Advertising to AIs

 Agentic AI is a trending term. If the hype comes true, perhaps all that will be left for humans is to buy things. But what if AIs start clicking on ads?

Google Trends for "agentic ai," last 12 months, worldwide

Agentic AIs are autonomous systems that can make decisions and take actions without direct human intervention (SSOnetwork). They have goal-oriented behavior and adaptive responses, which maps pretty well to my working definition of agency. Forecast applications range from robotics to executing trades based on real-time market analysis.

If AI's really become agents, then they will be spending money on somebody's behalf. If they're buying things, things there's an opportunity for marketing. 

While people know how to make ads to humans, AIs are aliens. We don’t have any intuitions about how to market to them effectively. That’s not a problem, though. Most online ads are already placed, and increasingly designed, by algorithms that their human developers cannot explain. The algorithms will learn how to appeal to other AIs as easily as they learn to appeal to people. We may soon see ads crafted by AIs to appeal to other AIs, using optimization strategies that would be incomprehensible to human marketers.

The AI-oriented ads may be invisible to humans. Digital platforms like Google and Amazon could find themselves hosting an entirely new market of AI-to-AI commerce with no humans in the loop. The leading edge of advertising might not be about appealing to human emotions at all, but rather about optimizing for AI decision-making processes.

Two afterthoughts, Feb 13, 2025

Probably the first place we’ll see AI-to-AI marketplaces will be in business-to-business transactions (“A2A in B2B,” you heard it here first). There’s a lot of gold in the upstream value chain, there are fewer parties than in business-to-consumer, and machine-readable contracts provide an infrastructure for executing transactions.

Procurement employees often go to trade shows to learn about new products and offerings. Trade show and conference planning in the US is a $20+ billion business. More than 10 million professionals attended B2B trade shows in the U.S. last year. I wonder if there will be an AI-to-AI equivalent of a trade show. It seems unlikely since algorithms don’t have flesh to press, but they might find value in many-to-many networking opportunities.