8 min read
Article Summary (TL;DR)
By 2035, the "moment of truth" in retail won't happen in a supermarket aisle or on a screen, but within the silicon pathways of an AI agent negotiating on your behalf.
- The Rise of AI-to-AI Commerce: Agentic AI will handle routine purchasing decisions, making traditional consumer-facing marketing "spin" completely invisible.
- Data is the New Creative: Success will depend on structured, machine-readable data rather than polished ad campaigns or emotional branding.
- Science-Backed Sovereignty: AI agents will prioritise hard metrics like unit economics, carbon footprints, and nutritional density: over "all-natural" marketing claims.
- From SEO to AEO: Marketing departments must pivot from Search Engine Optimisation to Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) to stay relevant to the machine gatekeepers.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, we are standing at the edge of the greatest shift in human commerce since the invention of currency. If you read my previous thoughts on The Third Shelf, you’ll know that the way we interact with "stuff" is fundamentally breaking.
But there’s a casualty in this revolution that most C-suite executives aren’t ready to talk about yet. It’s your marketing department.
By 2035, the traditional marketing department: the one focused on "brand story," "emotional resonance," and "visual identity": will be functionally irrelevant for the vast majority of consumer goods. Why? Because by then, humans won't be doing the shopping. Our AI agents will be.
The End of the Emotional Purchase
For decades, marketing has been a psychological game. It was about how a specific shade of red made you feel, or how a celebrity endorsement could make a brand of oat milk feel "premium." We spent billions of dollars trying to win the "moment of truth" at the shelf.
Instead I want to look at a world where that shelf doesn't exist for the consumer.
My belief is that the vast majority of routine purchases like your milk (animal or precision-fermented), your proteins or your household staples: will be delegated to Agentic AI.
I mean, how many of us actually enjoy supermarket food shopping?
Why Machines Don't Care About Your "Story"
So, what are these technologies and why are they important?
Agentic AI refers to autonomous systems that don't just "chat" with you like ChatGPT, but actually act on your behalf. They have goals, they navigate the web, and they execute transactions. They are the ultimate rational consumers.
When your personal AI agent goes "shopping" for a high-protein flour, it doesn't look at the beautiful packaging. It doesn't care if the brand's Instagram feed is aesthetically pleasing. It bypasses the "spin" entirely.
Instead, it interacts with a brand's Retailer Agent. This is an AI-to-AI negotiation. Your agent will demand information such as:
- Hard Data: What is the precise amino acid profile?
- Scientific Evidence: Show me the peer-reviewed LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) for this batch’s carbon footprint.
- Unit Economics: What is the price per gram of bioavailable protein compared to the 50 other available options?
- Trust Signals: What are the verified pesticide parts per billion (ppb) measurements from the latest harvest?
If your marketing department is still busy arguing over the font size on a cardboard box while your competitors are perfecting their machine-readable structured data, you’ve already lost. The machine gatekeeper will simply filter you out of the "top 3" recommendations before the human consumer even knows you exist.
From SEO to AEO: The New Battlefield
We are moving away from Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and toward Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO). In the old world, you wanted to be on the first page of Google. In the 2035 world, you must be the single answer provided by an AI assistant.
According to research into Agentic AI as the next frontier, these systems will prioritise structured data over creative copy every single time.
I believe the "Machine Brand" will become more important than the "Human Brand." The Machine Brand is built on transparency, API reliability, and data accuracy. If your Company's AI agent lies to a consumer's AI agent about a product's sustainability metrics, the "trust score" of your brand will be downgraded across the entire network instantly. You can’t "spin" your way out of a data discrepancy in a world of autonomous verification.
Push vs Pull
We cannot afford the waste associated with traditional marketing: the overproduction driven by "perceived" demand rather than "actual" nutritional need.
Agentic AI allows for a "Pull" economy. The AI knows exactly when the entities it serves need calories, and it pulls those calories through the supply chain with surgical precision. Marketing, in its current form, is a "Push" mechanism. It tries to convince people to buy things they might not need. In a resource-constrained 2035, "Push" marketing isn't just inefficient; it's ecologically irresponsible.
What Happens to the Marketers?
Does this mean every marketer is out of a job? Not necessarily. But the job description is changing fundamentally.
The successful marketing department of 2035 will look more like a laboratory and a data science hub than a creative agency. I believe we will see the rise of the "Prompt Engineer Marketer" and the "Data Integrity Officer."
- Data Over Drama: Instead of writing jingles, they will be ensuring that every single product SKU has a comprehensive, machine-readable "Digital Twin" that includes every scientific metric imaginable.
- Outcome Marketing: They will focus on "Outcome-based" results. For instance, they won't sell "Healthy Cereal", they will sell "Optimised Glucose Response for Every Customer."
- Scientific Sovereignty: They will work closely with food scientists to ensure that the hard data backing the product is unassailable.
Marketing will become a B2B2C discipline: where the first "B" is the Brand, the middle "B" is the Buying Agent, and the "C" is the final Consumer who simply hits "Approve" on their morning summary; if they're involved at all!
The Logic of 2035
If you want to survive the next decade, you need to stop thinking about consumers and start thinking about agents. You need to stop investing in "feelings" and start investing in "facts."
The shift is inevitable because the math of the future demands it. We are moving from a world of abundance and "vibe-based" shopping to a world of 11 billion entities and precision-based sustenance.
Scientific Integrity + Machine-Readable Data = Brand Survival
I’ve spent over 35 years in the food industry, and I’ve seen many trends come and go. But this isn’t a trend. This is a fundamental rewiring of how the world eats and buys. The marketing department of 2035 won't be irrelevant because marketing has died; it will be irrelevant because it has been absorbed into the science of the product itself.
The question for your Board is simple: Are you building a brand for a human to look at, or are you building a data set for an AI to trust?
To continue the conversation email me at tony@tonyhunterspeaker.com