While we all know our B2B from our B2C audiences, how about B2A? Jack Smyth, chief solutions officer for AI, planning, and insights at Brandtech company Jellyfish, explores why ‘brand-to-agent’ is the most important audience you’ll never meet.
We split our industry into two audiences: B2C and B2B.
Now, a new audience will break down that barrier: B2A.
B2A is ‘brand-to-agent’ marketing.
A marketing practice focused on the most important audience you’ll never meet: agents. We’re increasingly surrounded by AI agents who can navigate the web, compare brands, choose products, and complete tasks without supervision.
Every single day, every single one of your customers has a set of goals – from buying milk to comparing cloud providers — that an agent will do.
These agents will become part of every brand’s audience. According to recent research from Salesforce, 24% of people are already comfortable with AI agents shopping for them, and among gen Z, that number jumps to 32%.
For some categories, they’ll be the most influential members of your audience. Influencers, intermediaries, and affiliates who work upstream of what lands in cart.
You can trace the future simply by walking backwards from the point of purchase. Amazon’s Buy For Me and Perplexity’s Buy With Pro features are crawlers with credit cards, shopping agents that fetch a product without you having to browse.
Now scale that to holidays. Cars. Credit cards. Mortgages and more.
Coming to a marketing department near you
Our internal forecasts – built over the industry, search and social trends – show agent adoption will surge in the next six months. Starting with simple commerce automation but growing fastest in three key industries: beauty, auto, and travel.
In these industries we predict a ratio of seven active agents for every individual customer by 2026.
Pause for a second: seven agents for every individual customer. A new network of AI collaborators, confidants, and curators surrounding the person you try to reach every day.
Your media budget won’t increase by 7x to accommodate these new AI eyeballs, so how can you influence the most important audience you’ll never meet?
The beauty industry is the canary in the goldmine as agentic shopping follows existing virtual try-on features and influencer referral loops.
Curating your look – drawing inspiration from a celebrity, creator, or close friend – is a common part of the beauty experience. Agents proactively comparing their latest look and recommendations for your review will create a new filter for every trend.
How to make the most of the B2A marketing revolution
The B2A revolution is building with every new model, fundraise, and feature release.
The CMOs who recognize agents as an audience, worth their time and effort to influence, will become their first choice.
If you want to prime your brand to growth through B2A start with these three basics:
- Understand what each major LLM thinks about your brand. The most popular agents are powered by the most popular models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more. These models have built a diverse and surprising set of preferences for every category based on their training set and every asset you publish.
- Evaluate every asset from the agent’s POV. Here’s where the power of multimodality comes into play. The core models that power these agents can read text, look at images, listen to audio, and watch video. Start at the point of purchase and work your way back. What will they read, see, watch and compare?
- Audit your media plan to ensure it reaches both audiences: humans and AI. Beyond the model preferences, the companies building these agents have commercial partners that will ‘route’ their requests to certain platforms, retailers, and apps – creating precious opportunities to catch an agent’s attention.
Agents will become the most important audience you’ll never meet. They may also be your most attentive audience.
Multimodality means they don’t get bored, they pay attention to every pixel, and they’re working round the clock to meet the needs of people you try to reach every day.
And we’re already seeing conversion rates improve by up to 69% by optimizing for agents browsing on behalf of your ultimate audience.
Optimizing your CTAi, or call-to-agent, will become a core part of marketing.
This is more than a line of text in a banner.
Every aspect of your brand will need to be analyzed from the agents’ point of view.
From point-of-sale layout to positioning and pricing, why would my agent choose you?