys or 8c models or bathtubs and there's lots of stuff which you know cmos the cmo role even even bigger if you're a listener and you've got two roles the cmo role already five roles but it's very they're complicated roles and we felt that was making their lives more stressful and so we wanted to come up with something much simpler and importantly something that you can rally a cross-functional group of people around and so so really what we boiled it down to was there's now two audiences for brands and for you go to market humans and machines and so there's two jobs which is priming and proving priming which is about really building that affinity and connection and familiarity with the humans for a lot of the traditional brand building methods that we all know.
22:38And then the proving side is really about how do you convince the LLMs, the AI systems, that you are a brand worth trusting and recommending. And that's actually some new pieces to the marketers sort of to-do list really about machine readable propositions, hard-coded messages that machines can read, stronger proof points and claims. And so we developed that sort of simple way of organizing. And then we started testing it out with some clients. I think the first two clients to start using it was a Rocket. So it's one of the biggest mortgage finance lending companies in the US. And then Motorways, one of the UK's leading auto e-commerce sites for selling cars.
23:18And so they started piloting using the model and helping us optimize it and so on. And then the second thing we did in the space was, okay, if we know that there's two jobs, priming and proving. And it's like a sort of continuous loop rather than a funnel when it works well. Building the familiarity with the humans and then driving that sort of machine readable differentiation with the machines. The two things can feed each other what drives excellence. And so we worked with SEMrush, who are one of the leading AI visibility companies and have basically data covering, I think something like 60 categories and hundreds of millions of prompts to understand what are the patterns, what are the behaviors of the companies that are consistently outperforming their categories in terms of AI trust, AI visibility, AI recommendation.
24:00And that really got us to four real levers that brands need to thrive in this new era, which are coherence, which is how consistent you are across everything. Currency, which is, are you being talked about in the right way, the right places for your target audience and their subcultures? And then authority, which is a lot of the topic of today. Like, are you trustworthy? Are you worth citing for machines. And finally, advocacy, which obviously is existential and Trustpilot is such a great arbiter of advocacy. What are people saying about you when you're online across the world? So those four things, coherence, currency, advocacy, and authority, handily sort of alliterative are what we recommend and what we see great results from when clients really focus on those four things to drive the way that they manage their brands and the way they go to market in this era.
24:54Alicia, how have you started thinking about some of the changes that you need to make at Trustpilot organizationally, structurally to achieve your goals in this area? It sounds as though you've made a lot of progress. I mean, what have you learned along the way? We started off really gung-ho on moving to an agentic organization and it was a little bit cart before the horse. I think for us, what we learned as a team was, again, if you think about why Trustpilot works for LLMs. They love that rich, structured content, fresh, recent. It makes sense. It helps it make decisions. When you think about a marketing organization and sending off agents to do some of the work and be more efficient, you really need to have that data and the data foundations really correct.
25:40You need to have really tight processes and real specificity in your strategy. I think when you've got a lot of experts around the table on your teams, they can shorthand and shortcut some of that. And you need to really spell things out in a much more machine readable and easy way. So I think we quickly took a step back and learned about how do we really, so we took about six months to really think about how we're structuring things across the team, getting that data layer correct and foundational and how we're taking in the information. So that's been the first thing. We've also been really working on some work around how we structure the team and how we think about the team and really making less siloed functions and more cross-functional sprints and teams across the entire organization is how we've been looking at that.
26:27But for us, I think the key thing is the brand of Trustpilot, which is huge and critical, not just for us, for businesses to be able to showcase the trust that they've earned and built over the years. But it's also foundational for us to really ensure that our customer experience team is close. So having them together has been really powerful for us. So one team talking, we use Trustpilot as a tool. We've replaced NPS and use only Trustpilot. And the teams are able to work closely in real time, really looking at what are the trends that we're seeing? What are the experiences? Is there anything we need to change?
27:02And we try and be our best customer so that we can also, it gets a little bit, not meta the company, but meta, but we use our tool to be our best customer so that we can tell our customers how to use it and use it well, which is really embedding the sort of marketing and brand alongside that customer experience. That pattern of moving things to be more cross-functional, not just within marketing, but within the company, I think is a key change that I see that the brands that we work with who are doing best in this era. Because I I think what we see a lot of companies doing is treating, okay, we're now in this delegation era, which is great language, by the way, delegation economy.
27:40I haven't heard it say that, but in this AI era, a lot of folks tend to say, okay, it's the new SEO. AAO is the new SEO, so we'll put it in growth marketing and run it from there and update that playbook. The challenge we see when companies do treat it as sort of the new SEO is that they're not setting themselves up to get the best benefit from it. And I think a lot of that is because of so many of the ways to win and the things that will drive that trust and discoverability are beyond growth marketing and content and even beyond marketing itself. It is like the visibility of your leadership team.
28:17It may be the quality of your CX and, you know, exactly what, you know, Lissy said at the start there. And so it really needs to be shared language, shared framework, shared jobs to be done, shared accountability across a number of different teams. And it's great if marketing can step up and lead that. But it's certainly not just a purely growth marketing thing. And it's not even just a marketing thing. So I can't emphasize that enough. And so the simplicity of language, that's why things like priming and proving, I think, have done well, because it's just everyone, even if they don't believe in brand or even marketing, which, you know, quite a lot of leaders don't necessarily do that.
