The ideal objective for a marketer has always been clear: to know when a person needs something. To understand the goal they’re trying to achieve. To respond in that moment with an offer that fits. To see how the person reacts. And to learn from it, immediately.
Not once. But millions of times, at the same time.
That’s been the dream since marketing became a discipline. Philip Kotler probably sketched it on a napkin in 1967. John Wanamaker famously complained he was wasting half of his advertising budget—he just didn’t know which half. Every CMO since has nodded in painful agreement.
It was never a lack of ambition that stopped us. It was the constraints.
Never has this been clearer to me than today, in “the age of AI.” Just recently, I read Thomas Marzano’s brilliant manifesto, Brand Constitutions: The Legible-Lovable Standard for Building Equity in an Agentic Economy, where he describes the role of agentic branding. It’s a vision of the future centered around human-driven brands engineered to thrive in a world run on intelligence, automation, and code. Here, I attempt to offer a four-part model that can help us all build better towards that future.
The old system was built on human-driven workarounds
Humans and organizations could not do this at scale. We couldn’t sense demand as it formed. We couldn’t decide in real time. We couldn’t coordinate actions across functions. We couldn’t learn continuously from every interaction.
So, we invented workarounds.
We created segments, and froze people into them. The soccer mom. The millennial foodie. The business traveler. As if humans stayed put in neat boxes instead of living messy, multi-dimensional lives.
We created campaigns, so activity could be planned in bursts. The fall launch. The holiday push. The Super Bowl spot. Because organizing thousands of people and millions of dollars required advanced planning, not real-time response.
We created annual plans, because learning was slow. Last year’s data informed this year’s strategy. By the time you learned what worked, the world had moved on.
We created channel silos, because coordination was impossible. TV did awareness. Print did consideration. Direct mail did activation. Digital did . . . well, digital did whatever was left. Everyone fought over budgets and blamed each other for suboptimal results.
This is what we now call the attention economy. An economy built on interruption. On inferred demand. On proxies instead of reality. You interrupted people watching Friends with a commercial, hoping they’d remember your brand when they went shopping three days later. Sometimes it worked (often enough, anyway).
These were not bad ideas. At the time, they were necessary.
Marketing became the art of managing abstractions: reach, frequency, impressions, clicks. We got very good at it. We built entire careers on optimizing CTR by 0.3%. We A/B tested button colors. We argued about attribution models in conference rooms.
Growth was linear. Profit was indirect. You spent money, waited, measured, adjusted, repeated. Spray and pray. The feedback loops were long and the causality was fuzzy, but it was the best we had.
The new system is built on operationalized intent
Today, AI removes the original constraints. That’s not my idea. Sangeet Paul Choudary wrote in his book, Reshuffle: New technologies, especially AI, collapse the core constraints in systems. Not partially. Structurally.
Technology now makes it possible to sense needs and intent as they emerge. When someone searches “best running shoes for bad knees,” you know exactly what they need. When they browse your competitor’s site, you know they’re shopping. When they abandon a cart at 11 p.m., you know it’s the right moment to re-engage.
Now, a system can act in the moment, not after the fact. The offer appears. The discount triggers. The recommendation surfaces. And it does so right now. Not next week during the next campaign. You can coordinate decisions across the system. Pricing adjusts based on inventory, content adapts to behavior, and the chatbot knows what the customer service rep said yesterday.
The system operates as one organism, not twelve warring departments.
We can learn while operating, not in hindsight. Every interaction teaches the system. Every click, every conversion, every bounce refines the model. Which means learning now compounds continuously.
Our systems can make the interaction between company and customer operational.
This is the intent economy.
The real shift is from proxies to signals
The old system optimized proxies because there was no alternative.
Segments stood in for people. You sold to “suburban moms 35–54” instead of Tamar, who’s training for her first half-marathon, worried about her knees, and researching shoes at 10 p.m. because that’s when the kids are finally asleep.
Campaigns stood in for interactions. You launched in September because that’s when budgets freed up and the agency finished the creative, not because September was when people actually needed your product.
Funnels stood in for journeys. Awareness, consideration, purchase. Clean. Linear. Logical. Except nobody’s actual journey looks like that. They see an ad, ignore it, hear about you from a friend, read reviews, forget about you, see another ad, click, get distracted, come back three weeks later, and finally buy. Or don’t.
Channels stood in for coordination. TV built awareness. Digital captured intent. Retail closed the sale. Each measured separately. Each optimized independently. Each convinced they deserved more budget. The customer experienced it as chaos.
AI changes this.
Intent becomes a live signal, not a statistical guess. You don’t infer that suburban moms might want minivans. You detect that Tamar is researching seven-seaters because she’s carpooling to soccer practice, and her Civic isn’t cutting it anymore.
