I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about this strange period of figuring out how to market to the agents that (I almost wrote “who”) are increasingly shopping on customers’ behalf.
Morgan Stanley estimates that AI shopping agents could account for 10% to 20% of US e-commerce by 2030.
And the way that AI agents shop is very different than humans. Here’s how Aviv Shamny, co-founder of a brand visibility company called Limy, describes it in a piece from Brent Crane in the New York Times:
“When you advertise to humans, you target eyeballs, emotions and dopamine, but when you advertise to agents, you advertise to logic, a very mathematical logic.”
I picked the “41 shades of blue” as a callback to a famous user test at Google. As Doug Bowman, Google’s former top designer, complained in a farewell note in 2009, Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they tested 41 shades in between.
The story was mocked as data-driven design gone wild. And yet Google later claimed that the right blue earned the company an extra $200 million a year. People can be influenced by subtle design choices like that.
Contrast that approach with AI shopping agents that read brand and product pages as text and data rather than as design. They pull prices, specs, reviews, and policies, comparing options against a shopper’s criteria, and skip anything they can’t parse.
A brand’s colors, imagery, and “emotional resonance” — many of the things that marketers spend a lot of time thinking about — barely register.
Automated traffic across the web increased nearly 8X faster than human activity last year, according to cybersecurity firm HUMAN Security.
Some brands are responding with wholesale shifts. Time Magazine has even started serving ads just for AI agents. Certain websites now seem written more for AI agents than people.
And yet the very approach that might appeal to agents might be what’s off-putting to humans.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
