Thought Leadership
By
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The last few products I bought came from brands I’d never heard of. AI introduced us.
When I set out to revamp my skincare routine, I hit a wall: the category is thick with unpronounceable ingredients, competing claims, and “benefits” I didn’t know I was supposed to want. Normally that means 20 open tabs and a crowded shelf I don’t understand. This time I just asked AI.
I told it what I wanted and what I’d spend. In seconds, I had a tailored list with what each product did and what was a genuine necessity versus a nice-to-have.
Then I bought it.
And I’m not unusual. Roughly a third of U.S. consumers have now used AI to inform a purchase. Among them, standalone AI platforms have overtaken traditional search engines as the most common place to start purchase research.
In a jittery economy, people are watching every dollar. But they aren’t just hunting for the lowest price. They’re hunting for confidence: the feeling that they’re making the right call. The work that used to take an evening of reviews, price comparisons, and spec-sheet squinting now happens in a single conversation. You describe what matters to you; AI weighs the tradeoffs, explains its logic, and (if you want) names one winner. You get the same confidence in a fraction of the time. And because it shows its reasoning, you don’t just buy. You feel good about it.
Retailers are already building for this. Earlier this year, Walmart and Google announced they’d bring Walmart and Sam’s Club products straight into Gemini, so a shopper can move from “here’s what I need” to a real recommendation (and then a purchase) without ever leaving the conversation.
That creates a new and unforgiving place to compete: the AI-generated shortlist.
Here’s the part that should keep marketers up at night. For most of advertising’s history, your first audience was a person. Now, increasingly, it’s a machine. And the machine decides whether a person ever sees you at all. If AI is narrowing the field to a handful of options, the whole game becomes making that handful. Everything else is invisible.
That puts a hard premium on having a brand edge. A specific, credible reason to choose you. Maybe it’s a benefit no competitor can honestly claim. A need or occasion you own better than anyone. A product experience people can feel. A level of trust others haven’t earned.
AI is ruthless with the tangible benefits. It compares prices, ingredients, reviews, pack sizes, and features in an instant. If your difference is vague, inconsistently told, or unsupported, AI has nothing to grab onto. And a brand it can’t explain is a brand it quietly leaves off the list. You don’t lose the pitch. You never get to make it.
None of this means you should stop emotional brand-building or reduce marketing to feeding facts into an algorithm. People still have to trust the recommendation and believe that the product is right for them. Familiarity, credibility, and emotional connection matter as much as ever. What has changed is the order of operations. You can’t assume a consumer meets your advertising or your packaging before they form an opinion. Sometimes the algorithm gets there first.
So the job is twofold: build an edge that genuinely matters to people, then make it clear, specific, supported, and consistent everywhere your brand shows up — including the places you’ll never see.
Because when a consumer asks AI, “What’s the best option for me?” two things have to be true.
Your brand has to make the shortlist.
And AI has to understand why it belongs there.
Best,
Erica Wyman
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