As AI agents begin to search, compare and buy on our behalf, how will brands build preference? Simon Levitt, Global Technology Director at Imagination, explores why this shift could give live experiences a greater role in shaping customer decisions.
For most of the internet’s history, the visitor was assumed to be human. Websites were designed for people to navigate. That assumption is breaking.
Cloudflare reported in July that automated traffic had overtaken human activity, generating around 57% of web requests. HUMAN Security found that traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers grew by 7,851% during 2025. Those agents are no longer simply reading the web. They are beginning to act on it.
When the visitor is not the customer
Automated traffic creates a verification problem for marketing. An impression, view or click loses value when we cannot confidently connect it to a real person.
Agentic AI takes that problem further. The person and the visitor are becoming separate entities.
A customer can ask an agent to find and book a hotel. The agent conducts the search, assesses the options and completes the transaction. The customer need is real. The booking is real. But no person visited the website, saw the advertising or moved through the funnel.
This is not fraudulent traffic. It is economically valuable activity without human attention.
The internet’s commercial model was built on the assumption that attention and action happened in the same place. Agents break that connection.
Digital becomes the interface for agents
The website will stop being the primary place where many customers navigate a brand. It will become infrastructure that their agents interrogate.
An agent does not need to admire the hero film or understand the thinking behind the user interface. It needs reliable information and a clear way to act. If the price is hidden, the availability is unclear or the product data is inconsistent, the agent will move on.
This changes what digital performance means. The brand’s online presence must become machine-readable before it can become commercially useful.
It also weakens one of the traditional functions of digital marketing: forming preference during the journey. Agents will be very good at flattening products into comparable attributes and selecting the option that best satisfies an instruction.
If the instruction is “find me the best electric car,” brand becomes one variable among many. If the instruction is “find me a Jaguar,” the most important part of the decision has already happened.
The brand preference existed before the agent began its work.
Brand experience becomes the interface for humans
As agents take over more of the functional journey, live experience takes on more of the human one.
It becomes the place where somebody can encounter the product directly and decide what it means to them. It is where a brand can create the trust and desire that determine the instruction eventually given to the agent.
This creates a new division. Digital becomes the interface for agents. Live experience becomes the interface for humans.
That is not simply a line about channels. It is a design principle.
The digital interface must help an agent understand the offer and act correctly. The live interface must give a person a reason to care. One executes preference, the other creates it.
For brands, these interfaces cannot be developed separately. The promise made to the person must survive the machine-mediated journey that follows. A compelling physical encounter is worthless if the agent later finds contradictory information or cannot complete the requested action.
Creative technology therefore has a broader job than connecting an event to a website. It must connect human intent to machine execution.
The missing journey
This shift will break conventional attribution.
A person may form a preference at a live experience and later tell an agent to act on it. The agent completes the transaction without following the digital path the brand expected. There may be no campaign click, retargeting journey or recognisable conversion funnel.
The live experience influenced the decision. The agent delivered the outcome. Traditional analytics will struggle to connect the two.
Brands will need to recognise human intent before it disappears behind the agent. That means capturing meaningful, consented expressions of preference and connecting them to the eventual commercial outcome. Counting traffic will matter less than understanding who – or what – was acting, and on whose behalf.
The implications go beyond measurement. Brands are now designing for two fundamentally different users.
Build only for people and agents will struggle to transact with you. Build only for agents and your brand will be reduced to whatever can be compared in a table.
The next generation of brands must do both.
They must be machine readable and human memorable.