Invisible consumer: What happens to small businesses when AI does the shopping?

I spent some time this week listening to an episode of I’ve Got Questions, Futurist Sinead Bovell’s podcast, featuring Professor Gillian Hadfield, a scholar exploring AI economics and law. She spoke about a shift that is quietly approaching the horizon: the rise of an “economy of agents.”

Right now, we take for granted that humans are at the absolute centre of the digital marketplace. We’re the ones who open a browser, scroll through social media, compare prices, read reviews and eventually decide where to spend our money.

Tech companies however, are pouring billions into a very different future. A future where autonomous AI agents will do most of those tasks on our behalf. You’ll give your digital assistant a set of parameters, whether you need a local electrician, a catering supplier or a bookkeeping tool, and it will go out into the digital wilderness to filter, negotiate and execute the transaction for you.

It’s a fascinating, slightly dizzying concept. As someone who spends every day working alongside independent, founder-led brands, it made me ask a very practical question: what happens to marketing when the customer on the other side of the screen is a machine?

The end of digital charm

For the last decade, small business marketing has leaned heavily on what I like to think of as digital charm.

We write personal captions. We share behind-the-scenes glimpses of our workshops, studios or shops. We spend hours choosing the exact right photography and colour palettes for our websites because we know that human beings make buying decisions based on emotion, alignment and trust.

An AI agent, however, cannot feel charmed.

It doesn’t experience a warm response to a moving founder story. It doesn’t notice the aesthetic layout of an Instagram grid, and it isn’t swayed by a witty headline. It evaluates raw data, technical compatibility, pricing parameters and code structure.

If the digital marketplace transitions into an ongoing dialogue between software systems, the traditional “shortcuts” we’ve used to build visibility online completely change. The emotional hooks disappear.

The risk of the automated squeeze

Professor Hadfield points out that our existing systems, from law and courts to standard economic structures, aren’t built for a world where software is the primary economic operator. And for independent businesses, the operational challenge is very specific.

Large global brands have the capital and technical resources to build massive, structured data loops. They can optimise their digital footprints perfectly to satisfy a machine’s strict optimisation criteria.

If independent brands try to compete purely on that technical, data-driven battlefield, they risk being squeezed out of digital discovery entirely. When choices are outsourced to an algorithm that only reads code, the human texture that makes a local business compelling is easily overlooked.

While that might sound alarming, I think it actually exposes a profound opportunity for independent brands.

Moving outside the machine loop

When the process of searching, comparing and transacting online becomes entirely automated, human behaviour will shift in response.

If our digital spaces become a frictionless landscape managed entirely by software, the things we value as flesh-and-blood humans will move elsewhere. We will seek out the spaces and experiences that code cannot replicate.

This isn’t to say digital marketing disappears. Your website and local profiles still need to be clean, accurate, and technically sound so that machines can find the basic facts. But it means recognising that your actual competitive advantage lies entirely outside the machine loop.

It survives in the elements of business that cannot be coded:

• The value of local presence: A physical shopfront, an open studio or an in-person consultation becomes far more than a place to complete a transaction. It becomes an essential trust anchor.
• Un-automatable word-of-mouth: You cannot automate the trust built when a regular client recommends your business to a neighbour over the garden fence. In an agent economy, human-to-human relationships become a premium, protected circle of credibility.
• Clarity over decoration: Instead of spending endless hours trying to dress up your digital channels to trick a changing system, the objective shifts to simple, unvarnished utility. Tell the internet exactly what you do, where you are and how to buy from you. Let the data be clean for the machines, but save your creative energy for the actual people in front of you.

A more sustainable perspective

It’s incredibly easy to look at the rapid pace of technology and feel a constant sense of pressure to pivot, learn a new platform or completely change how you show up online.

Looking a little further down the horizon usually brings us right back to the same timeless principles. Marketing, at its core, has always been about relationships.

The tools evolve, the platforms change, and we may soon find ourselves marketing to digital proxies instead of directly to human eyes, but the businesses that thrive over the long term will still be the ones that understand how to make real people feel seen, welcomed and remembered.

That’s something no algorithm can emulate, and no digital agent can buy on our behalf.

If you’re looking at your current digital presence and want to build a more grounded, sustainable strategy that focuses on real-world impact rather than chasing every tech trend, we’re always here to help you navigate it. Feel free to get in touch with us at CoLab Marketers.