Shopify's new SimGym tool, which uses AI agents to simulate how customers interact with a store, points to a new standard in marketing. Soon, launching a campaign, redesign, or product without first running it through a sophisticated AI simulation will be considered archaic and reckless.
As users delegate purchasing and research to AI agents, brands will lose control over the buyer's journey. Websites must be optimized for agent-to-agent communication, not just human interaction, as AI assistants will find, compare, and even purchase products autonomously.
Companies can use AI to generate unique, 'ephemeral software' experiences for marketing campaigns. Instead of a generic Spotify Wrapped-style review, businesses can now affordably create a custom, interactive 'unwrapped' summary for each user based on their specific product usage data, costing just cents in tokens.
Beyond just generating creative, the future of AI in CRM is using "agentic AI" to build better strategies. This involves agents that help define audience segments, determine the next best product or action, and accelerate the implementation of complex campaigns, enhancing human strategy rather than replacing it.
A study with Colgate-Palmolive found that large language models can accurately mimic real consumer behavior and purchase intent. This validates the use of "synthetic consumers" for market research, enabling companies to replace costly, slow human surveys with scalable AI personas for faster, richer product feedback.
Expensive user research often sits unused in documents. By ingesting this static data, you can create interactive AI chatbot personas. This allows product and marketing teams to "talk to" their customers in real-time to test ad copy, features, and messaging, making research continuously actionable.
Go beyond using AI for data synthesis. Leverage it as a critical partner to stress-test your strategic opinions and assumptions. AI can challenge your thinking, identify conflicts in your data, and help you refine your point of view, ultimately hardening your final plan.
View AI less as a tool for discrete tasks and more as the foundation for a central marketing hub. This system uses AI to create and maintain branded playbooks for all marketing activities, ensuring consistency and quality regardless of who is executing the work.
In AI, low prototyping costs and customer uncertainty make the traditional research-first PM model obsolete. The new approach is to build a prototype quickly, show it to customers to discover possibilities, and then iterate based on their reactions, effectively building the solution before the problem is fully defined.
Instead of asking an AI tool for creative ideas, instruct it to predict how 100,000 people would respond to your copy. This shifts the AI from a creative to a statistical mode, leveraging deeper analysis and resulting in marketing assets (like subject lines and CTAs) that perform significantly better in A/B tests.
Marketers focus on using AI as a new tool, but the more profound shift is that customers now use AI for research, comparison, and even RFP generation, fundamentally altering the buying journey before they ever interact with a brand.