Most branding theories were designed for a world that may no longer exist

For some time, discussion around artificial intelligence, AGI, intelligent agents and the future of economic decision-making has been accelerating. Much of it revolves around one question: will machines become more intelligent than humans?

For someone working in brand, marketing and strategy, I think another question may be more consequential: if intelligent agents begin to make part of our economic decisions, what happens to the idea of a brand?

Most established branding models, from Keller and Aaker to Kapferer and many meaning-driven approaches, share an assumption: the final audience is human. A human interprets meaning, responds to narrative and symbols, develops associations and eventually decides.

A new intermediary is entering the decision

This is no longer only a speculative scenario. Intelligent agents are entering search, comparison, commerce, service and enterprise workflows. Emerging agentic-commerce infrastructure depends on structured product data, price, availability, fulfilment conditions and other machine-readable signals. Part of what a brand once communicated directly to a person may increasingly need to be legible to a system that filters options before the person sees them.

In B2B, the implication may be even stronger. It is increasingly plausible that an agent will participate in supplier discovery, proposal comparison, risk analysis, evidence gathering or preliminary negotiation.

How does an intelligent agent ‘see’ a brand?

A person may prefer a brand because of trust, identity, story, reputation, beauty or belonging. A machine does not live those meanings in the human sense. What a decision system can process is more likely to appear as data and signals: performance history, error rates, information transparency, data consistency, responsiveness, transaction conditions, reliability and verifiable evidence.

In that sense, what is a brand association for a person may become a decision signal at the machine layer.

This does not mean branding disappears. I suspect the opposite. Brands may become more important because one of their enduring functions has always been to reduce uncertainty. People reduce uncertainty through meaning, experience, memory and association. Machines are more likely to reduce it through data, evidence, consistency and computable credibility.

The future brand needs two representations

I believe brands will increasingly need to exist in two perceptual systems at once.

Human representation: meaning, narrative, personality, myth, identity and experience — the structures through which people understand, remember and relate to a brand.

Machine representation: accurate data, structured knowledge, transparency, reliability, traceable history and signals that a system can retrieve, compare and evaluate.

These should not become two different identities. They should emerge from the same source. If a brand claims quality, responsibility, innovation or reliability, that meaning should be perceptible to people through behaviour and experience, and traceable to machines through evidence and data.

Meaning remains the source

My argument is not that data replaces meaning. Meaning remains the source of the brand. But it may no longer be enough for meaning to appear only through story, visual identity or communication. It must also be capable of translation into the language of machines.

That is why one of the important questions for future brand strategists may sit alongside “What does the customer think of us?”:

When intelligent agents make decisions about us, what will they be able to see?

This question connects directly with Brand Philosophy, Brand Identity and B2B & Corporate Branding. The gap between what a brand says and what its data demonstrates may increasingly become part of brand credibility.

Further reading

• OpenAI: Agentic Commerce Protocol
• OpenAI: Powering Product Discovery in ChatGPT
• Google: Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)
• Original Persian note on Virgool

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