Marketing technology has always been something of an arms race. Yesterday’s breakthroughs turns into today’s table stakes.
Agentic AI is being touted as the next frontier in the race. Marketers are already starting to implement Marketing AI agents across their tech stacks to analyze customer data, tailor messaging, and run campaigns. These AI agents can operate autonomously, with limited human intervention, and promise to get closer to what has long been the holy grail of marketing — delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Yet what I find particularly fascinating about the AI arms race in MarTech is that customers and buyers are also starting to use AI agents. AI doesn’t just promise a new and improved marketing funnel — it could upend the marketing funnel altogether.
Many customer journeys are already “zero click.” Customers use AI to evaluate products and services without ever interacting directly with the companies marketing them. A recent Bain report found that 80% of consumers rely on “zero-click” results for at least 40% of their searches.
Bain partners Natasha Sommerfeld, Rishi Dave, and Daniel Webster-Clark described the potential current and future implications of AI agents:
“Companies that don’t optimize their approach for AI agents’ new role in many steps of the funnel have already started to lose potential customers. The kicker: They might not even be aware of the loss, as they never hosted the initial website visit or content download to explore the product. Without that initial exploratory touchpoint, marketers likely cannot reengage those prospective customers, since they do not exist in company databases.
“In the old order, when a prospect didn’t convert, the company at least had the breadcrumbs of page views, ad impressions, form fills, or email sign-ups, enabling marketers to follow up. But the AI-powered funnel shuts out sellers well before the journey reaches them. Discovery, evaluation, and short-listing all happen inside the AI tool. Unless a company’s brand surfaces at that moment or is already top of the buyer’s mind, it might never make the list.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