Marketing stops managing representations of reality. It starts operating on reality itself.
Decision-making moves from planning cycles to continuous orchestration. You don’t decide in January what to promote in October. You respond in real time to what people need right now.
Learning compounds with every interaction. Netflix doesn’t wait for quarterly surveys to figure out what works. Every view, every pause, every rewind teaches the algorithm. The system gets smarter while you sleep.
AI changes the fundamental architecture of brand growth
In the attention economy, growth started with messaging. You crafted a campaign, bought media, interrupted people, and hoped some of them remembered you when they had a need. Growth depended on memory structures and mental availability. It was probabilistic—indirect and slow.
Demand was stimulated. You created desire where none existed and convinced people they needed things they didn’t know they wanted. “Just Do It” didn’t respond to demand for sneakers—it created a movement. It worked, but it required massive investment, patience, and faith.
Efficiency was optimized inside silos. TV got more efficient at reach per dollar. Digital got better at cost per click. Retail improved conversion rates. But nobody optimized the whole system, because nobody could see the whole system.
Profit was inferred at the end. You spent $10 million on marketing, revenue went up $30 million, you assumed causality and hoped the CFO didn’t ask too many questions. Marketing mix modeling tried to untangle it, but mostly, it produced consultant reports gathering dust.
In the intent economy, growth starts with demand
You detect Tamar searching for running shoes. You appear with the right shoe, the right content, the right offer. You don’t create demand—you capture it as it forms.
Intent triggers action. The system responds automatically. The product gets recommended. The email gets sent. The ad appears. The price adjusts. No planning cycle. No approval process. No waiting for the quarterly campaign.
Profit is traceable and causal. Amazon knows exactly which recommendation drove which purchase. Google knows which ad generated which revenue. The line from intent to action to profit is direct and measurable.
This is a different architecture, not an upgrade. It collapses the distance between intent, action, value creation, and economic profit.
And here’s where it gets interesting.
A four-part model for how brands compound in the intent economy
In the attention economy, brands compounded in one way: in consumers’ minds. You built associations into a memory network around your brand. You created salience, easy to come to mind when it matters. When someone needed a cola, they thought Coke. When someone needed shoes, they thought Nike. This compounding was real but slow. It took years—decades, even.
In the intent economy, brands compound in two ways. First, they still compound in consumers’ minds. That hasn’t gone away. Mental availability still matters; you still want people to think of you first.
But second—and this is new—brands now compound through attention itself.
Attention is the scarce resource. Not reach. Not impressions. Attention. Real, focused, valuable attention from someone who actually needs what you’re selling right now.
And brands capture attention through a four-part model of competitive advantage:
- Relevance—Do I consider you? Are you even in my consideration set when I have this specific need, in this specific moment? If you sell running shoes but aren’t relevant to “bad knees,” you don’t exist.
- Distinctiveness—Do I recognize you? In a sea of options, do you stand out? Can I recall you? Distinctiveness gets you noticed. It gets you considered. But it doesn’t get you chosen.
- Differentiation—Do I have a reason to choose you? What makes you different from the 17 other options I’m looking at? This is where most brands stop. They think differentiation is the pinnacle. It’s not.
- Default—Do I even consider alternatives? This is the summit. Default means you’re the reflexive answer, the automatic choice. When Tamar needs running shoes, she goes straight to your site. She doesn’t Google, she doesn’t compare, and she doesn’t think twice. You’re the default.
Google is the default for search. Amazon is the default for shopping. The iPhone is the default for smartphones (if you’re in the Apple ecosystem). These brands don’t fight for attention anymore. They already own it.
As you climb this hierarchy—from relevance to distinctiveness to differentiation to default—each level amplifies the next. It compounds.
Relevance gets you in the game. Distinctiveness gets you noticed. Differentiation gets you chosen. Default gets you chosen again and again and again without effort. It’s a compounding through attention that creates exponential growth in economic profit, not linear growth.
In the attention economy, you spent more to get more. Double your ad budget, maybe you doubled your sales. Linear. Expensive. Exhausting.
In the intent economy, once you reach default status, growth becomes exponential. You capture more intent. You learn faster. You optimize better. You become more relevant, more distinctive, more differentiated, more default. The flywheel spins faster.
Netflix didn’t win streaming by having the best content (though they do, in my view). They won by becoming the default. “Netflix and chill” entered the language. When people think streaming, they think of Netflix first. That’s default. That’s compounding. That’s exponential profit growth.
The inconvenient fact is this: most brands are still fighting at the relevance and distinctiveness levels. Very few reach differentiation. Almost none reach default. But the intent economy makes default achievable for more brands than ever before. Because you can now operate on intent directly, in real time, at scale.