28:53they can understand, okay, my job is to help with the proving here. So I need to go into red and do some AMAs and build trust with a certain community, for example. So I think, you know, it's a sort of opportunity for marketers if they do the right thing to grow their influence in the company, but they have to be coming at it from the right point of view. Yeah, that's really sound advice. My last question to both of you is how do you foresee the delegation ecosystem evolving over the next few years. Obviously, this area is moving incredibly quickly. So we will not get in touch with you and ask you to make sure that your guesses are accurate as to where this could go within the next few months.
29:33But how do you anticipate this impacting how brands build trust and are discovered over the long term? Alicia, do you want to kick us off? Yeah. So for me, I think, and I really kind of sticking with the proving aspect of it, you know, I think really ensuring that the promise meets the expectations and really ensuring that experience and things like return policies, really kind of some of the detailed things that maybe aren't as sexy on the marketing side, but really critical in terms of building out that great experience for consumers that make the greatest brands. When you think of the greatest brands end to end, every experience is usually on point.
30:14And that's going to become more and more obvious to people. So they're not going to have to try things. They'll be able to see things upfront, whether they're using the AI agents or they're using the LLMs or doing part of that outsourcing. So, you know, we see it as an opportunity and I think it's, you know, the evolution. People still experience the products. And so when we think about a review platform, that end experience, you're still eating the ice cream or, you know, using the insurance. or driving the car. And so those experiences still are human, but that purchase journey is becoming more and more outsourced.
30:48And that really meaningful truth experience is going to become even more important. Neil, what's your take? Zooming out, I think brand is going to become more important and less important, depending on how you treat brand in a sense. So for companies that really do treat it as a company moat and something that really drives the experience that they offer, people and get behind that and really double down on the sort of integration of proposition through to claims, through to customer advocacy, just all of those things, those companies and that type of brand building is going to really thrive in this era because, you know, as I think, as you, everyone's been saying that it's very hard to hide anything now.
31:31So deep differentiation is going to become more important. And I think superficial distinction is going to be less important and so i think you know the way it's going to be really interesting for like master brand and brand portfolio strategy because i think traditionally a lot of those brands have been built by massive scale you know big familiarity of a brand and then use that and that awareness and familiarity can then drive a lot of business in quite a passive shopping environment whereas now the master brand really needs to have quite hard claims to really support it as well i think just growing just emotion is going to be important still but it needs to be emotion coupled with pretty differentiated claims and sort of evidence and so on.
32:13So I think we are going to see a bit of a gap open up between the brands that are built that way and the brands that are built more superficially. And then I think with going back to the original thing of like this, how do you stop your brand being completely disintermediated, which is sort of the picture that Steve's research is going to, that is a huge challenge now. So how do you make sure that your brand is going to be one of the ones that people still do ask for and still brief their agents for? So the emotional side of things is still going to be really important. It just needs to be coupled with really, really meaningful differentiation.
32:46Lots of food for thought there. That's a great place to leave it. Alicia, Neil, Steve, thank you for joining me on The Walk Podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Al. That's all for The Walk Podcast today. Mark this toolkit is now live on walk.com for all subscribers. and be sure to tap follow wherever you get your pods as we will also have a deep dive episode on each one of those trends over the next few weeks. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
The AI delegation economy is complex and requires holistic brand building, not just a relentless focus on optimisation. But will customers really put their trust in AI agents to purchase on their behalf? Neil Barrie (21st Century Brands), Alicia Skubick (Trustpilot) and Steve Whiteside join WARC's Anna Hamill to break down 'the drive to delegation', based on insights from WARC's 2027 Marketer's Toolkit.
Guests:
Stephen Whiteside, Head of Content - Americas, WARC;
Neil Barrie, Global CEO/Co-Founder, 21st Century Brand;
Alicia Skubick, Chief Customer Officer & Chief Marketing Officer, Trustpilot
David Tiltman, Chief Content Officer, WARC
Supporting Resources:
The Marketer's Toolkit 2027 (non-subscribers) https://www.warc.com/en/article/the-marketers-toolkit-2027-sample-23d3a5e296c4469eb729624359347df8
Chapters:
00:00 — Intro: 2027 marketing trends from WARC Marketer's Toolkit
02:40 — What the Delegation Economy Means for Marketers
06:07 — Agentic AI Adoption: From Research to Autonomous Purchases
06:38 — The Market Potential of AI-Assisted Shopping
08:12 — Consumer Trust, Privacy, and the Limits of Agentic AI
09:58 — Which Categories Will Shift to AI Delegation First?
13:52 — Brand Strategy in the Age of the Delegation Economy
14:06 — Human Proof: Building Trust Beyond AI Visibility
17:23 — Trustpilot, Reviews, and AI-Powered Discovery
20:47 — Priming and Proving: A Framework for Brands
24:54 — Preparing Marketing Teams for Agentic AI
29:12 — The Future of Brand Trust and Differentiation
For 40 years, WARC has been providing the marketing industry with rigorous, unbiased evidence and expert effectiveness guidance. The WARC Podcast publishes a new episode every Tuesday and Thursday.
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