Imagine a world where your next purchase isn’t selected solely by you, but by an AI agent acting as your personal shopper. Need an outfit for a summer wedding? Your AI agent instantly scours online stores, considering your size, style preferences, budget, event theme and even the weather forecast to deliver perfectly tailored recommendations. This future isn’t far away, and it will reshape how brands compete for consumer attention.
Success in this new era hinges on a brand’s ability to deeply understand customer preferences and anticipate future needs. Those who excel will consistently surface the most relevant recommendations, predicting and meeting their customers’ evolving desires and behaviours. The brands that succeed in this AI-intermediated future, will be those that fundamentally transform how they collect, unify and leverage customer data.
Personalisation is key to loyalty
As AI gatekeepers—like AI personal shoppers—become more prevalent, brands will have fewer opportunities to directly engage customers. To thrive, businesses must work harder than ever to nurture customer loyalty and foster direct brand interactions. The best way to achieve this is by delivering exceptional, highly personalised customer experiences.
Gone are the days of segmented email blasts. This new era will mean detailed insights are being gathered at every customer interaction and touchpoint. Analysing unstructured data – such as conversations from virtual assistants and customer service interactions – will become especially valuable as conversational interfaces become commonplace.
Future success will therefore require brands to effectively capture, consolidate and utilise customer data to deliver meaningful, personalised engagements. The brands that fail to evolve beyond basic segmentation will find themselves increasingly filtered out by AI gatekeepers.
Build on solid customer data foundations
To prepare for this AI-intermediated future, brands must invest in their data infrastructure now. Brands that master the management of customer information will enter a virtuous data cycle: the more effectively they use data to personalise interactions, the more engagement they’ll generate, leading to richer datasets and increasingly tailored experiences. Such precision will also help brands craft offers capable of navigating past AI gatekeepers.
Creating accurate, unified customer profiles is fundamental. Businesses typically have fragmented customer records scattered across various systems, risking inconsistent or even conflicting experiences. With opportunities to influence customers becoming increasingly fleeting, inaccurate profiles can lead to negative customer experiences – and the potential loss of future opportunities.
Brands must therefore ensure real-time, up-to-date customer profiles are maintained. If a customer makes a purchase through one channel, the brand should immediately adapt messaging across all channels. Rather than repeatedly push the same products, they should proactively predict and promote the customer’s next desired purchase. This level of responsiveness and prediction requires not just data collection, but intelligent data unification and activation.
Delivering for both buyer and bot
The principles that win customer loyalty today will become even more critical when AI agents filter brand communications. Brands unable to build precise customer profiles will see their current engagement challenges magnify in the age of Agentic AI. Effective engagement will depend on delivering the right content through the right channels quickly and accurately – a difficult task at scale without solid data foundations.
Conversely, brands investing in robust customer data infrastructure will find themselves positioned for success, capable of consistently delivering highly personalised experiences that resonate deeply with customers.
Ultimately, what’s good for the buyer is good for the bot. Relevance and timeliness are paramount. AI intermediaries may act as gatekeepers, but brands that master customer preferences and deliver personalised, timely experiences will unlock pathways past these digital barriers. The time to build these capabilities is now, before AI agents become the primary gateway to your customers. Brands that delay may find themselves permanently locked out of direct customer relationships in the agentic AI future.
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