AI Strategy · 2026-07-30 · Michael Ditter
Marketing to Agents: My Perspective in PHD × WARC's 'From Abundance to Agents'
PHD and WARC's new global study sizes the agentic transaction economy at $3.35 trillion by 2030. I was one of eight industry experts interviewed. The question that matters: what does your brand signal when the machine is making the choice?
More than $944 billion of global consumer spend will be facilitated by AI agents this year. By 2030, PHD and WARC project $3.35 trillion — with the top ten markets accounting for more than two-thirds of it.
That is the backdrop of From Abundance to Agents: How the Delegation of Choice Is Transforming Marketing (July 2026), new research by PHD in partnership with WARC across ten global markets. I was one of eight industry experts interviewed for it, and it asks the question I would put in front of every CMO: if a brand's job is to signal quality and influence choice for people, what happens when the machine is making the choice?
Two things I argued in the report:
“Categories that are most vulnerable if we zoom out are highly mediated by information — things like travel, beauty, electronics, different CPG categories that rely heavily on reviews or recommendations or recipes. Categories in which discovery, comparison, and purchase are to some extent collapsing have the biggest opportunity to engage, build, and shape the space.”
And on what readiness actually looks like:
“It comes down to having the foundational elements in order. Do you have visibility to what LLMs perceive about your brands? Do you understand in broad brushstrokes where that perception might be originating from? And have you started to take actions to ensure you have the foundational data and story of your brand in place? Those actions, I think, are the foundational things you have to have in place to be ready for a world where you are marketing to agents.”
The brands that treat agent perception as seriously as human perception — auditing what models believe about them, structuring their data and story so machines can read it — will be the ones agents shortlist. Everyone else will find out what invisibility costs.
Read it: PHD's announcement · the report on WARC · download the PDF.