AI is rewriting the shopping journey, and marketers have to follow it. That means watching how brands show up in large language models (LLMs), and how they engage customers arriving through AI-driven searches. This is the “intelligence revolution.”

“The intelligence age is gaining steam,” said Stephanie Paterik, vice president of insights at EMARKETER, in her keynote presentation at this week's Future of Digital Summit. “One billion weekly ChatGPT users worldwide is a number that OpenAI hit just this month. Sixty-nine percent of CEOs around the world tell us that AI is changing their business, not just how they send an email or craft, you know, a report, but how they are fundamentally operating.”

• The US is absorbing the bulk of AI infrastructure spending. Of the $1.4 trillion invested in AI infrastructure, $1 trillion has landed in the US alone, per EMARKETER.

“It's no small thing that we've seen the early stages of a new ad channel open up as OpenAI has opened up their chatbot to advertisers,” said Paterik.

Adapting to human-machine purchase journeys

GenAI use has crossed the halfway mark: more than half of internet users now use it monthly, and 40% use it weekly. Weekly use is the number that matters, because habit, not trial, is what reshapes how shoppers behave.

“When you look out to 2029, [AI] will become a fixture in how people are spending their time online, how they are shopping online, and how marketers are spending their dollars,” Paterik said.

Shoppers are coming to AI with intent to purchase, voicing a problem they want solved. Paterik calls the result “a new human-machine purchase journey.”

“[Shoppers] have this iterative conversation where they are working through it, solving the problem, getting recommendations, being influenced by a machine, and then they are doing their own research and making a purchase, most often with retailers,” she said.

Trust and authority sources

Trust and authority are “at a premium” for winning shoppers, according to Paterik, even though this new journey has yet to take its final shape.

“AI doesn’t just look for keywords, it's not just indexing pages,” said Paterik. “It's building an understanding of your brand from a whole ecosystem of signals.”

LLMs prioritize three types of signals, according to EMARKETER's AI Visibility Index:

• Brand sites
• Publishers, including news publishers
• Expert sources, including industry bodies and authorities

AI chatbots shrink the shelf. A search on an ecommerce site might produce 40 products, while the same search in AI might produce only five, Paterik cautioned.

Leaders in the intelligence age

AI is not loosening the grip of the so-called “Triopoly.” Google, Amazon, and Meta will keep leading the digital marketing ecosystem, earning three out of four ad dollars over the next three years, said Paterik.

“Google is EMARKETER’s pick, if you will, as having the strongest advantage in consumer AI at the moment, and that is because conversational search, in some ways, is an outcropping of search,” she said.

Amazon will maintain its leading position in ecommerce and retail media, and the gap is not close. It earns 79% of all retail media ad revenues, against 9% for second-place Walmart, Paterik pointed out.

“Because of [Amazon’s position], we think that they are going to be the lead innovators on agentic commerce,” said Paterik.

Meta will lead social video and social shopping in the near future, because its platforms are still winning the most time and the most ad spend in those areas, according to Paterik.

“Social shopping is going to be a boost for TikTok, but still Meta will not face meaningful competition,” she said.

How marketers should prepare

Organizations should expand omnichannel strategies to include AI, according to Paterik.

“This is a moment to invest in and build trust signals for both humans and machines through earned media, and a chance to experiment with paid in its early days,” she said.

Businesses should also be ready for the customers who increasingly arrive through AI chatbots.

“It's a time to look at UX and see: Are you making it as easy as possible for that customer to come and validate the research and make the purchase?” Paterik asked.

Lastly, marketing leaders should avoid assuming that search strategies will translate into a winning generative engine optimization (GEO) strategy. The new challenges in the customer journey need solving across teams, not inside one.

“This is no longer like a niche specialty, it's really going to require cooperation across entire marketing teams and across entire organizations in order to make sure there's that quality and consistency of trust signals going out about your brand,” Paterik said.

This was originally featured in the EMARKETER Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.