AI agents as distribution channels
As AI agents become more and more common, we will delegate purchasing decisions to them more and more.
Every new platform that was introduced (internet, PC, mobile phones, etc) satisfies two criteria:
- Gives us new capabilities
- Enables new distribution patterns
So far AI hasn’t delivered on the second. However agent-driven commerce could become prevalent in the future.
This means that marketing will stop trying to convince humans, but will be optimized to influence AI agents.
AI agents are already capable of driving buying decisions (think of code generation: it needs to decide which snippet of code to “buy”).
They are also potentially better than us at purchasing decisions:
- Discovery
- Evaluation
- Purchase
as they can scour the internet and discover and evaluate many more products than us.
This means that in the future:
- many product categories will have options that can be programmatically verified
- agents will be personalized and embed user preferences and context
- Core agent competencies like long-term planning and propert guardrails will be solved.
Outsourcing purchasing power to agents is a natural evolution from how we discover and buy new products today.
References
#ai #decision #agents #buying #ml #distribution #channel #marketing