AI assistants are taking management of the client journey—and if manufacturers don’t act quick, they’ll lose the fitting to be chosen.
Editor’s Word
This thought-provoking article in regards to the influence of AI Procuring on how folks make buy choices and kind loyalty to the manufacturers they patronize, goes method past the provocative headline. In Half One, Steve described the “Nice Disintermediation,” detailing how Google is shifting in to disintermediate manufacturers and loyalty suppliers as results of its AI Procuring Assistant. On this article, he particulars the influence of the approaching modifications on loyalty applications and their supporting ecosystem of individuals, processes and expertise.
For many years, loyalty applications have been the workhorses of buyer retention. Factors, tiers, challenges, presents—all designed to reward habits, construct behavior, and foster connection. And so they labored. Not completely, however reliably. Starbucks. Chick-fil-A. Sephora. McDonald’s. Sure, these manufacturers bought merchandise, however in addition they skilled essential behaviors. They taught clients to care, to interact, to return.
However now, all of that’s vulnerable to changing into out of date, not as a result of loyalty stopped working, however as a result of one thing extra highly effective has stepped in between. AI assistants like Google’s at the moment are positioned to change into loyalty proxies, fairly actually synthetic intermediaries that replicate the outcomes of conventional loyalty applications with out requiring the client to work together with the model in any respect.
Right here’s how the erosion begins:
- Prospects now not open your app to see how shut they’re to their subsequent free espresso. As a substitute, the assistant merely tells them: “You will get 10% off espresso from Model X in the present day.”
- They don’t browse your restricted time presents or full weekly challenges. The assistant filters essentially the most related deal from a dozen rivals and shows the one it thinks they’ll need.
- They don’t care who’s providing the reward—they solely care that one thing was supplied, and it was handy to just accept.
The AI turns into the loyalty program. Besides it’s not your loyalty program. It’s Google’s. It’s Amazon’s. It’s the assistants. And that shift is extra harmful than it appears. As a result of now, the loyalty isn’t to your model. It’s to the assistant. And assistants don’t play favorites, at the least not in a method that you’ve management over. They don’t care who the client buys from, solely that the algorithm is “proper,” the expertise is seamless, and the acquisition converts. The assistant is loyal solely to optimization.
This implies your years of funding in personalization engines, behavioral segmentation, CRM methods, and provide orchestration are about to get steamrolled. Even worse, your fastidiously crafted loyalty system—the one constructed on rewards, rituals, and recognition—turns into simply one other knowledge supply. It would get cannibalized by the assistant’s machine studying mannequin, which picks by means of your perks and filters them by means of its personal logic to resolve what (if something) reaches the client.
Your total program turns into a comparative characteristic getting evaluated in another person’s platform. And when that occurs, you lose the flexibility to:
- Affect habits
- Design emotional journeys
- Create exclusivity
- Ship shock and delight
- Construct habit-forming loops
In different phrases, you lose the sport of loyalty since you’re now not holding the controller.
And make no mistake: this isn’t theoretical. That is already occurring. We’re witnessing the rise of an AI-powered ecosystem the place buyer interactions are now not brand-mediated, however algorithm-mediated. The place id, desire, and buying historical past are managed not by the model that earned them—however by the assistant that merely ingested them.
So, ask your self this: if the client by no means sees your app, by no means visits your website, by no means experiences your model world—are they nonetheless even your buyer?
Or have you ever already misplaced them to the proxy?
The Commoditization of Model Id
For generations, branding has been the soul of enterprise technique. It’s how Nike grew to become “Simply Do It,” how Apple grew to become a life-style, and the way Patagonia grew to become a motion. Nice manufacturers do greater than provide merchandise. They undertaking aspiration, convey id, and embody values. They craft an emotional imprint that lives far past the transaction.
However in an “AI-first” buying surroundings, that id is vulnerable to being erased.
Right here’s why: AI assistants don’t care about your model story. They care about indicators. Structured knowledge, product attributes, worth, supply time and buyer scores all issue into the equation. Perhaps—simply possibly—your moral insurance policies, neighborhood involvement, and charitable actions are buried in there someplace. However the Massive Thought you’ve spent numerous hours crafting within the boardroom? The company narrative you’ve so fastidiously architected? The emotional connection the primary time your clients see your product on-line?
Flattened.
That is the brutal logic of AI-powered curation. It strips away the nuance and compresses your id right into a set of calculated efficiency metrics. Did the product convert? Was the worth aggressive? Did the consumer click on the suggestion? That’s what survives. All the pieces else is misplaced in translation.
Your daring packaging design? Gone, the assistant doesn’t present it. Your tone of voice? Irrelevant, the client is studying a one-line abstract from the assistant. Your heartwarming annual Christmas video, the sort that will get shared on LinkedIn and brings folks to tears? The AI doesn’t care. It’s not a part of the acquisition circulation. On this new ecosystem, even essentially the most iconic manufacturers danger changing into undifferentiated commodities. Your hard-won uniqueness is squashed right into a sameness, a transactional row in an inventory of “beneficial” outcomes.
It’s the nice equalizer, however not in a great way.
