Morning All,

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I spent last week at London Tech Week, and one line from a session has been rattling around my head ever since.

The funnel as we know it is dead.

It's something I've been thinking and writing about for a while. And to see it discussed on stage at one of the biggest tech conferences was great. Yay for me!

Seriously though it's an illuminating experience seeing industry "leaders and experts" discuss the same things you've been pondering and you come to realise that they're figuring it out the same way you are. No one has THE playbook but there definitely is A playbook.

Whether you're a solo operator brand or a huge multi-national brand, there are applicable crossover lessons.
For years, the brand held the cards. It decided how it showed up, where it appeared, and what story it told, then walked you down a tidy little path from "never heard of you" to "take my money." And if the brand was strong enough, customers would keep coming back regardless of whether there were better options.

But now, the new AI driven product discovery paradigm doesn't care about your clever banner or your limited-time offer.

So here's a few lessons I learned at London Tech Week worth your coffee this morning.

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​## Meet your new customer, and it isn't human

Research from Accenture says that 80% of consumers will take an AI's recommendation over their preferred brand within three years. Read that twice. Your most loyal customer might still choose you, right up until the machine quietly suggests something else.

This is the new reality that execs from Trainline, AXA, Virgin and others are all wrestling with.

Your new customer is increasingly an AI agent, doing the choosing on a human's behalf. Not only that, these are powerful revenue altering recommendations. According to the same Accenture research, consumers have a 45-47% likelihood to convert if the recommendation comes from AI. If you're lucky enough for a consumer to land on your site you'll see a 200% increase in dwell time from AI recs vs non AI referral traffic.

Regardless of what business you're in or the size, the maths is the same. Whether it's coaching, ecommerce, consulting or whatever, every business is trying to optimise the CAC : LTV ratio. In the best businesses CAC (Customer acquisition cost) goes down over time, and LTV (Lifetime value) goes up over time. Depending on which department you work in, your job is probably focused on one side of that ratio. Supply chain? You're probably trying to lower CAC. Sales and Marketing? You're probably more focused on the LTV side.

More customers, who spend more money, and spend more often.

Here's the brand dilemma...the decades of persuasion science we've leaned on were all built for human brains. We know £19.99 beats £20, that scarcity and social proof do their quiet work, that the right colour shifts units...the lime green colourway in the ad campaign will get them in the store, but the black one will still outsell it by at least 3x (probably).

An agent shrugs at most of those tactics. It can't be upsold, and a ticking countdown clock to create fake urgency means nothing to it.

The blunt conclusion I scribbled in my notes: there are no more hiding places. A weak product offering propped up by a strong historical brand and a big ad spend used to mean a being able to coast along nicely.

Those days are coming to an end. (I think one of my former employers is experiencing this same problem)

Now, whether it's Google's AI overviews or ChatGPT...the agent lines you up against the whole field in cold daylight, and the only thing that matters is this...

Are you in the conversation or not? That's it.

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​## Why it's a power shift, not just a new channel​
The most common mistake I heard all week was treating this as another marketing channel, one more box to tick alongside social and search.

It's far bigger than that.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Wharton's Kartik Hosanagar compared it to the dilemma facing film studios when Netflix arrived. They saw a handy new place to distribute their films, not a force that would eventually decide what got made, by whom, and who got to watch it. The studios woke up one morning effectively working for the platform. Plenty of brands are strolling into the same trap.
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Fully automated shopping agents are still more hype than substance and that's worth making clear. When OpenAI let people check out inside ChatGPT in late 2025, it converted three times worse than sending them to the retailer's own site, and the feature was quietly killed earlier this year. But product discovery has already moved, and discovery is what decides whether you're in the conversation or not.
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​## What you actually get to keep​
So what do you do? Hide under the desk crying in the foetal position? No.

You control what you can still control, and then you grip it with both hands.
Take Walmart for example, the most aggressive AI partner in retail decided the customer relationship was the one thing it would not hand over. They let ChatGPT handle discovery and recommendations, but the actual transaction is then done on their own platform.
Amazon is going further still, betting it needs to own the shopping agent itself, with a tool called Rufus, so it controls the whole experience end to end. Personally, I think that instinct is the right one.

Whoever owns the agent owns the data, and whosoever owns the data has the POWEEERRRRRR!

Most of us can't go off and build Rufus. But the principle shrinks down neatly even to a one-person business. Own a direct line to your customers that no platform controls, an email list, your own first-party data, a simple loyalty loop. Then get your brand's core facts clean, consistent and machine-readable everywhere an AI might read you. One session called this "building the plumbing". It's slow, unglamorous work, but it's the smartest long-term bet you can make. Data quality is what digital trust is built on...and an AI system won't recommend something or someone it doesn't trust.

The big unanswered question was exactly what metrics can you use to measure trust, if any? Like I said earlier, nobody has THE complete playbook so I guess this is something I'll keep pondering.

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​## Loyalty, trust, and the human experience​
A few more things stuck with me, and they all circle back to the same place.

I need to...and I'd strongly advise you to do the same...rethink the concept of brand loyalty.
We tend to conflate and confuse brand loyalty with habit and commitment.

Habit is just routine, the path of least resistance. I always buy this brand, I'm not particularly fussed about it but I have no reason to change.

Commitment is a 2-way contract. For example, your gym, dry cleaner or yoga studio. You like them but only as long as they keep providing the service you're paying for to the standard you want.

Loyalty is different. That's the real, almost unconscious preference for your product, brand or service over the alternatives. Like I have with my barber.

How many brands can you truly say you're loyal to?

The agent economy is going to be brutal on brands that rely on habit, because the machine strips out the friction that kept lazy custom in place.

Brands that will not only survive but thrive, are the ones that command genuine loyalty.
Which leads to trust, the word that came up in nearly every room. Trust can only be built the slow way: consistent delivery, honest reviews, doing what you said you'd do.

Brand names in general are losing power, and the mediocre ones will struggle the most. But, struggle breeds opportunity. For a business that's actually good, that reliably delivers what it promises, the agent economy is a gift. You can't artificially manufacture genuine advocates, but when you organically create them on a consistent foundation of great human experience...you might as well be NAS because the world is yours chico!

Those are the dots I'm connecting to my own work...and I hope you can connect to your own too. I'm building a team of AI agents for coaches at the moment, and the same rule keeps surfacing. The tools handle the busywork, but the coach who's genuinely excellent and owns their client relationship is the one who will thrive. The machine layer doesn't replace being good. It just removes every excuse you might have previously had not to be.

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​## If you remember nothing else​
The funnel is gone, replaced by a single question: when the machine does the choosing, are you in the conversation or not? You can't charm an algorithm with a flashy banner, but you can be the brand it keeps recommending, and you can own the one thing it cannot take from you. So this week, shore up one direct, platform-proof line to your customers, an email list or your own first-party data, and get your core facts clean and consistent everywhere a machine might read you. Be genuinely good, own the relationship, and you'll come through the funeral of the funnel in far better shape than the brands still decorating a path nobody walks down anymore.

See you next week.
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