Imagine if AI agents planned your next vacation

You can't buy consumer trust, but you can pay for advertising.

Companies once earned consumers' trust through reputation alone. Now, in a sea of competitors offering similar services, companies must first grab customers' attention, and demonstrate and maintain clients afterward.

The best return on investment through advertising is to partner with a marketing company to launch a paid advertising campaign. But proceed with caution. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the digital advertising space, both for consumers and advertising agencies.

These changes come with certain risks — which may or may not be clearly identified in standard contracts between a company and its contracted marketing agency.

The future of marketing: AI agents

Perplexity's C-suite recently identified a twist for advertisers and AI technology — someday soon, it is entirely possible that advertising campaigns will be created to target a human user's AI agent, instead of the human herself. This would replace the role of search entirely.

For example, a human could ask an AI agent — meaning, an AI-powered assistant created to perform certain tasks on behalf of the human — this prompt: "Plan a beach trip for me on the North Carolina coast, with the shortest driving distance from Raleigh and a hotel with a swimming pool." The AI agent then goes through a number of paid advertisements for beach destinations that fit the specs provided by the human user.