As a result of in a world the place AI assistants mediate each buy resolution, branding stops mattering except it reveals up within the machine’s logic. And except your model is uniquely optimized for these methods—except your narrative could be translated into knowledge that improves conversion—it turns into invisible.
Worse, the machine doesn’t care about invested fairness. It doesn’t reward the years you’ve spent constructing belief or the emotional capital you have invested in your clients. It rewards no matter wins the algorithmic race that day. And that could possibly be a no-name non-public label product that momentarily scores just a bit higher on worth or availability.
That is how model loyalty dies, not in some dramatic seismic betrayal, however in a quiet, gradual erosion of distinctiveness. You’ve gone from “beloved model” to “line merchandise.”
And right here’s the kicker: the extra profitable these assistants change into, the extra habituated clients get to skipping over the model totally. They cease asking who they’re shopping for from. They begin solely asking what they’re getting, how a lot it value, and when it is going to arrive.
That’s the commoditization of name id. And it’s the start of the top for loyalty as we all know it.
A Punch to the Intestine of the Loyalty Business
What we’re witnessing isn’t simply an annoying little poke. It’s a direct hit to the photo voltaic plexus of all the loyalty ecosystem, and most of the people within the trade are nonetheless smiling, nodding, and pretending they’ll breathe simply effective.
However they’ll’t. Not in the event that they’re paying consideration.
Let’s break down precisely who’s about to get walloped—and why:
1. Fundamental Loyalty Platforms
The normal loyalty tech stack—factors engines, tier methods, email-based provide orchestration—has been constructed on one sacred assumption: that manufacturers management the client interface. That assumption is now useless.
AI buying assistants like Google’s Gemini are intercepting and changing the UX layer the place loyalty applications have historically lived. Prospects gained’t log into your app to test their factors. They’ll ask their assistant what’s on provide, and the assistant will resolve what to floor based mostly by itself logic.
That stunning dashboard you constructed? It’s gone. Your hard-fought push notification technique? Changed by an AI nudge from another person’s platform. Until loyalty platforms can evolve to plug straight into AI ecosystems with real-time, dynamic, API-ready worth props that survive the reduce, they may change into irrelevant.
2. Companies and Consultants
The loyalty trade’s strategic advisors have lengthy been the architects of name engagement, designing journeys, campaigns, reward buildings, and neighborhood playbooks. However when the assistant turns into the journey designer, what’s left to strategize?
If clients now not work together along with your ecosystem, if rewards are extracted and reinterpreted by means of the assistant’s lens, if behavioral design is lowered to price-point logic all of that narrative scaffolding collapses.
Companies must reinvent their playbooks from the bottom up. Loyalty design will now not be about orchestrating brand-centric experiences. It is going to be about engineering affect inside hostile, third-party ecosystems.
And that’s a very totally different job.
3. Manufacturers and Loyalty Entrepreneurs
Maybe the toughest hit would be the in-house loyalty professionals—these brand-side strategists who’ve spent years establishing slick engagement pathways designed to effectively construct belief and loyalty with their audiences. As a result of now, that belief could be hijacked in a click on by an automatic AI filter with a significantly better conversion fee.
Your personalization technique? Out of date if it could’t be uncovered by means of the assistant’s knowledge layer. Your retention campaigns? Ineffective if the client by no means sees them. Your provide design? Meaningless if the AI decides a competitor’s provide is simply 1.5% higher.
And right here’s the harshest fact of all: The shopper gained’t miss you.
Not as a result of they don’t care, however as a result of they’ll by no means know what they’re lacking. The faceless assistant will ship an optimized expertise. It’ll be quick, frictionless, useful. And the emotional layer you spent years cultivating? Gone in a blink.
4. The Loyalty Business at Massive
That is an extinction-level occasion for the loyalty enterprise mannequin. Some loyalty practitioners already understand it. Some are denying it. However mark my phrases, it’s occurring now.
The larger questions is, what occurs to the $15 billion international loyalty administration market—the distributors, the methods, the conferences, the careers—when buyer engagement is now not brand-mediated? What occurs when “loyalty” turns into a backend variable in another person’s machine?
This isn’t a short cyclical downturn they might want to climate. It’s a tectonic realignment of stakeholder energy. And except we reinvent the sport, we’ll all be enjoying in another person’s sandbox, one with no scoreboard, no guidelines, and no viewers.
In regards to the Writer
Steve is an award-winning engagement designer, brand-customer relationship orchestrator, and enterprise strategist. He has 25+ years of direct expertise within the online game trade, having designed and produced AAA video games for Disney Interactive, Digital Arts, Sega, and Ubisoft which have generated gross sales in extra of $650 million. He has spoken at a wide range of premier occasions, together with Recreation Developer’s Convention (San Jose, California), South by Southwest (Austin, Texas), SIGGRAPH, Juarez Competitiva (Mexico), Gamification Summit (Amsterdam), Banff New Media Competition, GameON Finance (Toronto, Ontario), GDCNext (Los Angeles, California), Digital Leisure Management Discussion board (Hong Kong), Interface Summit, and several other others.
