Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy


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Best of the Show: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Podcast)

December 30, 2025

Anyone who’s read my writing or listened to the show knows that I’m generally bullish on the potential benefits of AI for customers and brands. Where I’m far less bullish is when “experts” tell you that AI will prevent you from building meaningful connections between your brand and your customers. Whether they mean to or not, they’re describing a world where every brand becomes a commodity. And, frankly, I simply refuse to go along. That view is simply nonsense. Brands exist so that customers can easily identify the products and services they know and trust. That was true 100 years ago. It will be true 100 years from now.

Or, at least, it will be if we do the work, right now, that will teach customers to ask for us by name. Getting that right depends on building brands customers care about, that they’ll love, that they’ll demand. Put simply, in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Why is brand “the only thing” in the age of AI? Why does it matter? And what can you do to ensure customers ask for you by name?

That’s what this “Best of the Show” episode is all about. Here are the show notes for you.

Best of the Show: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Past Appearances

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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Recorded using a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 15m 49s

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Transcript: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing

The single biggest story in marketing and customer acquisition this year has been artificial intelligence. That’s no surprise for anyone listening to this show. What I think is a shock and a surprise, though, is that more people don’t recognize why AI makes building your company’s brand more important than ever.

AI is already disrupting relationships between customers and your brand. Right now. Today. And the typical advice around what you should do is to make sure you show up in the answer engines.

That’s fine. You should do that. It’s also not enough.

Let me state this right up front: AI will only hurt your relationship with your customers if you let it. The key to winning next year — and beyond! — is to build a brand your customers want to ask for by name. Which is why in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Customers use ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok,MetaAI, Google Gemini — and, more critically, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode every single day. These tools lead your customers to products and services and brands that meet their needs. Ideally, the products, services, and brands these AI platforms offer are yours. Unfortunately, far too often, they’re not.

The discussion of where what that means for your business often misses a crucial point. Because many of the people talking about this shift to AI and this shift to your customers using AI for shopping and buying and engaging with brands as though the only way to win on AI is to appear in AI — solely, purely.

You want to appear there, of course. But it can’t be your entire strategy. We can’t be all in with AI the expense of your website, your CRM, and your other owned channels or experiences. We can’t be all-in with AI at the expense of building a brand that customers are willing to ask for by name.

How did Google get so dominant? How did Facebook? How did Amazon? Because for many businesses, they focused on appearing on those channels without working equally hard to get customers to engage directly.

I refuse to concede this point. Again: AI will only hurt your relationship with your customers if you let it. The key to winning is to build a brand your customers want to ask for by name.

In this Best of the Show, I looked at why in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Let’s dive in.

Intermediaries in the digital space are nothing new. I grew up in the hospitality industry and watched intermediaries like Expedia and Booking(.)com get between our guests and our hotels all the time. They were the first big tech that I really experienced. They were the intermediaries that inspired the original research that led to my book, Digital Reset. I then watched these digitally-native powerhouses slowly lose share to the real Big Tech players like Google and Facebook or Instagram, which only drove the point home further. The lion’s share of Booking and Expedia’s marketing spend every quarter goes to Google and to social media like Instagram or Facebook.

Quick aside:, the way, Kayak and Trivago’s core business is known as the travel industry as Metasearch. They display rates from a wide array of sources so that travelers can see how much they’d pay based on where they book their reservation. I’m deliberately not referring to Facebook as "Meta" to avoid confusion with the kinds of metasearch offered by Kayak and Trivago, which are owned by Booking(.)com and Expedia, respectively.

Okay, so sure, AI is a different kind of platform. It’s a different kind of threat. It might be the first and only place your customers go to find what they need.

But it’s not just a threat, it’s also an opportunity.

In fact, I’d suggest that the interaction with AI is starting to look more like the interaction with phones than the interaction with, for instance, search. Your customers have a lot of apps on their phones. And many of these apps allow for them to search for different things. They have Google. They have Amazon. They have Temu. They have Shein. They have Safari or Chrome. They have YouTube. They have Instagram or TikTok—or I guess if they’re over 45, Facebook. They have Spotify. They might have Expedia or Booking(.)com.

The point is that they choose the app that works best to find what they need in that moment. But they don’t start by opening the app. They start by picking up their phone.

