Code Switch: How AI Agents Could Force Advertising to Evolve or Dissolve

A few short minutes of a recent interview with Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity) has been triggering strong concern from leaders in the advertising community. And for good reason.

There's a future scenario where we could witness the most fundamental shift in consumer decision-making since the birth of mass media. While the advertising industry has weathered tech disruptions - from television to social media - AI agents represent something far more profound: the potential disintermediation of human choice itself. AI agents making purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers. With people perhaps never even seeing the ads.

Consider this: For decades, we've mastered the art of persuading humans through emotional storytelling, cultural resonance, and psychological triggers -- let's call this Advertising. We've built entire frameworks and successful creative businesses around human decision-making patterns.

But what happens when our target audience becomes an AI agent optimizing for parameters rather than responding to persuasion? When algorithms, not emotions, determine which toothpaste ends up in your basket?

The paradigm shift is profound: brands will need to advertise to the agents themselves, but consumers will have unprecedented power, able to instruct their agents to ignore certain brands entirely without advertisers ever knowing. This creates an asymmetric dynamic where brands might have no choice but to play by these new rules if that's what consumers demand.

However, this isn't an obituary for advertising - it's a call for reinvention. We need to stop thinking in false dichotomies of human VS. machine and instead architect for a hybrid future.

Here's how:

First, rebuild creative organizations around "dual-stream intelligence." One stream continues to master human psychology, cultural anthropology, and emotional storytelling. The other develops expertise in parameter-based communication, understanding how to translate brand value into quantifiable metrics that AI agents can process. Or in Pelle Sjoenell's BBH Labs post from back in 2018: ‘Selling to Machines, our next customer.”

Second, evolve the creative process by starting with the decision architecture. How will this product or service be chosen in a world where both humans and AI agents influence the purchase? This means developing creative that can simultaneously spark emotional connection with humans while optimizing for AI comprehension.

Most importantly, brand building doesn't become irrelevant - it becomes bifurcated. Humans will still set their agents' preferences based on their beliefs, values, and emotional connections to brands. This means the long-term game of building brand equity remains crucial, but the tactical execution of purchase decisions may increasingly shift to agent-to-agent communication.

The agencies that will creatively thrive in this new era won't be those with the most sophisticated AI tools or the biggest data sets (sorry mega-holding-company-mergers!). They'll be the ones that can seamlessly bridge the human and machine realms, creating work that resonates across both spheres.

The future of advertising isn't dead - let’s call it ‘reborn’. And for those willing to embrace transformation, the creative possibilities remain limitless. After all, we’ll be going beyond creating ads - we'd be architecting decision ecosystems that bridge human emotion and machine logic. That's not the death of creativity - it's an evolution.