Your Next Customer Isn’t Human
Machines don’t watch the brand film. They parse the proof.
The promise of AI in marketing is everywhere. The more consequential shift is quieter: the consumer is changing shape.
Your next customer isn’t human. And you’re probably not ready for them.
Today, millions of consumers are using AI assistants to research products, compare services, plan trips, and shortlist options across a range of categories. These agents do everything except click “buy.” 66% of frequent online shoppers already use AI assistants to guide their purchase decisions. 47% use them to summarize reviews before buying. Half of all consumers now intentionally seek out AI-powered search to make buying decisions. We keep calling this a new kind of search. It’s not. It’s a new kind of consumer, a synthetic consumer.
A traditional search engine delivers links. A synthetic consumer makes judgments. It evaluates, filters, and makes recommendations to the human on the other end, a human who trusts this machine intermediary to think and act on its behalf. If your brand doesn’t make the shortlist, you don’t get considered. Not because you weren’t good enough. Because you weren’t visible enough to a machine that thinks very differently from Google, and differently from the human tasking it.
For marketers, that doesn’t just mean you need to manage new channels to reach consumers (that’s old thinking applied to new challenges). It means you need to think about a different species of consumer: a combination of human and machine, or even a machine decision-maker alone.
And unlike the Google era, there’s no single algorithm to optimize for. ChatGPT’s share has dropped from 87% to around 65% in twelve months as competitors surge. Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot each pull from different training data, apply different logic, and tell you almost nothing about how decisions get made. You went from one front door to a hundred invisible ones.
This is where things fall apart for most marketers.
The synthetic consumer doesn’t experience your brand the way a human does.
It doesn’t see your beautiful website. It doesn’t feel anything while watching your brand film. It doesn’t scroll your Instagram. It processes text, structured data, and metadata. All those visual and emotional cues, all of the distinctive brand assets that you’ve curated and nurtured over years and decades, everything your marketing operation was built upon, it doesn’t play the role it once did because it can’t.
That means every touchpoint needs to change.
Your website was designed to persuade humans. Beautiful layouts, hero images, emotional storytelling. But if an AI assistant can’t extract clear, structured information about what you do, who you’re for, and why you’re different, you’re invisible to a fast-growing consumer segment. Full stop.
Your social media was built for visual engagement. Synthetic consumers don’t scroll feeds. They synthesize information from reviews, editorial content, expert opinions, and product data. If your brand only shows up in paid visual channels, you may not exist in the sources LLMs actually pull from.
Your messaging needs radical consistency. A synthetic consumer cross-references everything: your website copy, your reviews, your pricing, your product descriptions. If they tell conflicting stories, you get filtered out. Humans are forgiving. They fill in the gaps. They give you the benefit of the doubt. They respond to emotion even when the message is messy. Machines don’t do any of that. They just move on.
I know this sounds like a lot. But the underlying principle is simple:
Know what you stand for. Say it clearly. Say it consistently. And make sure it shows up in the places these new consumers are actually looking, not only where your spend has historically shown up.
The marketers who treat synthetic consumers as a real audience, not just another version of the search bar, are the ones who will own the next decade. Everyone else will wonder where their customers went.