Preparing Your Brand for Both Human Customers and AI Agents

By Toby Coulthard

Imagine you have just moved into an unfurnished house with bare walls. A decade ago, you might have turned to Google to search for furniture, browsed interior design magazines, and hunted for deals directly on retailer websites. Fast-forward to 2026, however, and a completely different method is available. You can simply photograph the empty space, upload that image to an artificial intelligence agent, specify your style and budget, and receive a curated list of furniture tailored to your tastes. The agent can even complete the purchases on your behalf.

Consequently, brands are shifting from selling to a single human customer base to selling to two distinct audiences.

This emerging audience of AI agents evaluates options based on different criteria than human buyers. In fact, these agents frequently finalize purchasing decisions well before a human ever lays eyes on the product page. There is a strong possibility that all the careful, emotive copywriting marketers have crafted will be dismantled and reassembled by algorithms. Relying solely on the human touch is no longer sufficient.

Leave humans in the equation

A word of caution is necessary: marketers should not completely abandon human buyers in their rush to adapt to AI agents. It is easy to get swept up in visions of a fully agentic future. Ultimately, though, every agent serves an individual human with unique preferences, and personalization will only grow more granular over time. The key strategy is to optimize for both groups simultaneously rather than focusing on just one.

Startup founders have a natural advantage here. Older, established brands are forced to retrofit decades of marketing copy, style guides, and approval workflows to ensure they are agent-ready. Conversely, new brands can establish a tone and voice that is easily interpreted by both people and machines right from the beginning.

What does this look like in practice?

Brands must first establish a distinct voice and document it. At most early-stage companies, the brand voice lives entirely inside the founder’s head. While this approach can function when a small team works closely with the founder, it fails when the writer—or the reader—is a machine.

AI tools rely on explicit rules and tend to drift without them. Having spent years at my startup, Jacquard, figuring out how to prompt AI agents to generate superior content, I note that we are now seeing agents acting as the audience on the receiving end as well, which makes clear rules more critical than ever.

Understanding what a brand sounds like is vital, but knowing what it avoids sounding like matters equally. Companies should explicitly list prohibited words and forbidden claims. These boundaries often remain unwritten because they feel obvious to internal team members who already understand them. However, taking the time to spell them out before a team—or a machine—begins generating your copy prevents costly issues down the road.

Verify your brand

Marketers must also recognize that product descriptions are no longer merely administrative details; they have become core brand assets. In a marketplace mediated by agents, descriptions might be the most frequently read copy you produce, as algorithms scan them when selecting products to suggest or buy. If two personalized AI agents shop for furniture for two different individuals, they might recommend the exact same chair to both, yet adapt the product descriptions to fit each user. The underlying source description must preserve the core brand identity.

Whenever feasible, brands should test their communication channels for both types of readers. Email inboxes represent the most obvious current example of this “second reader” dynamic. Platforms like Gmail and Apple now automatically summarize messages before the recipient opens them, displaying summaries above the main email body that may be read before the message itself.

Therefore, before hitting send, check what the automated summary says your email is about. Does the core offer survive? Does it retain your unique value proposition? This requires minimal time and represents a simple habit any marketing team can adopt immediately without special software.

Brands also need to measure the actual outcomes of their marketing efforts rather than merely tracking output volume. Marketers who evaluate success solely by the amount of content produced will find their data useless as AI makes content generation progressively easier. Instead, focus on business results, conversions, and revenue. These are the metrics that prove whether your marketing team is truly succeeding.

Finally, do not lose sight of the human element. No one can predict how quickly automated purchasing will scale. Humans remain the primary readers of copy and final decision-makers. Even AI agents, acting as our secondary audience, exist to cater to human preferences.

New founders and emerging brands are best positioned to navigate the transition into a dual-audience economy. Although the exact retail landscape of the next five or ten years remains uncertain, integrating these considerations into your brand strategy today is straightforward.

Trying to retrofit them later will prove expensive.

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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

• Why are brands now selling to two audiences instead of one? In addition to traditional human consumers, brands must now appeal to AI agents that research, filter, and purchase products on behalf of users before humans ever see the product page.
• Do AI agents make purchasing decisions based on the same criteria as humans? No, AI agents evaluate products using different criteria and data structures, often breaking down emotional marketing copy into raw data points.
• Why is documenting a brand voice important for AI agents? AI tools require explicit rules and guidelines to prevent content drift. Clearly written style guides and boundaries help machines accurately represent the brand voice.
• How do AI summaries in email affect marketing? Major email clients now summarize messages before the recipient reads them. Marketers must check these summaries to ensure their core offers and unique selling points survive the automated condensation process.
• What metrics should marketers focus on in an AI-driven environment? Instead of measuring content volume, marketers should focus on tangible business outcomes, conversions, and revenue.