I recently found myself standing in a room filled with the rich aroma of coffee and the curious energy of industry brand leaders at our latest ‘Talk Futures With Me’ breakfast series. We had gathered to unpack a question that has been gnawing at the edges of my mind for the past year: In a world increasingly governed by AI agents, is the concept of digital ‘brand’, as we know it, dead?
As we settled into breakfast and the accompanying existential dread, the conversation converged on the rise of the ‘Invisible Interface’. This is a future where screens recede, and we interact with the web not through clicks and scrolls, but through conversation with Large Language Models (LLMs).
Yet, this isn't the "future". It is the present, one where the numbers already indicate a mass abandonment of traditional digital interface with Gartner projecting that by 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop by 25 per cent! A decline driven not by a lack of inquiry, but by a migration of behaviour. Users are bypassing the search bar, turning instead to virtual agents like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to answer their questions directly.
As we bypass search bars for direct answers, the ripple effects will touch every digital interaction. Take, for example, a scenario as mundane as checking your bank balance. Currently, this requires a ritual: you locate your phone, open the banking app, authenticate, navigate the UI, and finally execute the transaction. It is a friction-filled process, certainly. But in that friction, you encounter the brand: the messaging, the colours, the tone, the logo, the promise, and the specific animation of the interface.
In an agentic future, you might simply ask your digital assistant, "How much money do I have?" The agent will bypass the app entirely, retrieve the data from the bank’s AI agent, and inform you: "$450."
The friction is gone. But so is the bank.
If the agent controls the interface and prioritises pure utility, the digital ‘surface area’ for brand building vanishes. The customer never visits the digital showroom; they simply receive the service or commodity and this creates a profound crisis for brand owners.
And this crisis is quantifiable, figures suggest that by 2030, at least 25 per cent of all purchasing decisions will be delegated to machines. This means that for a quarter of the total market, emotional advertising, celebrity endorsements, visual identity etc etc will be rendered effectively null as we move toward a world where purchasing decisions are based on logic, data, and efficiency, the very things machines love.
Crucially, a large proportion of that 25% comprises ‘utility-based’ transactions. Research from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business indicates that while consumers trust AI with practical commodities (re-ordering weekly groceries, for instance) they overwhelmingly prefer human input for emotional or ‘hedonic’ products, such as jewellery or the purchase of a new car. Why? Because we are human: impulsive, temperamental, and passionate. We do not buy these things because a spreadsheet tells us to; we buy them because of how they make us feel.
Consequently, the future of owned digital real estate lies not in competing on utility (you cannot out-logic an algorithm). If your website is merely a vending machine for definitive answers, AI will inevitably extract the commodity without ever glancing at the packaging. Instead, our digital spaces must evolve into the one thing an agent cannot replicate: engines of emotion, sanctuaries for the irrational.
If the AI handles the boring, binary logistics of the transaction, the brand’s owned channels must pivot entirely to the intangible. I refer here to the messy, narrative based, ambiguous, and deeply human elements that create brand resonance. This is the ‘indeterminate space’, the realm of mystery and noise where brand thrives. I believe that future websites won't be designed for conversion funnels; they will be designed for emotional resonance.
Currently, however, most brands are painfully contorted, trying to do the splits between these two worlds.
Consider the current state of digital travel. If you visit the Air New Zealand website today, or indeed almost any airline’s site, you are greeted not by the promise of adventure, but by a calculator. The ‘Book a Flight’ widget dominates the prime digital real estate, demanding dates, destinations, and headcounts. The site is desperate to transact.
But this is a losing battle. This transactional utility is already being cannibalised by aggregators like Google Flights and Skyscanner, who strip-mine price data to offer a more efficient search experience than the airline itself ever could. As we move forward, AI agents will take this to its logical conclusion, handling the entire boring logistics of price comparison and booking in the background.
If the agent is doing the buying, the website should be doing the dreaming. Why waste your most valuable pixels on a calendar widget when you could be selling the sensory experience of a sunrise in Tahiti or the comfort of a lie-flat bed? In this decoupled future, the airline website must stop trying to be a bookings agent and start acting like an architect of desire: converting the heart, then once achieved handing the wallet off to the agentic machine.
But, that’s easier said than done, how do you deliver a heart converting brand in an agentic world?
Caroline, our CEO, frequently cites a great case study involving Gucci. The fashion house understood long ago that their brand isn’t just a logo; it is a tangible personality with a voice. As such, they built a digital personality facsimile so robust and flexible that even if an AI were to summarise it, the ‘Gucci-ness’ would survive the translation. I see this example as the antidote to the monotone of agentic commerce. One can no longer rely simply on a logo and a couple of hex codes; one needs a brand voice and personality so distinct and adaptive that it cuts through the algorithmic noise and delivers on the ‘feels’.
At Alphero, we have begun exploring this through a concept we call “Brand Flex”. The era of the monolithic, static brand guideline is over. You cannot hand a PDF to an AI and expect it to ‘understand’ anything beyond the brand’s binary nuts and bolts (colour, type, and form). Instead, we are designing identities that, with the help of AI, can flex.
Imagine a digital experience which, like Gucci’s, adapts not just to the device you’re on, but to who you are and how you are behaving. If the data suggests a user is frustrated, the brand expression shifts to become empathetic and calming, and more importantly if they are in discovery mode, it becomes bold and expressive. It is the same core identity, but behaving with the fluidity of a human, rather than the rigidity of a machine.
This is where the fight for the future will be won. It will not be won in the binary questions of price and speed (let the agents have those). We must claim the ‘indeterminate’ spaces where personality and emotion reside.
We need to cease looking at our owned digital real estate as a tool for transaction and start treating it as a canvas for connection. When the agent controls the head, the brand must control the heart. If we can do that, if we can make the irrational choice to engage with a brand feel like the only choice, despite what the algorithm says, then we haven’t just saved the brand, we have saved the humanity in the machine.
So, let the agents handle the logic. We’ll handle the emotion.