Consumers increasingly are treating AI like it’s a device. It’s where customers start before they choose the app or before they buy. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me that ChatGPT calls its integrations with other companies "apps," not integrations. They’ve partnered with companies like Expedia and Booking and Zillow and Spotify and Canva and Figma to offer apps within the ChatGPT experience.

They’ve also launched its browser, Atlas, and it’s why they’re working on physical devices. They want to be the first place people go. This is why Perplexity has launched its Comet browser that, to quote the company, "works for you." Note the emphasis. It’s doing the work, not you, not your customer. The AI—or if you’d rather call it this, the agent that’s built into the browser—does the work. And there are others that are coming.

These companies want and need to be the first place that customers start, every time, if they have any hope of replacing Google or Apple as the first place customers start every time. As I mentioned in the intro, that’s our opportunity: to be the place that people ask for when they pick up that phone when they pick up that app, when they look into the device, when they start the conversation with AI.

That’s why AI will only hurt your relationship if you let it.

The key to winning is to build a brand that your customers will ask for by name. I’ve said it another way in the past. I’ve said that the brand is the prompt. The last thing you want is for AI to turn your brand into a commodity. The last thing you want is to let AI turn your brand into a commodity, differentiated only by price or sales channels. That’s just not a way to win. You’ve heard it said for years, "don’t build your brand on rented land." And this just isn’t that much different from that perspective.

I mean, sure, we’ll use these tools to increase the reach and awareness of our brands. But we cannot let AI replace our brands. Keep repeating to yourself that in the age of AI, "brand isn’t everything, it’s the only thing."

We should be thinking of these tools as ways to build our brand, not replace them. Look at current customer behaviors. Customers ask AI questions, then come directly to your website by typing in the URL or by searching on your brand name. Obviously, over time, that’s going to change some.

First, more features, more integrations, more apps within AI platforms will allow your customers to buy or book or connect with your sales team without leaving that experience. Second, as agents emerge, the agents themselves will be able to buy or book or connect with your sales team without the human being being involved all that much, or at least they won’t bother them until the very end of the process.

Our job as marketers and e-commerce leaders then is to make sure that they’re either choosing to buy or book or connect with our sales team on our owned web channels or to make sure they’re asking for us by name when they buy or book or connect with sales teams within the AI platforms. That should consume almost all of your energies right now, driving that behavior now. Because it’ll be much harder later to change customer behaviors once they get accustomed to bypassing you to just working through the AI.

Like I said, we’ve seen this movie before. We know what it looks like when customers buy through a third party and then we have to spend the time and energy and expense to get them to choose us directly. That is super hard. So maybe let’s not do that part.

Now, it’s entirely fair for you to ask, okay, how do you get your customers to ask for you by name?

First, you’ve got to build direct demand, on connecting with customers now. Push your loyalty and CRM. Push email and SMS to connect with customers directly. Focus on improving on-site conversion now so that they know to come back when they’re ready to buy. And then treat your industry’s various marketplaces and social media as paid shelves to fill gaps in demand as it’s needed.

Next, make your content AI ready. Build structured offers through schema and product or service feeds. Look at MCPs as a potential way to make your content—especially your structured data—available to the large language models. Lean into concise, clear, well-structured content like FAQs and authoritative explainers that AI tools and agents can cite to their users.

Next, diversify your channels. Balance search with social or YouTube or outdoor and print media. Look at some high intent partner channels. Who’s connecting with the people that you want to connect with? For each of these, make sure that you’re measuring the incrementality of these channels. We want to measure whether they’re delivering additional benefits or if they’re just taking credit for things that would have happened.

Finally, you’re to want to test some of the new messaging commerce functions that exist out there. Stand up a WhatsApp or iMessage flow where it’s appropriate. And look at blending service and sales into a holistic experience. Remember the idea that we’ve talked about so many times on the show that customer service is queen.

If you can do these things, if you can start to make sure your content and your experiences and the engagement you have with your customers is such that they actually like you and actually want to work with you again and again, you’re increasing the odds that they’re going to ask for you by name. You’re increasing the odds that you will not become a commodity. You’re increasing the odds that people actually want you.

The bottom line remains that AI will only hurt relationships with your customers if you let it. And the key to winning is to build a brand that your customers ask for by name. Again, and finally, remember that in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, which is episode 472, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest

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Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy
By Tim Peter
New York Metro
A weekly podcast exploring how e-commerce and digital trends shape your business and marketing strategy
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