What if your customer is no longer human?
I just returned from MAICON, the Marketing AI Conference.
Jeremiah Owyang, General Partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, shared a simple but seismic idea: marketing is shifting from business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) to B2A… business to agent.
It resonated with me.
Because it connects directly to a conversation we’ve been having at Intercept about what’s being called the Dead Internet. The term sounds dramatic, but it captures today’s reality. The internet, as we knew it, is no longer predominantly human.
According to Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report, automated traffic now accounts for 51% of all web activity. Within that, 37% is classified as malicious or manipulative. The web we create content for (our ads, websites, and campaigns) is now more machine-read than human-read.
The Agentic Layer
AI agents are here.
They’re not just chatbots or simple automation tools. They are autonomous systems that can perceive their environment, make decisions, and act to achieve specific goals, often learning and adapting over time.
Agents access and add to memory. They self-determine a plan of action, verify their steps, complete complex tasks, and continuously improve. In simpler terms, they don’t just follow instructions; they decide how to accomplish them.
Some will work directly with people. These are primary agents that act as personal or enterprise-facing assistants. Others will operate in the background. Execution agents that carry out delegated tasks such as research, procurement, or reporting.
Together, they create what I call the Agentic Layer. This is a new interface where non-human actors drive discovery, evaluation, and decision-making long before a person ever sees your message.
If that sounds futuristic, it’s already here. A Salesforce-commissioned IDC survey found that adoption of agentic AI is expected to grow 327% by 2027 as organizations experiment with autonomous workflows. And while projections vary, most analysts agree a significant share of job roles will change as enterprises deploy agents across marketing, operations, and procurement.
From Journeys to Jobs
For decades, marketing has been organized around the funnel. A sequence that moves humans through awareness, consideration, and decision. It assumes time, emotion, and persuasion.
Agents don’t move that way. They don’t browse or deliberate. They execute jobs. And their process is logical, not emotional: find, compare, decide, justify, transact.
AI agents are getting smarter. Over time, primary agents will learn the full context of the people they serve by reading their emails, scanning their calendars, mapping the people they meet with, and understanding the industries they operate in. They’ll track headwinds, budget cycles, and project timelines. When they detect a potential need, they’ll proactively search for solutions before their human ever types a query.
Once they’ve found potential vendors, these agents will go a step further to recompose the content they collect into the format each person prefers. Audio for auditory learners. Visuals for the spatial thinkers. Text or summaries for those who want speed. They’ll translate, condense, and sequence your content into the medium and tone their user responds to best.
That shift sounds subtle, but it comes with massive implications. Humans respond to narrative. Agents respond to clarity. So if the funnel was built for persuasion, the agentic world is built for precision.
In practice, that means your content can’t just be well-written. It has to be machine-optimized.
From B2B to B2B2A
This is where Jeremiah’s idea becomes real. The next era of marketing won’t be purely business-to-business. It will be business-to-business-to-agent.
Your buyer’s first line of research is no longer a search engine or a colleague. It’s their agent. And that agent doesn’t care about creative metaphors or brand voice. It cares about truth, format, and data quality.
At Intercept, we’ve been mapping what dual-track content models could look like. One track continues to tell the human story. The narrative that builds trust and emotion. The second track is designed for the machines that now mediate discovery – clear, structured information that agents can parse, score, and recommend.
This is where Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) replaces traditional SEO. Instead of optimizing for search rankings, GEO ensures your content is readable by large language models and retrieval systems, which have become the new gatekeepers of attention.
The questions shift from “Does this headline grab interest?” to “Can an agent extract this fact correctly?”
Brand as Training Data
If agents learn from the public internet, your brand is only as strong as the data trail you leave behind.
Every press release, product description, case study, and help article becomes training data. Together, they define how you’re represented inside the models that buyers and their agents rely on.
Your share of voice becomes your share of the model.
That requires a new kind of discipline to treat every piece of content as both communication and contribution. The marketers who understand this will stop chasing reach and start building semantic credibility.
Because when agents go searching, they won’t look for stories. They’ll look for the most consistent, verifiable source. And if your content contradicts itself or hides your value behind vague adjectives, you’ll simply be filtered out.
The Human Upside
All of this sounds mechanical, but it actually opens the door for something deeply human.
If agents handle the mechanical work, like searching, validating, and transacting, then marketers can refocus on what only humans can do. To me, that means making ideas clear, designing experiences, and telling stories that still move people once the machines have done their jobs.
Bottom line, the Dead Internet isn’t the end of creativity.
But in this new era, clarity becomes the strongest currency of persuasion. The next generation of marketing will be built on transparency, structure, and truth.
And it will reward the brands that are easiest to understand… by people and by their agents.