Post by Franck Marteau

Will your next customer be a Human ? 💎 Howard Yu was my professor at IMD. He has a rare gift: connecting history, economics and technology into one coherent picture of where things are actually heading. His latest essay with video, should be required reading for every CEO, CMO, founder and board member who still thinks their marketing funnel is safe. 3 things I took from his research on agentic commerce: 💡 The agent shelf replaces the marketing funnel. An AI agent now filters the world before human eyes ever see it. The battle for your customer no longer happens on your app or your website, it happens one step earlier, between your brand and a machine you never interact with. Professor Mark Greeven calls it the "agent shelf": the short list the agent picks from before showing you anything. 📢 Machine-readable trust is the new brand equity. A machine doesn't read your slogan. It reads on-time delivery rate, refund speed, time to resolve an exception, error rate in your product data. If your team takes more than a day to pull these, your brand doesn't exist yet to an agent. 🛒 Whoever owns the agent owns the customer. In China, ByteDance put an agent inside a phone. Within days, WeChat, Taobao and Alipay blocked it, not for security reasons, but for survival. If the agent opens any app on your phone, the customer belongs to whoever owns the agent, not to the app. The first open war over the agent layer has already started. Who will win Claude ChatGPT Mistral Google or new comers ? The video is in Howard's post below. Worth every minute. 👇 #AI #Agentic #Marketing #Branding #GEO #IMD