Last week at INBOUND, our CMO Jason Seeba spoke about one of the biggest shifts marketers have faced in decades: AI is quietly becoming the new gatekeeper between your brand and your customer.

Just as Google rewired how we find information and Amazon reshaped how we shop, AI agents and large language models (LLMs) are now dictating what we see, when we see it, and who gets through. This moment demands that brands rethink not just messaging strategies, but the very foundations of how they build and maintain customer relationships.

Here are our key learnings from the session, and what they mean for marketers trying to future-proof engagement.

AI is rewiring us… and our expectations

Customers are outsourcing decisions at a rapid pace.

  • Yesterday: Search, browse and make a choice.
  • Today: Ask ChatGPT for a shortlist of options.
  • Tomorrow: Simply tell your AI agent, “You know the soap I like. Order it for me, restock it when I’m low, and pick a new place to buy it if it’s out.”

On mobile, this shift is even more pronounced. Feeds, inboxes, and app experiences are being fine-tuned by invisible algorithms to anticipate preferences before we articulate them.

Your customers expect every message to be personalized, predictive, and valuable—or risk being filtered out.

The new gatekeepers: AI agents

Marketers once optimized for search engines and social feeds. Now, the filter is an AI layer sitting between you and your user.

  • LLMs summarize and prioritize: Many consumers already rely on AI to distill inboxes, feeds, and product choices.
  • AI will act for us: Not just suggesting, but taking actions like adding to carts, managing subscriptions, and even handling returns.
  • Traffic is shifting: Some sites already see 10:1 LLM traffic vs. human traffic. Your content and messaging increasingly reaches machines before people.
The bottom line: If you don’t own the direct relationship, AI will own it for you.

Three rules for winning attention in the AI era

1. Tuning: Tune for humans and AI
Messages that lack relevance, frequency discipline, or personalization risk being suppressed by AI filters. Your copy, cadence, and message segmentation must resonate with both human readers and algorithmic gatekeepers.

2. Trust: Build unshakable trust
In a world of infinite noise, trust is the ultimate currency. Every interruption you earn or waste contributes to your reputation (with your customer and the AI summarizing their options). Your brand’s “share of voice” in LLMs will mirror how credible, consistent, and valuable you are.

3. Timing: Perfect timing will set you apart
Information is abundant. Attention is not. The ability to deliver the right message, at the right moment, is the last true scarcity. Done well, this creates resonance. Done poorly, it erodes trust.

Future-proofing customer relationships

So how do you stay ahead? Two guiding principles:

  1. Leverage automation and intelligence. Use behavioral triggers, segmentation, and predictive timing to match the rising bar of personalization.
  2. Diversify channels of trust. Don’t let AI sit between you and your audience entirely. Build direct connections, particularly across SMS and push. These are permission-based relationships where your users deliberately let you through their front door. But that privilege is fragile: misuse it with irrelevant or untimely pings, and you’ll be muted.

That’s why OneSignal and HubSpot are so complementary: together, we help brands extend workflows beyond email into SMS, push, and even RCS. The same segmentation and triggers marketers already use in HubSpot can power omnichannel engagement with OneSignal, ensuring consistent, loyal relationships across the surfaces that matter most.

Own attention in The Age of AI

The future of engagement won’t be about who shouts the loudest, but who is trusted enough to break through. Make no mistake; AI is rewriting the rules of customer attention. But by tuning for both humans and algorithms, building trust at every touch, and mastering timing, brands can earn a direct line to their customers in a world increasingly mediated by machines.

That’s exactly what OneSignal helps you do. Start building AI-resilient customer relationships today with messaging made to stand out in a world of infinite summaries.

Get Started for Free