Move over Mad Men, the bots have entered the chat. In a world where AI isn’t just writing our ads but reading them too, marketers are facing a moment that’s less “pivot to digital” and more “pivot to sentient algorithms.” Welcome to the age of agentic commerce — where your next best customer might just be a silicon brain with a shopping list and a smarter-than-you attitude.

The age of marketing to machines is here — not in some far-off Black Mirror episode, but now. And while it might sound like the start of a sci-fi plot, it’s really just Tuesday in the modern digital landscape.

It’s Not Sci-Fi, It’s Just Tuesday

AI agents are already out there comparing prices, filling carts, and ghosting your popups — all without ever calling the boss in for approval. Gartner reckons that half of B2B product discovery will be AI-driven by 2028. That’s not a maybe — that’s a must-prepare. If your current digital strategy doesn’t account for bots as buyers, you’re essentially shutting your doors to tomorrow’s customers.

These aren’t your standard bots either. We’re talking about intelligent agents that can fill out forms faster than a caffeine-fuelled intern, compare options across a thousand sites in milliseconds, and make purchase decisions based on clean data, value logic, and preference training. And here’s the twist: they’re doing it all before your creative team even finishes storyboarding that “emotionally gripping” ad.

Meet Your New Two-Headed Audience

Let’s break this down: you’re not just marketing to humans anymore — you’re marketing to both humans and their digital butlers. One wants to be inspired, the other wants structured data and clean API calls. One loves a story; the other loves a schema.

Marketing to both means mastering a split personality — the charming, emotive storyteller for humans, and the cold, calculated data whisperer for machines. It’s a tightrope act between wooing with brand values and feeding the AI agents the structured nutrition they need to do their job: buy on someone else’s behalf.

Ignore either audience, and you’re either irrelevant to the buyer or invisible to their AI assistant. Neither is a good look.

The New Media Mix: Romance and Robot

Your old media plan? Scrap it. Marketing now needs a dual-stream strategy:

• Human-Centric: Tell the brand story. Use emotion. Go nuts with video and testimonials. Make people feelsomething.
• Agent-Centric: Serve up machine-readable content. Structured data. Schema markup. Seamless API access. Clean product feeds.

Think of it as writing a romantic novel… and the technical documentation that goes with it.

This bifurcated approach isn’t just about content — it’s about mindset. Creative teams need to collaborate with devs, SEOs need to understand AI parsing behaviour, and brand strategists need to start thinking like systems architects. The brands that win will be the ones that build bridges between storytelling and structured logic.

Prompt-Based Ads: Don Draper with a Keyboard Shortcut

Welcome to prompt engineering — the hottest new skill in the marketer’s toolkit. It’s not just asking ChatGPT to write a tweet — it’s instructing it like a seasoned creative director to whip up scalable, on-brand copy that actually converts.

This is creativity at scale: A/B tested, hyper-personalised, and ready to roll in five minutes. And the best part? It frees up your team to focus on strategy, refinement, and brand nuance.

Heinz’s “A.I. Ketchup” campaign? It didn’t just showcase brand equity — it proved that even when an AI dreams of ketchup, it dreams in Heinz. Coca-Cola’s “Create Real Magic” platform turned users into co-creators, fuelling engagement and generating 120,000+ pieces of AI-generated artwork. AI isn’t just your assistant — it’s your new creative partner.

In this world, your job isn’t to write every ad — it’s to teach the AI how you write ads. And that shift? It’s massive.

GEO: SEO’s Weirdly Smarter Sibling

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) isn’t dead — it’s had a glow-up. Meet Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Instead of optimising your content for humans to click, GEO ensures AI tools cite your brand in their answers.

That means your real goal isn’t to be the top result on Google — it’s to be the source the AI chooses to reference when someone asks it a question. Think of it as becoming the brainy kid in class the teacher always quotes.

To make that happen, your content needs:

• Structured data (think schema.org)
• Authoritative tone and credible sources
• Multi-platform consistency (because AI reads Reddit too)

And forget about keyword stuffing — this is about semantic clarity, trust signals, and topic authority. GEO is less about headlines and more about helping AI understand your brand’s expertise.

Strategic Moves: Be Nice to the Bots, Still Woo the People

The smart money is going to those who can market on both fronts. This isn’t about choosing between humans and machines — it’s about serving both simultaneously. That means:

• Reallocating ad budgets to include machine-optimised content
• Training your team in prompt writing and structured data design
• Finally breaking down the wall between marketing and IT
• Measuring success with new KPIs like ‘snippet inclusion’, ‘schema effectiveness’ and ‘AI-cited brand mentions’

Treat it like a strategic reboot. You’re not rebranding — you’re rebuilding your digital foundation for a dual-audience future. The brands that do this now will own the market by the time others realise what hit them.

The rest? They’ll be stuck explaining plummeting traffic and rising bounce rates — to a chatbot that saw it coming.