Is AI taking over the customer journey?
How to keep your brand visible in 2027
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the way customers discover, compare, and choose to buy brands. Where the customer journey used to run through search engines, websites, and campaigns, AI assistants and smart agents are increasingly taking over that process. At the Light Up Tech Conference, Raymond Muilwijk, our Group AI Director, shared what this means for marketing, customer experience, and digital strategy. The key question: will your brand still be visible in a world where AI drives the customer journey?
What feels like cutting-edge innovation today is quickly becoming a fundamental shift in how decisions are made. Not just by people, but on their behalf.
)
)
How AI is drastically changing the customer journey
Raymond demonstrated how user interfaces have always adapted, even as the core goal —understanding peoples’ intent — remains basically unchanged. From terminals (typing), to mouse (clicking), to mobile (swiping), to voice (speaking) … and now to conversational and agent-driven interfaces. But this time, it’s fundamentally different.
Where we once searched, clicked, compared, and read ourselves, AI now does that work for us. For instance, you might simply say: “I need the perfect shoes to run a marathon.” and an AI agent will:
compare brands
check online reviews
analyze specifications
assess value for money
present 2–3 options with the reasoning beind them.
Decision-making now happens in minutes instead of days. The number of brand touchpoints? Just one, or maybe even none.
This shifts the focus of the customer journey from your channels to AI platforms that have already filtered options before a customer even sees your brand. For marketing and CX, this means that influence relies less on banners, landing pages, or campaigns, but more on the data AI uses to make recommendations.
)
From SEO to AI optimization: how to stay visible in AI recommendations
For years, online visibility was all about staying top-of-mind on search engines. Rank high on Google, drive traffic to your site, and guide that traffic to win customers for your brand. Very straightforward, right? But AI agents use the web differently. They don’t read pages like us humans do. They consume structured data, APIs, and context, combine sources, and generate direct answers or recommendations based on that.
This requires a new approach to optimization. Not just for search engines, but for generative AI. The focus has shifted fundamentally.
Instead of:
ranking high on Google
driving traffic to your site
controlling the on-site experience.
You need to ensure that:
AI understands your data
agents recognize your brand as a reliable source
your product information is directly usable in AI responses.
Your website is no longer just a destination for visitors, it’s a data source for AI systems deciding which brands make it into their recommendations. If you’re not in there, you basically don’t exist, even if your marketing looks great on the front end.
)
Hello. I am AI, your new brand spokesperson
One striking insight from the session: brands now have a new spokesperson. No, it’s not your campaign or your tone of voice. It’s your systems that will soon speak on your behalf. Your CRM, ERP, product database, and content structure together shape the image AI forms of your brand.
When AI compares products or evaluates vendors, it relies purely on facts: are specifications accurate, are prices consistent, are terms clear, is the information up-to-date? Starting from this, it forms a rational assessment of trustworthiness and relevance, deciding which brands get recommended.
We see brand experience shifting from storytelling to system quality. What your data proves becomes more important than what you promise.
)
Why Data as a product is critical in a world driven by AI
In this new reality, data becomes a strategic product in itself. Raymond calls this “data as a product”: data that’s intentionally designed, maintained, and improved like a service or application.
Humans navigate with emotion, design, and storytelling. AI agents navigate with structure, completeness, timeliness, and machine readability. Incomplete or messy data is like a physical store with missing price tags and near-empty shelves.
Organizations face two strategic choices:
1. Become a trusted source for AI agents
Ensure that your data is open, well-structured, and accessible via APIs, vector databases, and AI standards so external agents can find and represent you accurately.
2. Own the full journey yourself
Build your own AI interfaces, limit external AI access, and try to keep the entire interaction within your closed ecosystem.
The first strategy maximizes visibility in an open ecosystem. The second offers more control but holds the risk of becoming invisible once customers shift to external assistants. Either way, data quality becomes a direct driver of business outcomes.
)
Why a central AI strategy matters in your digital ecosystem
Almost every software vendor is adding AI to their products: CRMs, e-commerce platforms, marketing tools, and service solutions are all being equiped with smart features. This delivers value locally, but without central oversight, you could end up with:
fragmented AI solutions
dispersed data
inconsistent security rules
a blurred view of costs and/or impact.
Different AI tools may use separate data streams, security policies, and performance metrics. This makes it hard to see AI’s true impact on the customer journey, assess risks, or control costs. That’s why a central AI and orchestration layer isn’t optional, but essential:
A single place for model selection and routing
Centralized guardrails and compliance
Shared data pipelines and vector stores
Insights into usage, costs, and performance.
AI is evolving from a feature to core infrastructure, something you design, monitor, and manage like your cloud environment or data platform.
)
The future of interfaces: from screens to ambient AI
As if AI agents weren’t enough, the interface itself is evolving too. The “next interface” may not be in your hand, but on your face (think smart glasses), in your ear, or embedded in other wearables. AI becomes ambient: always present, ready to assist at the right moment.
Brand interactions will increasingly happen outside your channels. Not via your homepage, but through assistants aggregating information into a single recommendation. We’ll see the point of decision moving further away from the brand itself.
AI in marketing: sooner than you think
This isn’t some far-off futuristic vision. The technologies, standards, and platforms enabling this already exist and are evolving fast. Many organizations are still experimenting, but the general direction is clear.
Companies investing in data quality, architecture, and governance now are building up a lead that’s hard to catch later. Those who wait risk that the rules are being set by their competitors, once AI becomes the dominant channel.
)
The future of the customer journey starts with your data
Raymond’s central message was strategic, not technological: are you playing to lose… or designing to win?
AI will reshape the customer journey. The question is whether your brand will:
play an active role as a trusted data source
orbe reduced to an anonymous option in a list read out by AI
The customer journey isn’t disappearing. But it is shifting from screens to systems, from interfaces to infrastructure, and from marketing to data.
The strategic question for organizations isn’t just how to use AI in campaigns or content, but how to ensure their brand is visible, understandable, and trusted by AI systems making choices on behalf of our customers. In a world where AI drives the journey, this is becoming the new form of discoverability, and the new competitive playing field.
Companies that take this seriously today are designing not just for the next campaign, but for the next generation of customer experience.
Curious how AI impacts your brand? Let’s talk!
Want to know how your organization can actively adapt to this new reality? Or how to keep your brand visible in a world where AI drives the customer journey?
Get in touch with us. We’ll share insights, and show you how to start building tomorrow’s customer experience today.
Together, we’ll make sure your brand still plays an active role in the AI-driven world of 2027.