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Let me start with a slightly uncomfortable truth.
If we’re still having meetings in 2026 around “Top of Funnel,” “Lead Magnets,” and “Conversion Hacks,” we may already be a few steps behind our customers.
And I say this as someone who has spent over a decade building, optimising, and scaling funnels. I’ve tracked click-through rates obsessively. I’ve A/B tested landing pages until the difference was 0.2%. I’ve celebrated lower CPLs like trophies.
But somewhere between AI becoming conversational and automation becoming autonomous, something fundamental shifted.
Our customers moved on.
The Real Shift Nobody Is Talking About
Here’s the biggest mindset change I’ve had to make as a digital marketer and entrepreneur:
In 2026, we’re not just marketing to people anymore. We’re marketing to their AI Agents.
That one line changes everything.
Earlier, a customer journey looked predictable: Ad → Click → Blog → Landing Page → Form → Nurture → Sale
Messy, yes—but still human-driven.
Today, that journey is being quietly rewritten.
Your customer’s AI assistant is now doing the research for them. It scans options, compares pricing, checks reviews, evaluates credibility, and then presents one recommendation.
By the time the human sees your brand, the decision is already 80% made.
Welcome to the Era of Agentic Commerce
Think about how you personally behave today.
\You don’t “browse” like you used to. You ask. You expect answers. You trust summaries.
Now multiply that behaviour with AI doing it at machine speed.
This is Agentic Commerce—where:
- Discovery is delegated
- Comparison is automated
- Trust is algorithmically assessed
Marketing is no longer about persuading at scale. It’s about being present, trusted, and readable inside AI systems.
If your brand isn’t recognised by the AI ecosystem—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Apple Intelligence, voice assistants—you don’t just rank lower.
You don’t exist.
Why the Funnel Is Breaking
Funnels assume control.
They assume the user will:
- click what we want,
- read what we publish,
- move where we guide them.
But AI doesn’t follow funnels. It shortcuts them.
That’s why funnels today feel leaky, expensive, and exhausting. So instead of fixing funnels, I’m retiring them.
I want to briefly unpack the demand loop that I am configuring for the year next!
1. Search Everywhere Optimization (SEO 2.0) – Are you working on your digital gatekeeper? How is your data structured? Are they machine friendly? Are you really open to the AI agent market?
If AI doesn’t trust your signals, the human never meets your brand.
2. Hyper-Personalised, Human-First Marketing – As the AI has and is been advancing, now people have started moving backward. No… really we are doing it…we don’t really realise it,but we do!
We have now started looking at those imperfect stories to set the bridge between to what is now being presented to us. We want to see those behind-the-scene work. These were the past-participles way back in 2021-22. Sounds a decade old talk. But the transformation has taken us 20 years ahead of our time. Therefore, somewhere we now want to stay connected to the core-reality to keep establishing the facts!
The brands winning attention today are not the loudest—they’re the most real.
These days my articles are becoming longer than ever. (Chuckles!). Opening this discussion further with the following question worth thinking about –
If an AI had to recommend just one brand in your category—would it choose you?
- Is your marketing strategy ready for that world?
- I’d love to hear how others are rethinking this shift.
Contact me if you wish to know “what it means for marketers and founders!”
Happy reading