For more than a century, the advertising industry has operated on a simple assumption: people make decisions, and brands need to persuade them. But what happens when people no longer make those decisions entirely on their own?
Most of today's conversation about AI in advertising focuses on efficiency: how to produce more ads in less time, write copy faster, create videos at a lower cost, and optimize campaigns more effectively. All of these developments matter. But they miss the real transformation.
The AI revolution may not be about our ability to create more advertising. It may be about the fact that, in the future, we will simply need less of it. Imagine a consumer telling their AI assistant: "Find me a family vacation to Barcelona, for up to NIS 8,000, with a well-located hotel and convenient flight times." Instead of opening Google, reading dozens of reviews, comparing websites and clicking on ads, the consumer receives an answer.
The AI has already done the work: searched, compared, filtered, checked prices, analyzed reviews and made a decision. At that moment, the attention economy on which the advertising industry was built begins to change.
For decades, brands have competed for a few seconds of our attention. They bought media space, built campaigns, invested in creative and tried to make us stop scrolling. But if a machine is doing the searching and comparing, it matters far less whether we managed to get a consumer to see an ad if their AI never considered the brand in the first place.
The new battle will be for recommendation. And that means the most important customer for a brand in the future may not be the person looking at the screen, but the algorithm deciding what to show them.
This represents a dramatic shift for marketing. For years, we have asked: How do we get people to choose us. Now, in the age of AI agents, the question will be different: How do we get machines to choose us?
This is where assets that traditional advertising has not always given enough weight to become critical: credibility, reviews, performance, price, availability, customer service, return policies, customer history — and above all, high-quality, structured information. The future brand will need to be not only compelling to people, but also machine-readable.
That is a profound change. If marketers once asked how to make consumers remember their brand, they will increasingly need to ask what AI knows about it. Is the information accurate? Can the brand be compared with its competitors? Can its claims be verified? Is the customer experience good enough to become a data point that an AI system takes into account?
In other words, the future brand will not be defined only by what people think about it. It will also be defined by what machines know about it.
This also brings us back to search. For two decades, businesses have invested billions in trying to appear at the top of Google. The competition was for the click. In the age of AI agents, there may no longer be ten blue links to choose from.
There may be one answer. Perhaps two. Instead of SEO, we may increasingly be competing for algorithmic trust. The implications for companies are enormous. In the future, they may not only need to buy media to reach consumers. They may need to invest in the infrastructure that allows AI systems to understand them, compare them and recommend them.
The boundaries between marketing, product, data and customer service will also begin to disappear. A poor customer experience will no longer be simply a customer-service problem. It could become a data point that influences the next recommendation. An unreliable product, a late delivery or negative reviews will not merely damage a brand's reputation — they will become information that a machine uses to make a decision.
And this creates an interesting paradox: consumers may become less aware of the brand they are buying from, while brands themselves will need to become more transparent, accurate and measurable than ever.
But there is an even bigger question for the advertising industry. If AI agents begin filtering a significant portion of the information for us, who will see all the ads being created today? Who will click? Who will visit the landing page? Who will open ten browser tabs to compare products? A significant part of the industry may be built around a stage in the purchasing journey that will simply disappear.
That does not mean advertising will die. People will still want inspiration, entertainment, status, emotion and stories. Brands will still need to build cultural worlds around themselves. But the role of advertising may change: less about persuading a person to take an action, and more about creating the conditions in which both the person and the machine choose the same brand.
That is why the question marketing leaders should be asking today is not only how to use AI to create more ads.
The question is this: What happens to our brand on the day the customer stops choosing, and lets a machine choose for them? Because when that day comes, advertising will not disappear, it will simply move from the screen to the decision.
Ido Almany is the CEO of Zoomd. Amit Bohensky is the Chairman of Zoomd and a serial entrepreneur.