The future is already here, and it’s not theoretical anymore
Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are already implementing this new architecture. Right now. Not in some distant future—today.
ChatGPT has memory. It remembers your preferences, your past conversations, your needs. It has shopping research built in. It has an agentic browser called Atlas that can navigate the web on your behalf. And it has Instant Checkout—you can complete a purchase without ever leaving the conversation.
Google launched AI-powered shopping with Gemini. Virtual shopping agents that know what you want, find it, compare it, and help you buy it. All conversational. All transactional. All in one place.
Both systems use an open standard called Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). This isn’t a proprietary play. It’s infrastructure. Like HTTP for commerce.
Think about what this means. Search has fundamentally changed. It’s no longer ten blue links; it’s a conversation that becomes a transaction.
You don’t type “best running shoes for bad knees” and click through 12 websites, read reviews, compare prices, open new tabs, bookmark options, come back later, forget what you were doing, and start over.
You ask: “I need running shoes. I have bad knees. I’m training for my first 10K. Budget around $150.”
The AI responds: “I’d recommend the Brooks Adrenaline GTS or the ASICS Gel-Kayano. The Brooks are $140, the ASICS are $160. Both have excellent cushioning and stability. Which matters more to you—lighter weight or maximum support?”
You answer. It refines. It shows you options. It checks inventory near you. It finds a discount code. You buy.
In the AI model, you never leave the conversation. You’re more likely to never visit a retailer’s website or see a brand’s carefully crafted landing page. You may never encounter their conversion funnel.
The entire journey is collapsed into a dialogue. Which means this isn’t an incremental improvement but a different system entirely.
Every brand built for the attention economy just became vulnerable
If the customer never visits your website, what happens to your direct relationship? If they never see your brand story, what happens to your positioning? If they never experience your carefully designed customer journey, what happens to your conversion optimization?
The AI becomes the interface, the recommendation engine, and the moment of purchase. And it doesn’t care about your brand guidelines. It cares about solving the customer’s problem. Right now—in this conversation.
This is why the four-part model matters more than ever.
- Relevance: If you’re not in the AI’s training data, if you’re not connected to the UCP, if you’re not accessible through these systems, then you don’t exist. You’re not even considered.
- Distinctiveness: If the AI can’t articulate why you’re different, you’ll be lumped in with alternatives. “Here are five similar options” means you’re a commodity.
- Differentiation: If you don’t have a clear, compelling reason to be chosen, the AI will default to price, availability, or ratings. You’ll compete on the lowest common denominator.
- Default: If you can’t become the automatic answer (“for your needs, I recommend X”), then you’ll always be fighting for consideration. The AI will keep presenting alternatives.
Brands that reach default status in these AI systems will capture exponential value. They’ll be the first recommendation. The trusted answer. The reflexive choice.
Brands that don’t will become invisible.
Welcome to the intent economy
The intent economy is already here: Google and OpenAI have already built the infrastructure. ChatGPT and Gemini are the new front door to commerce. The UCP is the plumbing that makes it work.
AI is the system that collapses intent, action, and transaction into a single continuous experience.
You express intent through conversation. The system acts immediately. The transaction completes without friction. Learning happens in real time. The next interaction is smarter.
No websites. No funnels. No campaigns. No channel attribution debates. Just intent, followed by response, value creation, and economic profit. All happening in seconds. All traceable. And all optimizable.
The brands winning in this system won’t be the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They’ll be the ones who understand how to operate within conversational commerce. How to make themselves relevant, distinctive, differentiated, and ultimately default within AI systems.
They’ll be the ones who stop managing attention and start capturing intent. Because in a world where AI is the interface, attention is table stakes and intent is everything.
The old system wasn’t wrong; it was limited. We managed proxies because we had no choice. We interrupted people because we couldn’t detect intent. We ran campaigns because we couldn’t orchestrate continuously. We measured reach because we couldn’t measure impact.
The people who built this system were brilliant. They optimized under constraint. They created enduring brands with limited tools. They deserve respect, not dismissal.
Now, however, we have a choice.
AI doesn’t improve marketing inside the attention economy. It makes the intent economy possible.
It doesn’t make your campaigns 10% better. It makes campaigns obsolete.
It doesn’t improve your segmentation. It makes segments irrelevant.
It doesn’t optimize your funnel. It collapses the funnel into a moment.
And that changes not just how we market, but how growth itself works. The question is no longer, how do we get better at attention? It’s, how do we build systems that operate on intent? Because the companies that figure that out won’t just grow faster. They’ll compound, reach default, and capture exponential profit growth.
The companies that don’t will keep optimizing proxies, while their competitors operate on reality.
That’s the true shift.
Cover image source: Nattapol