DUBAI: For the past two decades companies have been clamoring to adapt to the digital era. Marketing and sales teams switched storefronts for online pages, and social media presence became almost as important as the product itself.
However, as people become increasingly exhausted by technology and agentic AI promises to replace the need to browse the web, this status quo is at risk of being upended, creating a new dilemma for businesses hoping to stand out.
Speaking to Arab News after a session discussing the future of consumer preferences at the Dubai Future Forum on Monday, Michael Costigan, the leader of Salesforce Futures Department — one of the world’s most popular sales software platforms — said that companies would need to create real connections with their customers more than ever before.
“In the last 20 years, we had choke points around social media and search which enabled those companies to amass a lot of power, and that’s where attention went; attention was the key commodity,” Costigan said.
“As we move forward in the agentic era, we won’t be subject to claims for our attention. We’ll have a personal AI agent that will potentially manage a lot of your needs that you previously had to go online yourself to do, and I think people continue to move toward that tech detox kind of attitude.”
According to a survey by consumer research platform GWI, one third of consumers in the UK and US have expressed concerns over the impact their smartphone has on their well-being, with one in five having been on a full “digital detox” and seven out of ten having tried to limit their time online.
Earlier in the day at the Dubai Future Forum, Mastercard announced that it had successfully managed the first end-to-end agentic transaction — buying movie tickets for customers in Dubai — without them having to touch a screen or even make any selections.
“This is going to create challenges for companies in terms of how they build and maintain relationships with their customers,” Costigan said.
“You have to build and build on the customer relationships you already have, so you don’t become just another point in a price comparison.”
He recommended that businesses invest in high-quality products that build brand loyalty, as in the future it was likely that gimmicks and marketing could become more difficult.
It was those brands with loyal customers that would succeed. Asked about whether the agentic future could result in a situation where AI companies have too much power over consumer choice, he was confident that governments would have the foresight to intervene.
“I think there will be a lot of challenges, but I think governments will intervene. We will have to wait and see,” he said.
