Step inside The Intuitive Advantage, a ten-part look at how intuition, AI, brand and experience are set to reshape 2026. In Part Seven, Future Platforms CEO and MAD//Fest host, Livia Bernardini asks the question, In a world where algorithms make decisions for humans, how do brands connect with people they can no longer directly reach?

We are entering a world where the consumer is not always a person. It is a system acting on their behalf: booking their travel, curating their wardrobe, choosing their financial products, even negotiating their utilities.

Which raises an uncomfortable question:

How do you flirt with an algorithm to get to a human?

Because that's what we're really talking about. Not selling to people anymore, but charming their digital bouncers first. The rise of autonomous AI agents marks the most profound shift in consumer behaviour since the invention of the web. What we are witnessing is the formation of the agent economy, a world in which decisions are delegated to digital representatives who know our preferences so well that they begin to choose before we consciously decide.

This transition demands a kind of intuition leaders rarely call upon: the ability to sense what will matter to machines long before the rules are written. No one can yet tell you definitively how to build for a world where your primary buyer may not be human. We will need to make the kinds of conscious calibrations we explored last week in Part 6 because we are all learning in real time.

When Machines Mediate Reality

I asked Claude to help me sharpen this piece. It told me to cut my quantum physics reference. I'm partially listening.

For those who know me, you know I'm a quantum physics nerd. Here's why it matters: in quantum mechanics, observation changes reality. Light behaves like a wave until you look at it. Then it collapses into a particle.

Attention alters the thing itself.

The same is happening online. AI agents are not only surfing the web; they are reshaping it. As they crawl, select, transact and optimise on our behalf, they gradually pull the online world toward structures that suit them. Companies will discover that what persuades a human (beauty, narrative, aspiration) is not the same as what persuades a machine.

This is also where my collaboration with Claude becomes meta. I'm writing about human and machine relationships while negotiating one in real time. Claude wants efficiency. I want personality. We're finding the compromise that makes both of us better.

Which is exactly what brands will need to do with AI agents.

Being agent-ready means designing for two audiences simultaneously: the emotional world of humans and the logical world of machines.

What Bots Want (And Why Hotels Are Screwed)

Consider this: you're booking a hotel for your anniversary. You want romance, a view, that intangible something that makes it special. Your agent wants cancellation policy clarity, hidden fees transparency, price consistency, and review integrity.

Two identical hotels may feel completely different to you but look interchangeable to your agent. The boutique property that spent millions on brand campaigns and has that perfect rooftop bar? Your agent might skip it because their terms and conditions are buried in a PDF that machines can't parse. Meanwhile, the functional chain hotel with structured data and clear APIs gets the booking.

The absurdity is the point.

An agent acting on your behalf might book you into the "wrong" hotel for all the "right" reasons. It optimised for what it could verify, not what you would feel.

This is where brands face their existential crisis. You must build for both layers: the emotional fidelity that wins hearts, and the structural fidelity that wins algorithms. Miss either one and you're invisible to half your future customers.

How to Actually Prepare

Klarna is investing heavily in structured product ingestion so agents can understand their inventory. Shopify has pushed merchants toward richer taxonomies. But the real insight isn't about copying what big platforms do. It's about understanding the gap between what your brand claims and what a machine can verify.

"We care about sustainability" means nothing to an agent. Carbon per product data, supply chain lineage, repair infrastructure? That's the language machines speak.

Narrative must become numbers. Values must be queryable.

At Future Platforms, we prepared LIV Golf for this transition by creating a brand proposition and working prototype that allowed fans to surface information from trusted sources in a conversational, up to the minute way. From live updates to merchandise touchpoints, we designed with the understanding that the audience would not always be human. The brand needed to work in prose and in code simultaneously.

The practical reality: if an agent receives the instruction "ethical fashion under £100," can it find you? Can it transact? Can it interpret your attributes?

If not, humans won't be your bottleneck. Their agents will simply pass you by.

When Your Brand Values Get Machine-Audited

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. Ethical consumers who once manually researched brand claims will increasingly rely on their agents to do it for them. Those agents will compare sustainability scores, labour practices, longevity metrics and return patterns with the cold efficiency of a spreadsheet.

They will not read your beautifully crafted "About Us" page. They will check the numbers behind the words.

Which means brands that have been performing values rather than embedding them structurally will get exposed.

An agent doesn't care about your tone of voice or your campaign awards. It cares whether your supply chain data is accessible, whether your carbon claims can be verified, whether your labour practices are documented in machine-readable formats.

Good intentions are no longer enough. Structural proof is required.

And the brands that figure this out first will own the agent economy.

The New Landscape

Agents aren't the only forces reshaping the internet. Our attention still acts like the scientist's gaze, changing the field simply by observing it. As humans shift how they choose, explore, and engage, the digital world bends with them.

A new landscape is forming. The leaders will be those who can sense its shape while the ground is still moving.

Next week, we explore why, in an era of agents and automation, the product itself becomes the marketing.

I've now negotiated with Claude through six rewrites of this piece. It wanted fewer words. I wanted more personality. It suggested clearer structure. I kept the quantum physics tangent. We're both slightly annoyed with each other, which means we've probably found the right balance. Welcome to the future of creative partnerships: half collaboration, half couples therapy.