The AI Current: Customers trust AI more than you, but what if it’s wrong?

Discovery is leaving the app

“We are seeing an absolute massive shift… people are now using ChatGPT to start their discovery versus Google or the brand website.”

The checkout surface is moving too

“All you need to tell AI is ‘I have 10 people coming over… we’re doing a taco party… these are the dietary restrictions, my budget is under $50’ – and that’s it. It’s already happening in that direction.”

We’ve seen this before

This isn’t the first time, however, that the purchase surface has moved. Social media went through a similar arc: discovery shifted to TikTok and Instagram first, then checkout followed. AI is on the same path, likely faster. 

AI is becoming the first place users express intent 

“It’s not just Amazon knowing your preferences within Amazon. It’s AI knowing your preferences about everything: where you travel, what you bought last week in Gap, what you bought in Walmart.”

Will product surfaces survive or become invisible infrastructure? 

The answer from this room: both. For some businesses this is a threat. For others, an opportunity to reduce friction and cost. Either way, the shift is real and brands are already rebuilding their tech stacks to be agent-readable, not just human-readable.  

Synthetic audiences are already real

“We can feed attributes of our actual users… and they were ~98% close to real research, while also giving us actionables to improve creatives.”

The biggest risk: loss of control

“If every agent possesses so much of our knowledge… There’s no concept of privacy anymore…” 

“We still have to worry about what the agent shares about us without our permission... some of these guardrails become much more abstract and hard to reason about.” 

The challenge isn’t (only) technical

“If Salesforce can talk to Adobe and you’re transacting across systems, will we allow that with all the privacy and data layers in place? It’s technically possible, but we can’t overlook the human and governance layer.”

Does your scale still protect you?

AI is shrinking many of the traditional advantages larger companies used to have. Startups can now move faster, test more, and build more with fewer people. But expectations are rising even faster. Some reports suggest workloads have increased 30-40% since AI adoption. The moat is velocity now, not size.

So, will AI replace the apps we build?  

Not exactly. What matters is whether you show up where intent is created, easy for AI systems to work with, and fast enough to adapt.