Your Next Customer Might Be An Agent. Here’s How To Build Your Brand For Both Humans And AI.
Businesses must now market to both human buyers and AI agents, who evaluate products using different criteria and often make purchasing decisions before a human ever views a product page.
By Toby Coulthard
Imagine moving into a brand-new, completely unfurnished home with bare walls. A decade ago, finding furniture would involve opening Google, browsing interior design publications, and checking retailer websites for deals. By 2026, however, the process has changed entirely. You can simply photograph the empty space, upload the picture to an artificial intelligence agent alongside your budget and aesthetic preferences, and receive a curated list of ideal furniture. The agent can even complete the purchase for you.
Consequently, businesses are no longer marketing exclusively to a single audience of human buyers; they are now selling to two distinct groups.
Because this new secondary audience of AI agents evaluates products using entirely different criteria, they frequently make purchasing choices before a human ever lays eyes on a product page. There is a significant likelihood that carefully crafted emotional marketing copy will be parsed and reconfigured by algorithms. Relying solely on a human-centric approach is no longer sufficient.
Keep humans in the equation
Nevertheless, a word of caution is necessary: marketers must not completely abandon the human element in their haste to adapt to AI agents. It is easy to get swept up in the concept of a fully agentic future. Ultimately, every agent serves an individual human user who holds unique preferences, and personalization will only grow more granular over time. The key is to optimize simultaneously for both audiences rather than focusing on just one.
Startup founders have a natural advantage here. While established companies must retrofit decades of messaging, brand guidelines, and approval workflows to accommodate AI agents, new ventures can establish a brand voice and copywriting style that is easily understood by both humans and machines from day one.
What does this look like in practical terms?
Brands must first establish a distinct voice—and document it. In many early-stage organizations, the brand voice lives entirely within the founder’s mind. While this may suffice when copy is produced by a tight-knit group working closely with the founder, it fails when the writer or reader is a machine.
AI tools operate on explicit rules and easily drift without them. Toby Coulthard, chief product and growth and officer at Jacquard—an AI platform that assists brands in generating and optimizing tailored messaging at scale—has spent years helping AI agents produce better content. Now that agents are acting as the reader on the receiving end, clear rules are more critical than ever.
Understanding what a brand sounds like is important, but defining what it does *not* sound like is equally vital. Companies should explicitly list forbidden vocabulary and claims they refuse to make. These boundaries often remain unwritten because they feel obvious to the existing team. However, spelling them out before a team—or a machine—begins generating copy prevents future complications.
Verify your brand
Marketers must also recognize that product descriptions are no longer merely administrative tasks; they have become core brand assets. In an environment mediated by agents, product descriptions may represent your most frequently read copy, as agents rely on them to find items to suggest or buy. If two personalized AI agents search for furniture for different clients, they might select the same chair for both while adjusting the description for each user. The original source description must preserve the core brand identity intact.
Whenever possible, brands should evaluate their channels through the lens of both readers. Email inboxes provide the clearest current example of this “second reader” phenomenon. Services like Gmail and Apple Mail now summarize messages above the main text body before the recipient even opens them, meaning the summary may be read prior to the actual email.
Therefore, before hitting send, review what the AI summary claims your email is about. Does the core offer survive? Does it retain your unique value proposition? This is a quick habit that any marketing team can adopt immediately without requiring specialized tools.
Furthermore, brands need to evaluate their marketing success based on actual outcomes rather than sheer output. Marketers who measure effectiveness solely by the volume of material produced will find their data useless as AI simplifies content creation. Instead, teams should concentrate on business results, conversions, and revenue to determine if their marketing efforts are truly effective.
Above all, do not lose sight of the human buyer. It remains unclear how rapidly AI purchasing will scale, and humans are still the primary readers of copy and final decision-makers. Even AI agents are ultimately acting on behalf of human preferences.
New founders and emerging brands are best positioned to navigate this transition into a dual-audience economy. Although the exact evolution of the retail landscape over the next five to ten years remains uncertain, integrating these considerations into your brand today is straightforward.
Trying to retrofit them later will prove costly.
Toby Coulthard is chief product and growth officer at Jacquard, an AI platform that helps brands generate and optimize bespoke messaging at scale.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
Frequently Asked Questions
01Why do brands need to market to AI agents in addition to humans?
AI agents are increasingly used by consumers to research, filter, and purchase products on their behalf. Because these agents often make purchasing decisions before a human ever views a product page, brands must ensure their copy and product descriptions are optimized for machine comprehension as well as human appeal.
02How can established brands prepare for AI agents compared to startups?
New startups have the advantage of building an agent-ready brand voice and documented guidelines from day one. Established companies face the more difficult and expensive task of retrofitting decades of legacy copy, brand guidelines, and approval processes to be legible to AI.
03What are “second readers” in modern marketing?
“Second readers” refer to AI tools—such as email summary features in Gmail and Apple Mail or shopping agents—that read and interpret marketing copy or product descriptions before a human ever sees them.
