AI Dominates Consumer Choices: Brands Must Adapt or Fade
By Varun Mittal
EY report: AI agents now drive consumer choices. Brands must overhaul sales & marketing to stay relevant in an automated retail future. Learn how.
🔥 Main Takeaway
Artificial intelligence is rapidly taking control of consumer purchasing decisions, forcing brands to completely rethink their sales and marketing strategies or face irrelevance in an automated retail landscape.
📌 What Happened?
The new EY “State of Consumer Products 2026” report, titled “Reclaiming Relevance: sales and marketing in an AI world,” reveals that AI agents, algorithms, and retail platforms are now profoundly influencing consumer buying. Consumers are increasingly delegating purchasing choices to these automated systems. This means brands must shift from competing for human attention to being explicitly selected by AI, systems they often cannot directly control. EY’s research, based on a survey of over 850 senior executives, found that a significant 57% of companies are stuck at “Incremental Optimization” (Level 2) on a five-level sales and marketing maturity ladder. Another 35% are only at “Coordinated Execution” (Level 3), indicating most are not ready for an AI-driven “Self-Optimizing Ecosystem.”
💰 Why It Matters
This isn’t just a tech upgrade; it’s a fundamental power shift from brands to AI, directly impacting future revenue and market share for consumer product companies. Companies stuck in the “optimization trap” with incremental changes will struggle to gain traction with AI-guided consumers. For investors, brands that fail to structurally integrate their commercial decision-making across sales, marketing, pricing, and content will likely underperform. Only 21% of executives are confident in their ability to influence algorithmic recommendations, highlighting a massive competitive gap and potential for disruption.
👀 What to Watch Next
Keep an eye on how major consumer brands publicly announce their AI-driven commercial transformations and investments in new decision-making infrastructures. Watch for the emergence of agile startups and technology solutions designed to help legacy brands navigate this AI-first retail environment. Future earnings reports will likely offer insights into whether companies are effectively adapting their strategies to capture the AI-influenced consumer.