By Ben Gibson, UK CEO of Cosmo5
Marketing is on the brink of its most significant realignment in two decades. While the industry has spent years optimising for algorithms, search engines and social platforms, the centre of gravity is shifting again. This time it is towards generative AI systems that are no longer just gateways to information, but interpreters, advisors and increasingly autonomous decision-makers.
By 2026, the rules of marketing will be rewritten by this shift. AI is becoming the broker of trust and the curator of ‘truth’. This is significantly changing consumer journeys too. The result is a radical reshaping of how brands show up, how people behave online and what it will take to stay visible in a world where machines increasingly mediate what humans see.
Here’s where I see the biggest and fastest changes to come for marketers.
AI becomes the primary gateway to brand discovery
For more than twenty years, search engines acted as the front door to the internet. In 2026, generative AI assistants – such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and others – are rapidly replacing that function. However, the capability of these tools are much more advanced, and once they retrieve information, they also synthesise it, prioritise it and present it as authoritative truth.
This shift has profound implications. Instead of comparing sources or scrolling through pages of results, users increasingly accept a single answer framed by a system they trust. Visibility becomes dependent on whether a brand is recognised as an authoritative input.
The front door to the internet is being rebuilt. The question is no longer which browser users will open, but whose answers people will believe. The brands that fail to understand how AI systems ingest, classify and elevate information will find themselves erased from consideration long before a human even enters the decision journey.
Machine-mediated trust becomes the new battleground
The traditional marketing funnel – awareness, consideration, evaluation – collapses into a single AI-mediated moment. Assistants filter signals, assess credibility and often take action on behalf of consumers. Being the right answer matters far more than being a memorable one. This is where trust is being fundamentally redefined.
People no longer question the validity of AI responses because they trust them with the answers feeling clear, confident and conversational. There’s an emotional link. AI mirrors our language, reduces cognitive effort and provides a sense of reassurance. The result is dependency. When AI satisfies a user’s need, they rarely look elsewhere.
This creates a new trust hierarchy. People trust what AI summarises over what websites claim. Reputation becomes something constructed upstream within the knowledge layers AI uses, and that’s long before the brand has any direct interaction with the customer.
Success will depend on earning approval from both audiences, the person, and the intelligent agent advising them.
AI-led persuasion reshapes advertising
As AI-led decision making becomes normalised, traditional digital advertising formats will continue to decline in relevance. People do not want banner ads forced into conversational interfaces. Instead, people will likely respond positively to sponsored relevance, which is recommendations that feel natural, informed and integrated into the conversation.
Think of it as affiliate-style advice woven into helpful answers. These are subtle, contextual, additive rather than interruptive.
This shift is both a UX preference and a behavioural rewrite. When people turn to AI first, the commercial influence point moves earlier in the journey, embedded within the advisory moment itself. The opportunity for brands lies in aligning their commercial content with the ways AI systems deliver guidance.
The era of the generalist marketer arrives
As customer journeys flow fluidly across voice, visual, predictive and conversational interfaces, marketing teams must become similarly fluid. AI has removed many executional barriers, making integration, not specialisation, the primary source of value.
The age of narrow expertise is fading. The marketers who thrive in 2026 will be cross-disciplinary thinkers able to connect content, media, data, experience and commerce into a single strategic system.
Customers don’t think in channels, the next generation of marketers will be connectors.
This shift changes how teams are built, how agencies operate and how strategy is executed. Marketing becomes less about managing isolated touchpoints and more about architecting a cohesive decision ecosystem that AI can interpret consistently.
Omnichannel evolves from aspiration to operating system
In a world where AI defines brand identity based on available signals, inconsistencies become dangerous. AI quickly fills gaps and not always how brands intend. What an organisation used to consider “separate functions” now read as a single signal set to large language models. Marketing, sales, customer advocacy, product content, PR, even customer service transcripts are interpreted holistically, not as isolated streams of information.
To avoid being misrepresented or deprioritised, brands will need to operate omnichannel in the truest sense. Integrated media, commerce, creative and data systems will ensure that wherever a customer or an AI agent looks, the brand shows up with clarity and credibility.
The old model, where SEO sat with the website team, social with brand, CRM with retention, PR with communications, each operating in silo, simply cannot survive this shift. Fragmentation weakens performance and threatens visibility altogether. Coherence becomes a prerequisite for being seen.
The eCommerce journey is changing
One of the starkest behavioural shifts heading into 2026 is how people shop. Browsing is declining, and query-based purchasing is rising fast. Consumers now begin with highly specific questions: “What’s the best £30 gift for a fitness-mad sister?” or “What’s a good rainy-day toy for a dinosaur-obsessed nine-year-old?”, and increasingly expect assistants to do the heavy lifting.
That shift has accelerated as ChatGPT and Perplexity roll out major shopping updates. Together, they signal a decisive change in how buying decisions are made. Instead of trawling websites or marketplaces, shoppers are asking: “best moisturiser for sensitive skin”, “quiet cordless vacuum for a flat”, “compare these two prams”. The assistant then interviews the shoppers, for example “what’s your budget?”, then gathers context, filters brands, and, in Perplexity’s case, can even complete checkout via PayPal. The entire buying journey is starting to unfold inside the assistant, not across retailer touchpoints.
AI-driven discovery is on track to rival traditional SEO and marketplace rankings by the end of 2026. And it reinforces a simple truth: credibility now needs to be engineered for machine interpreters, not human browsers.
The decisive moment for brands
2026 will be the year marketing crosses the trust threshold. AI will mediate what people see, believe and choose, creating a decisive shift in competitive advantage. The brands that succeed will be those that recognise this now and take ownership of their definition before large language models or competitors do it for them.
The businesses that adapt early and design for ‘machine mediated’ trust, rethinking discovery, reorganising talent and adopting truly omnichannel operating models, will not only win visibility; they will shape the expectations of the next decade.
The ones that wait will simply disappear from view.
The convergence of tech and brands 