A few years ago, while leading an SEO team, I noticed one day that our effort was focused not on human users, but on satisfying the preferences of algorithms. As someone who’s spent over 20 years in marketing, that was a strange realization. It was also a preview of what was to come.
If SEO represented the first era of marketing to machines, we are now entering the second. This new epoch, driven by autonomous AI agents, is significantly more transformative.
Marketers have long worked within the constructs of B2B and B2C. But a new model is quickly emerging: B2R, or ‘business to robot’. In many cases, this will evolve into B2R2H: ‘business to robot to human.’
Your most valuable customer might no longer be a person. It could be a digital agent, operating independently with the ability to make purchasing decisions. This is not a distant future: AI assistants are already booking meetings, reviewing suppliers, and preparing contracts. The foundation has been laid, and momentum is building.
The fact is, this isn’t getting the type of attention it deserves. Thanks to regulatory developments like the GENIUS Act and the mainstreaming of stablecoins – essentially digital tokens designed to hold a steady value that can be used by bots – AI agents are gaining transactional power. For machine-based commerce to function, money needs to be programmable and accessible without human intervention. This is exactly what stablecoins offer.
An AI agent with a digital wallet can evaluate vendors, check certifications, calculate delivery timelines, and make payment in seconds. There are no forms to fill out, no approval chains, and no delays. Commerce becomes continuous, automated, and intelligent. Stablecoins make machine-to-machine commerce frictionless with no human approval needed for transactions.
So, what does this mean to marketers? This shift requires a different approach to marketing. Instead of focusing solely on human psychology, marketers must now influence the systems that drive automated decisions.
Buyers and consumers may configure their agents to prioritize sustainability, verified sourcing, or specific compliance standards. Companies may soon publish their buying criteria in structured formats designed to guide these agents.
Just as brands once encouraged customers to follow them on social media, they will now prompt businesses to ‘update your agent profile’ to include them in their agent’s preferred vendor list.
It’s important that your brand-to-demand strategies evolve to ensure that your brand, products, and services are discoverable, credible, and selectable by AI systems. This is where reputation meets automation.
Winning marketing in this world won’t just be about getting into someone’s head; it will be about embedding yourself in the criteria their agent uses to decide
The future also includes brands deploying their own agents to negotiate with buyer-side agents. Imagine a technology vendor’s AI agent interacting with a potential client's digital buyer, reviewing specs, pricing, and terms. All in real time.
Imagine your brand’s agent haggling with your material provider agent about the best deal on a key component for your product. Marketing could morph into algorithmic negotiations rather than human persuasion, with smart contracts and dynamic pricing doing the work that once belonged to creative campaigns.
This is not theoretical. Google and more than 50 technology partners have launched the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to standardize communication between AI systems. Platforms such as Pactum already enable companies to handle entire contract negotiations through autonomous agents.
And let’s be clear: agents won’t be swayed by brand storytelling alone. They’ll demand machine-verifiable proof. Buying criteria such as sustainability claims, sourcing standards, and product safety will need to be published in structured, verifiable formats that an AI agent can parse and trust. The future of brand credibility isn’t a glossy campaign; it’s structured data.
To influence an agent, your brand must speak its language. That means publishing key claims, including sustainability credentials, regulatory compliance, and ethical sourcing in structured formats that machines can parse.
Brand equity will no longer be built solely on emotional connection. It will rely heavily on whether your data can be trusted by algorithms.
If AI agents can evaluate, compare, and purchase your product or service in under a minute, many of the metrics we rely on today become irrelevant. Click-through rates, impressions, and conversions are based on human behavior.
Instead, success will depend on factors like inclusion in agent preference sets, algorithmic trust scores, and machine-level eligibility. Marketing teams must start thinking in terms of system-level discoverability and compliance-driven reputation.
For the clients I deal with, the challenge is no longer to just ‘rank on Google’ or ‘optimize the funnel.’ They’re asking: how do we show up in answer engines that power AI agents? How do we encode trust signals in machine-readable ways? How do we design websites as agent-friendly storefronts, capable of supporting automated transactions?
Marketers should begin by assessing how AI tools interpret their brand today. Identify which attributes can be expressed as structured data, and where automation can streamline engagement.
The buyer journey is evolving. Increasingly, AI agents will be involved in or entirely drive B2B purchasing decisions. If marketers want their brands to remain visible and competitive, they need to adapt now.
This is not about abandoning human connection. It is about preparing for a dual audience: the decision maker and their digital proxy. Winning in the next phase of marketing means influencing both.
If you’re not preparing for B2R, you’re preparing to be invisible. Because soon the robots will decide.
