"AI is choosing the brands now"
September 2, 2026
What LEAP made obvious, and why the next battle for consideration may happen before a customer ever reaches you.
Welcome to this week's Takumi AI Brief.
I'm writing this from LEAP in Riyadh.
There is no shortage of AI here.
Agents. Models. Infrastructure. Automation. New interfaces. Bigger promises.
But walking the halls, one thought keeps coming back to me.
The most consequential shift for marketers may not be what AI can create.
It's what AI can choose.
01 · The Trend That Actually Matters
New research from BCG surveyed more than 13,000 consumers across 12 markets.
Nearly a third now use AI somewhere in their purchase journey, roughly three times the level of just 18 months ago.
Among people who regularly use AI to make purchase decisions, 70% ultimately buy what it recommends.
But here's the number that should actually get a CMO's attention.
In roughly 63% of AI-assisted purchase journeys, AI introduces consumers to brands they wouldn't otherwise have considered.
Read that again.
For decades, marketers spent billions building the consideration set. Advertising created awareness. Search captured intent. Social created discovery. Retail converted it.
Now another participant has entered the journey, and it's assembling the shortlist itself.
02 · The AI Shift to Watch
We've talked a lot about AI changing search.
I think that undersells what's actually happening.
Search still assumes the consumer does most of the work. Type the query. Review the options. Compare the products. Visit the sites. Decide.
AI changes the role of the interface entirely.
You can simply ask what the best business bank is, which SUV fits a family of five, or what a skincare routine for sensitive skin should look like.
Instead of ten blue links, AI narrows the market, explains the trade-offs, and recommends the answer.
BCG calls this AI becoming a new gatekeeper for consumer choice.
I'd call it something more specific. The Consideration Shift, mental availability no longer decided by what a person remembers, but by what a machine chooses to surface.
For years, big brands had an obvious advantage. People bought what they already knew.
But what happens once the consumer hands part of that decision to a machine that can evaluate hundreds of brands they've never heard of?
AI could strengthen incumbents.
It could just as easily become the greatest challenger-brand discovery engine we've ever seen.
That's the part established brands should worry about most.
03 · If I Were in the CMO Chair
This isn't theoretical anymore.
Walmart's AI shopping assistant, Sparky, helps customers build baskets, reorder regular purchases, and navigate shopping missions conversationally.
Walmart says customers using Sparky currently have an average order value around 35% higher than non-Sparky users. The company won't claim AI alone causes that uplift, but the commercial signal is hard to ignore.
The progression matters. AI started by answering questions. Then it helped people discover products. Now it's building the basket.
The next step is obvious. It buys.
Discovery. Evaluation. Recommendation. Transaction.
Potentially inside one conversation.
We spent twenty years removing friction from the customer journey.
AI may remove much of the journey itself.
04 · If I Were in the CMO Chair
I'd stop thinking about this purely as GEO.
GEO matters. But optimising content so ChatGPT mentions your brand is only one part of a much bigger shift.
The real question I'd put to my team is simple.
Would an AI system actually understand why it should recommend us?
→ Not whether our website ranks → Not whether we have an llms.txt file → Not whether somebody mentioned us on Reddit last month
Why should the machine put our brand on the shortlist at all?
That takes a different kind of marketing discipline. Clear propositions. Authoritative product information. Independent evidence. Reviews and real customer experience. Strong brand signals across credible sources. Structured information machines can actually parse. And, most importantly, genuine differentiation.
Because AI is very good at summarising, which means brands whose propositions sound exactly like everyone else's have a new problem.
The machine sees through the marketing language faster than any customer ever did.
The CMO Takeaway
One of the dominant conversations at LEAP is AI agents moving from assistance to action.
For marketers, that shift is already happening much closer to home. Inside the buying decision itself.
The old question was how to persuade the customer to choose you.
The new one is how to make sure AI considers you worth recommending in the first place.
If AI increasingly controls the shortlist, the battle for the customer starts before your ad is seen. Before your website is visited. Possibly before the customer even knows your brand exists.
AI has joined the buying committee.
Marketing needs to earn its vote.
Mohit Lodha, Founder, Takumi AI