The Next Ad Target Is Your AI Assistant
High hopes for anyone annoyed by targeted marketing. Brands may soon stop approaching humans directly. But there is a catch. They will still reach us through our personal AI assistants.
From grabbing attention to delegation capture
Online advertising was inherently built around human presence. The consumer searched, scrolled, compared, clicked, abandoned a cart, returned, and bought, while the ad system watched and intervened at (presumably) the right time.
However, agentic commerce changes this target. The valuable surface is no longer only the user’s attention. It is the assistant’s decision path: ranking, filtering, remembering, excluding, explaining, and eventually purchasing before the user sees the shelf.
The infrastructure is already arriving
OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, Stripe, Mastercard, and Visa are already building parts of this agentic commerce system. As of February 2026, OpenAI is testing ads in ChatGPT while disclosing they are labeled, separated from answers, and do not influence responses. Google’s...
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