Brands must adapt marketing strategies for AI-driven purchasing
Retail is shifting toward a dual-audience model where companies must appeal to both human preferences and autonomous AI decision-makers.
The retail landscape is evolving as AI agents increasingly influence or complete consumer purchases based on data criteria rather than traditional marketing sentiment. Toby Coulthard, chief product and growth officer at Jacquard, argues that businesses must optimize their messaging to be legible to both human consumers and the machine-learning models that now curate their options.
Modern brands face the challenge of codifying their brand voice to prevent AI 'drift'—the unpredictable ways machines summarize and interpret marketing copy. Because AI agents often process product descriptions before a consumer sees them, these descriptions have become critical assets. Companies that fail to set clear rules for their voice and claims risk losing their brand identity as AI processes translate their offerings for different users.
While established companies face the difficulty of retrofitting legacy processes, newer brands have the advantage of building AI-readiness into their core identity. Coulthard advises marketers to stop focusing on the volume of content production and instead prioritize business outcomes and conversion metrics. Adapting to this dual-audience reality now is expected to be significantly less costly than retrofitting brand assets at a later stage.