CX's & O's: Are We Even the Customer Anymore?

You’re scrolling through a streaming service, overwhelmed by choice. You open your food delivery app, paralyzed by a thousand restaurants. You need a new pair of running shoes, but the reviews are a battlefield of conflicting opinions.

Now, imagine a world where this friction disappears. Your streaming service auto-plays a show you love without you ever searching. Your grocery cart is magically filled each week with everything you need. A perfectly fitted pair of shoes arrives at your door before you even realized you needed them.

The agent making these decisions? It’s not you. It’s your AI avatar.

This isn't just a futuristic convenience. It’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between brands and people. It forces us to ask a startling question: In the near future, will brands even market to us anymore? Or will their true target audience be the digital proxies that guard our attention and manage our lives?

The Rise of the Digital Agent

First, let's define the "AI avatar." This isn't a cartoon character in the metaverse. Think of it as your Chief Executive Assistant for Life. It’s a sophisticated AI agent—built on models like ChatGPT, Gemini, or their next-gen successors—that has permission to act on your behalf.

It knows your:

• Explicit Preferences: "I am lactose intolerant."

• Implicit Habits: "I always watch thrillers on Friday nights."

• Deep Values: "I prioritize sustainability over cost for household items."

• Financial Boundaries: "Do not book a flight over $800 without checking with me."

This avatar will schedule meetings, manage finances, control your smart home, and yes, handle a vast majority of your purchasing decisions. It operates on a set of rules and goals you set, but with the autonomy to execute them.

The Brand's New Customer: A Hyper-Rational, Data-Driven Entity

When your avatar becomes your primary purchasing agent, the entire landscape of marketing and sales transforms. The "customer" a brand must persuade is no longer a emotional, brand-loyal human, but a hyper-rational, data-saturated AI.

1. The End of Emotional Advertising?
That clever, funny, tear-jerking Super Bowl ad? Your AI avatar is utterly unmoved. It doesn't have nostalgia for a brand its "parent" loved in the 90s. It cannot be swayed by a celebrity endorsement or a beautiful cinematography. Its currency is data, specifications, and alignment with your core directives.

2. The Battle for API Access and Data Feeds
If the avatar is the customer, then the point of sale is the Application Programming Interface (API). Brands will compete ferociously to have their product catalogs, inventory data, and sustainability metrics seamlessly integrated into the AI's decision-making matrix.

Imagine your avatar is tasked with "restock household paper products." It won't go to a website. It will ping the APIs of various brands and retailers, comparing:

• Real-time price vs. your budget.

• Carbon footprint of the product and shipping.

• Delivery ETA against your current supply.

• Ethical sourcing certifications.

The brand with the cleanest, most reliable API and the most verifiable data will win the sale, invisibly and instantly.

3. The New "Marketing": Optimization for AI Audiences
Marketing departments will need a new division: AI Relations. Their job won't be to create catchy jingles, but to ensure their product data is structured, comprehensive, and trustworthy for AI consumption. They will use a new form of SEO—"Avatar Optimization"—ensuring their products are the default choice when an avatar is filtering for "most sustainable," "best value," or "highest-rated by certified experts."

Customer reviews will be replaced by trusted, third-party verification systems that avatars are programmed to trust. A human-written 5-star review saying "Great product!" is meaningless to an AI. A verified data point from Consumer Reports or a blockchain-based supply chain ledger is gold.

The Human Role: Setting the North Star

This sounds dystopian to some—a world where we surrender our agency to cold, calculating algorithms. But that’s a misunderstanding of the shift. Our role evolves from being the daily decision-maker to the philosophy-setter.

Your job is not to pick the toilet paper. Your job is to tell your avatar, "Prioritize products that are septic-safe, recycled, and from companies with a strong track record on workers' rights."

You are the board of directors setting the company's vision. The AI avatar is the CEO, executing the operational details with impeccable efficiency. Our humanity is elevated from the mundane to the strategic.

The Challenges and The Perils

This transition is not without its profound risks.

• The Homogenization of Choice: If all avatars are optimizing for the same set of efficient, verifiable data, do we risk creating a sterile world where quirky, unique, and nascent brands are algorithmically locked out?

• The Black Box Problem: How do we audit our avatar's decisions? If it consistently chooses Brand A over Brand B, is it because it's truly better, or because Brand A paid for better API placement—a new form of pay-to-play advertising?

• The Loss of Discovery: Some of life's greatest joys come from serendipitous discovery—the little bakery you stumbled upon, the indie movie you took a chance on. Can an avatar be programmed for serendipity? Or will it optimize all surprise out of our lives?

The Inevitable Transition

The writing is on the wall. We are already delegating. We use algorithms to find love, navigate cities, and get news. The AI avatar is the logical, consolidated endpoint of this trend.

Brands that see this coming are not just future-proofing; they are building for a world where the customer is a sophisticated, untiring AI agent that values truth over hype, data over drama, and alignment over affection.

So, are we still the customer? For now, yes. But the next wave of commerce is being built for an audience of one: the digital you.

The question is, what values will you program into it?

Thanks for reading and see you here next week!

Sincerely,
Louis

PS - Welcome to everyone who joined CX’s & O’s last week! Let’s keep the conversation going. Connect with me on Linkedin for daily tips and insights!

PPS - If you like these insights, check out my new book “One to One: How to Wow Your Customers With Personalized Experiences.” Learn more.