How AI Will Become Your Main Customer

As artificial intelligence increasingly mediates consumer purchasing decisions, ecommerce brands face a new paradigm: optimizing not just for human shoppers, but for AI systems that recommend and potentially purchase products on their behalf. Recent data from Boston Consulting Group indicates that 28% of consumers are already using AI for product recommendations in categories like cosmetics, signaling a shift that could reshape how brands approach digital commerce.

The implications for Amazon sellers and ecommerce businesses are significant. When a customer asks ChatGPT for product recommendations, the AI's perception of your brand becomes as crucial as traditional marketing metrics. This dynamic is already playing out in unexpected ways, as demonstrated by a meal prep company that received negative AI recommendations due to seemingly minor details in their marketing materials – like garnishing dishes with chopped chives, which the AI interpreted as overly complex for their target audience.

"Making your brand accessible to an LLM is really difficult if your brand shows up in different ways in different places," notes Rebecca Sykes, partner at Brandtech Group. This highlights a critical challenge for ecommerce brands: maintaining consistency across all digital touchpoints becomes even more crucial when AI systems are analyzing your entire online presence.

The emergence of AI as a key stakeholder has spawned new analytical tools and methodologies. Brandtech Group's Share of Model software, for instance, evaluates how different AI models perceive brands, revealing that various models can form distinctly different impressions of the same brand. Some may view a brand as reliable while others might question its credibility, based on subtle variations in their training data.

For Amazon sellers and ecommerce brands, this new landscape presents both challenges and opportunities. Early experiments suggest that brands can influence AI perceptions through strategic content creation and careful management of their digital footprint. Pernod Ricard's experience with their Ballantine's whisky brand demonstrates this potential – they're actively working to adjust AI perceptions of their mass-market product line through targeted social media assets and revised marketing materials.

However, the relationship between brands and AI systems is likely to mirror the evolution of search engine optimization – a constant balance between legitimate optimization and attempts to game the system. Research from Carnegie Mellon University has already identified how specific prompt structures can dramatically influence AI product recommendations, raising concerns about potential manipulation of these systems.

The AI angle adds another layer of complexity to ecommerce strategy. Beyond traditional SEO and marketplace optimization, brands must now consider how their products and content appear to AI systems. This includes everything from product descriptions and imagery to brand messaging and customer service interactions. The challenge lies in optimizing for AI comprehension while maintaining authentic, valuable connections with human customers.

Particularly relevant for Amazon sellers is the potential bias in AI systems toward global brands over local ones, as identified by University of South Florida researchers. This bias could impact how AI systems recommend products, potentially affecting smaller sellers and private label brands on the platform.

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• Reddit is actively developing a paid subreddit model as part of its post-IPO monetization strategy. The platform is also expanding AI partnerships and exploring marketplace features.

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT continues rapid adoption, now serving 400m users WEEKLY and 2 million businesses. The company is preparing to launch GPT-4.5 and GPT-5, merging its AI models for enhanced reasoning and conversation.

• OpenAI framed ChatGPT as the next major human innovation, comparing AI’s impact to the wheel, electricity, and the internet while showcasing its Sora video generation tool in ad production.

• Prompting at it’s finest!

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😍It was great, all I needed

🙂Good, not great

🙄It sucked