Auzan warned about the devaluation of brands due to AI agents
AI agents don’t have brand loyalty and the costs of switching between platforms, so thousands of brands are being devalued in the agent economy. According to him, there will remain those brands that demonstrate the status of the owner
Thousands of brands are being devalued by AI agents as neural networks lack brand loyalty and the costs of switching between platforms. This economist Alexander Auzan said at the Day of platform economy in the National center “Russia”, the correspondent of RBC.
“In the platform economy, all those circumstances that a person makes on the platform, and create some transition costs, form brand loyalty; in the platform economy, brands work,” he said.
The economist noted that the brand is needed by the buyer to solve the “puzzling problem of choice”. I buy this, this brand, but the rest I don’t care. I made sure it was safe, the economist explained.
Auzan added that in the agent economy, brands "do not work.".
“An AI agent does not need to optimize brand choice. I will tell you, it will be a dramatic transition, when much of the usual in marketing, branding will begin to sharply devalue.
The economist stressed that some brands will remain, especially those that allow you to show the status of a person. And many, many thousands of brands that provide this loyalty from above, they are devalued.
Agent economy is a new economic paradigm in which a significant part of business operations, negotiations and transactions are made by autonomous AI agents (software algorithms based on generative artificial intelligence), and people take on the role of architects: set goals, rules, strategies, ethical frameworks and control exceptions
In turn, the head of Sberbank German Gref noted that the agent economy “kills interfaces”, and the interface is “the main weapon of the platform”. Platforms built around human attention will lose out to platforms built on machine-readable interface quality, he said.
“Today, a platform is a screen: tape, storefronts, search bars are all algorithms that can hold a person’s attention.” All this is killed by AI agents who are not interested in windows or scrolling through tapes and are able to perform actions in seconds, he explained.
