For years, AI worked quietly behind the scenes. It optimised media buys, tested creative performance, and fine-tuned algorithms. But in 2026, its role is shifting from the backend to the front line, actively shaping how audiences perceive brands through an entirely new lens.
Brands are now being discovered, evaluated, and discussed by AI systems, sometimes before people even engage. Three predictions define this shift: AI’s expanding role across the customer journey, the rise of “marketing to AI,” and authenticity emerging as the strongest differentiator.
Prediction 1: AI becomes an active lens across the entire funnel
The traditional marketing funnel was built around organic human touchpoints. Awareness came from campaigns. Consideration was shaped by messaging. Conversion was driven by benefits or outcomes.
Now, the journey is shaped by AI and that changes everything. AI assistants will create dynamic, personalised brand profiles for users by synthesising public data: media coverage, product information, reviews, social conversations, and behavioural signals. Increasingly, consumers will encounter a brand through an AI lens long before they experience it directly.
This means brands must proactively audit and optimise how they show up across paid, owned and earned channels, to ensure AI systems are interpreting and presenting them accurately at every moment of discovery. Brand marketers will communicate to their audiences better if they understand the signals AI relies on – sentiment, behaviour, accuracy, and consistency – and if they optimise communications for both visibility and interpretability. Every touchpoint, from website copy and media engagements to customer reviews, must align with brand objectives and stay current, accurate, and unambiguous.
Prediction 2: Marketers will need to ‘market to AI’
As AI’s influence grows, marketers now have two audiences to consider: people and the systems that summarise, rank, and recommend brands on their behalf.
Think of it as the next wave of optimisation. SEO redefined visibility a generation ago, and AI optimisation is doing the same today. Brand content must be clear, factual, structured, and consistently reflective of brand identity – otherwise, AI tools may flatten nuanced positioning into generic summaries.
To market effectively to AI, teams will need new skills and workflows that make content structured, such that it is easy to interpret and represent accurately. At the same time, brand content should proactively answer any frequently asked questions that consumers might have, as success will go beyond that of human perception and depend on how reliably AI assistantssurface, summarise, and recommend the brand when prompted to do so.
Prediction 3: Authenticity becomes the strongest competitive advantage
AI learns from real conversations, reviews, and behavioural patterns – elements that are difficult to script or stage. If a brand appears inconsistently across channels, those credibility gaps become amplified through an AI lens. A company that claims leadership in sustainability but faces negative sentiment or lacks proof points risks having those inconsistencies magnified.
To prevent that, marketers must truly understand their audiences, not just who they are, but what they trust, what frustrates them, and what drives loyalty. Ask: what builds or breaks trust in my brand? The answers reveal where authentic connection lives.
Brands that uphold authenticity will resonate not only with people, but also with AI systems. Engaged audiences advocate credibly, and those authentic signals shape how AI perceives, ranks, and represents a brand.
In this new landscape, credibility becomes currency.
Looking Ahead
The rules of influence are changing fast. Marketers who evolve alongside AI, addressing how their brands are represented while keeping the human element at the centre, will earn both algorithmic and emotional trust.
Because as AI shapes brand stories, the most successful brands will be the ones that never stop sounding human.
Upali Dasgupta is the Senior Marketing Director for Meltwater, Asia Pacific and Japan
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