B2A: Marketing to Machines in an Agentic World 🤖
Open AI just changed shopping forever, is your brand ready for it?
Beneath the tidal waves of news that seem to assault us daily you may have missed a quietly revolutionary announcement that Open AI made recently. On 17th July they released Chat GPT Agent with one of the longest and most awkward product demonstrations ever filmed(Altman is no Jobs!).
The good news is, we watched it all so you don’t have to, and wrote this blog to give you everything you need to know about what ChatGPT Agent is, what it means for consumer behaviour, and — critically — how to make sure your brand doesn’t get ghosted by the next generation of AI-powered buyers.
Welcome to the Age of Agents
OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Agent, launched last week, isn’t just another AI update. It’s a line in the sand. Until now, AI tools have mostly advised, summarised, and suggested. This one acts. It can browse the web, read your emails, compare prices, fill out forms, write reports, schedule meetings, even buy things, all within a self-contained virtual workspace. It’s like giving your customers a digital chief-of-staff.
For marketers, this is not just a cool tech trick. It’s a tectonic shift. Consumers are about to outsource large chunks of their decision-making to these agents, and the rules of engagement may never be the same.
The Marketer’s Cheat Sheet: What Agents Actually Do
To be clear, this isn’t your garden-variety chatbot. ChatGPT Agent combines the superpowers of two earlier AI tools: Operator, which could take action online (like clicking buttons and making bookings), and Deep Research, which could scan the web and assemble in-depth, well-sourced reports. Agent does both, seamlessly, without you needing to choose.
That means if your customer says, “Find me a sustainable Korean skincare brand under $100 and book a gift delivery to Singapore for Friday,” the agent won’t just show a list. It’ll pick a brand, compare options, complete the checkout, and send the gift based on what it knows about the customer’s preferences, schedule, and values.
You can bet it won’t click on your ad, read your lovingly crafted About page, or watch your founder story video on Instagram. It will scan structured data. It will look for signals of reliability. It will prioritise product specs, pricing history, shipping speed, refund policy, and third-party reviews. It will judge your brand, but not in the way you’re used to.
What This Means for Marketing Strategy
The most important thing to understand is this: you’re no longer marketing only to humans. You’re marketing to their machines, too.
Consumer journeys are becoming increasingly machine-mediated. AI agents are stepping in as trusted co-pilots, filtering noise, weighing trade-offs, and making fast, rational decisions on behalf of their users. In many cases, your brand will only get in front of a consumer after it passes through an algorithmic filter.
That doesn’t mean emotional storytelling or brand identity no longer matter — far from it. The human behind the agent still cares deeply about trust, aspiration, and how your brand makes them feel. And here’s the kicker: that emotional connection might be the very thing that helps you make the shortlist in the first place. Agents will increasingly learn their users’ preferences — which means brand affinity can precede discovery, not just follow it. The game isn’t logic versus love. It’s logic and love, playing on a loop.
Be Machine-Readable. Be Human-Memorable.
Which brings us to a new balancing act: being structured for machines and magnetic for humans.
Yes, your product data needs to be clean, structured, and easy to scan. Agents aren’t here to admire your art direction — they’re skimming for facts. If your pricing is vague, your shipping unclear, or your returns policy buried in a PDF, the agent won’t stick around.
But here’s the twist: machines learn from us. The signals they prioritise — reviews, click-throughs, dwell time, repeat purchases — are shaped by real behaviour. A brand that people love, share, and come back to leaves a trail agents can’t ignore. No amount of nefarious bot traffic will outrank genuine human engagement.
That means UX isn’t just for people anymore — it’s for proxies, too. Marketing teams need to design experiences that perform on two levels: emotionally resonant for humans, structurally legible for machines.
The sweet spot? A site where storytelling and schema live side by side.
B2A: Business to Agent
So what’s the play here for marketers in APAC and beyond? It’s time to add a new segment to your go-to-market plan: the agent. These AI tools are the new power users, the new influencers, and the new bottlenecks.
They’re also a massive opportunity. Think about it: if you get it right, agents will become your most efficient distribution channel. They’ll be out there 24/7, making purchase decisions at scale, optimising for value, speed, and fit. The brands they trust will win faster, more loyal, more intentional customers without needing to shout above the noise.
This means investing in API access and platform partnerships. Making your brand’s data easy to ingest, easy to compare, and easy to transact. Running experiments not just with A/B tests on humans, but with how agents interpret your product feeds. Tracking agent traffic in your analytics stack. Designing promotional hooks that machines can recognise and act on - like bundling, urgency triggers, or contextual relevance based on calendar events or weather.
It’s a new muscle. But it’s one worth building now, before everyone else catches up.
Final Word
If your brand has spent years perfecting how to talk to people, now’s the time to learn how to talk to their machines too. It’s NOT the end of marketing - it’s the start of a new discipline. Welcome to B2A: Business to Agent.
And congratulations, by the way. You just saved yourself an hour of awkward on-stage banter and confusing camera angles. Now go brief your digital team - and maybe your CTO while you’re at it. Need help with that? We’re here for you. Speak to one of our modelers about how the changing media, marketing and commercial landscape will impact your business before it’s too late!