When agentic AI chooses, what’s left of the brand?
Listening to Radical with Amol Rajan recently, I paused at a line from Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, that captured a question sitting quietly at the edge of modern marketing. He asked
“What happens to a brand? What do brands mean in a world where you tell your agent, ‘hey, go buy me eggs or go buy me milk’? There’s no relationship between you as the human and what were effectively shortcuts for quality, which is what brands are.”
It is such a simple image, the voice command and the invisible purchase, yet it exposes the fragile truth beneath so much of what we do. For decades brands have acted as shorthand for trust and taste. They helped people navigate choice, promising quality, familiarity and a touch of belonging. But in a world where AI agents will soon make those choices for us, that shorthand may stop working. There is no shelf, no packaging, no moment of decision. You ask, and the system selects. The quiet crisis for brands is not about visibility anymore, it is about meaning.
Purpose over presence
For much of the last decade, the priority has been to show up everywhere. Fill the feeds, chase engagement, never go quiet. But as discovery shifts from open searching to single answers, presence alone is a weak defence. The next phase belongs to brands with a clear reason to exist — something strong enough to survive when the logo disappears and the decision is made invisibly.
This demands more than attention. It demands conviction. A brand now has to stand for an idea that holds steady when no one is watching. If your story could easily fit under someone else’s name, it is not distinctive enough. Purpose, not presence, is what keeps a brand relevant when algorithms start doing the filtering.
Sharper signals, less noise
We have built a digital world heavy with polite clutter. Updates, launches, posts, campaigns. All of it competing for attention but rarely offering anything lasting. In a landscape that will soon be summarised, compressed and paraphrased by machines, the signal has to be sharper. Every story, film or event should reveal something genuine about who you are and why you exist. If it does not, it is decoration.
The brands that endure will be those that resist the urge to speak constantly and instead speak with clarity. Success will depend less on visibility and more on distinctiveness — on leaving something that stays with people long after the noise fades.
Trust travels further than reach
As decisions shift from people to systems, credibility becomes the real currency. When someone says “buy me eggs” and never sees the label, the choice still rests on an invisible sense of trust. That is what brands were originally built on, and it will matter more than ever.
Trust is not a marketing asset. It is a pattern of behaviour that builds over time. It comes from consistency, honesty and the willingness to be transparent when things go wrong. You cannot buy it, borrow it or bluff it. It is the only true moat left when convenience and automation flatten everything else.
A few things worth doing
Revisit your story and ask what question your brand truly answers. Simplify what you produce and keep only what adds something genuine. Replace promises with proof. Focus on being relevant to people, not platforms. Algorithms will keep changing, but human instincts for trust and recognition are stubbornly stable.
The old game rewarded whoever could be seen. The new one will reward whoever can still be believed. The brands that last will be the ones that mean something even when no one is saying their name.
“ChatGPT and Google: The Tech Billionaire Taking On AI Companies (Matthew Prince)” from Radical with Amol Rajan, first released on 23 October 2025.