In the age of agentic AI, brands need customer experiences for when the customer isn’t there

Not long from now, someone, perhaps the teenage daughter of a friend or colleague, may be looking for a birthday gift for her friend. But instead of browsing on her phone or walking into a store, she’ll ask her AI assistant to “find something fun, under $30, that she hasn’t gotten already.” Moments later, the assistant will surface a list of recommendations. She’ll pick one, approve the order and move on.

This is a small moment, but it signals something big.

For decades, digital experience has been defined by human interaction: people clicking, swiping, tapping and navigating carefully designed interfaces. Businesses have optimized every step, from checkout flows to chatbot replies. But what happens when the person interacts less, or stops interacting directly? What happens when autonomous AI agents, which understand our preferences, behaviors and goals, start making decisions for us?

The last wave of digital experience innovation was about presence: meeting the consumer wherever they show up. Companies raced to build mobile apps, responsive websites and seamless transitions across platforms. The next wave is about agency. Rather than reaching people where they are, it’s about enabling software agents to act where the human is not.

This is the shift from omnichannel to omnibuyer. It’s a world in which the first interaction isn’t with a person, but with their digital counterpart – one that knows their tastes, understands their values and can make good decisions, perhaps even better than the person could on their own.

We’re already seeing early signals of this transformation across the economy.

In retail, AI assistants are helping consumers reorder everyday items automatically, and even detect mood changes to adjust product recommendations. In insurance, AI compares policy options and highlights hidden exclusions in plain English. In finance, agents are trained to delay purchases when they detect signs of emotional volatility, protecting people from impulsive decisions. In healthcare, conversational bots can now detect urgency based not just on words, but tone.

Even in the corporate world, procurement agents are drafting request-for-proposal responses, negotiating within policy bounds and escalating exceptions – with human oversight, of course, but often without human intervention.

In each case, AI is reshaping the logic of how decisions are made.

This is a trust shift. When an agent acts on your behalf, you have to trust that it knows you. That it understands your preferences, honours your values, that its decisions will reduce the cognitive load consumers have continued to bear – even as experiences have become faster and user interfaces more polished. You also have to trust the systems with which that agent interacts and the companies and platforms that train it and influence it.

Looking beyond the technological transformation at play, for businesses, this new reality raises a profound question: What does your brand feel like to consumers when it is reflected to them through an intelligent algorithm?

It’s no longer enough to have a clever tagline or a smooth mobile experience. In an agent-mediated world, companies must be legible – emotionally, ethically and operationally – to software.

Businesses must therefore begin designing not just for humans, but through them. Since agents won’t just follow instructions but will instead interpret and act for us, the systems they rely on must be ready to reflect human intentions, preferences and values.

Critics worry that this future distances people from the human side of commerce, but delegating decisions doesn’t mean abdicating them. But delegation can only work if emotion, tone and intent aren’t lost in translation.

Too many failed products can trace their demise to one thing: neglecting the emotional side of experience. That risk only grows in a world where software mediates our choices. Because even when AI gets the facts right, it can still feel wrong.

This is a turning point, and the rules of experience design have changed. Businesses should ask themselves:

This isn’t about removing people from the equation. It’s about showing up in ways that earn trust at every layer, especially the invisible ones. The adage that brands don’t get a second chance to make a first impression will hold up. The systems we build must be prepared to convey the nuance, emotion and intent of the enterprise on the customer’s behalf.

We’re still early in this shift, and the shape of what’s to come isn’t fixed, but the direction is clear.

The brands that succeed in this new world won’t be the ones with the flashiest user interface or the fastest app. They’ll be the ones whose values travel well: through algorithms, through agents, through the moments when no one is watching.

And they’ll be the ones who recognize that for consumers, in an agentified world, experience isn’t what happens on a screen. It’s what happens when you’re not there.