The apparent comeback of The Intention Economy in the AI age

It was one of the most inspiring books I read over a decade ago: The Intention Economy by Doc Searls outlines a future in which consumers would simply indicate their intention of buying something and instead of searching, comparing and evaluation different offers from different vendors themselves in order to find the best match - this whole mechanisms would be reversed!

I simply voice my intention to travel to New York over the weekend together with my wife for a Christmas Shopping trip and instead of jumping now through all those time consuming processes of finding the best flights, hotel, airport transfer and everything else you might need, this intent itself would be brokered - by a back then still to be defined system - to different vendors who would then compete to fulfill my intention, by not just tailoring it directly to my needs, but offering it me to my most favorite conditions. (criteria might be price, but could also be something different)

It was a great vision back then, but it focused more on the shift in power-dynamic between brands and consumers, than it was actually proposing a solution for how to operationalize this idea. The idea probably came simply a decade too early in order to bring it to life.

AI as our future primary platform of choice, will bring us closer to this vision

When you watched the Humane product demo you heard them say something along the lines of: "we will not have an app store. AI is our platform."

With the enormous progress we have been witnessing in AI it becomes clear that we are just a stones's throw away from doing exactly what Doc Searls had in mind: we simply ask for something and AI will try to take care of the rest. And that includes making transactions for us.

What will happen in the future when I ask an AI to book me a flight? I am pretty sure that Humane has in mind, that I can connect my credit card to their platform and that they will offer me to book the flight through a conversation with their AI pin.

This will have very interesting implications:

1. Bidding on intents will become a reality

I am pretty sure that one of the upcoming AI platform providers will start to introduce a monetization model about being featured as the preferred supplier to get certain transactions done with consumers.

I might have a choice as a consumer to define my preferred suppliers, but I also see a mechanism where something like a reverse auction takes place and the AI will make a proposal based on the reverse auction results, to get me the best tailored solution for my intention.

2. The importance of Branding will increase

If you look at the importance of performance marketing in todays media spend, which is primarily centered around intercepting consumers on their way to make a transaction to win their bid - and how much money is being poured into it, as it is so effective - we might actually see a reversal on this!

Being top of mind with consumers so they actually say "Book me flight to New York with Lufthansa" or "Get me some running shoes from Nike" will be more and more relevant, as we use AI as our primary platform to get jobs done.

Do I hear anyone saying: "Share of Intent" will be the new "Share of Voice" or "Share of Search"?

3. Complex tailored solutions will be the norm

As more we get used to this new form of conversational commerce and solving actual complex tasks with an AI companion, as more we will ask for actual solutions for our intentions rather than individual products.

I want my whole New York trip to be booked and don't want to take care for every single step along the way. But selling entire solutions, which solve a problem for consumers E-2-E is not really the default today. And it might involve combining products and services from different vendors.

• I want to run a Marathon and need the required equipment and training for it.
• I need to organized a birthday party for my son.
• I want to redecorate my kitchen and modernize my appliances
• I want to invest 10% of my income every month with a low-risk profile

We as consumers will come up with more and more complex transactional intentions to be solved by AI and it will be super interesting of what we will have to build in the backend to make this happen, how the experience will look like and how competition between brands will work in this reversed system.

It's a very interesting potential future to wrap your head around and it will confront us at Plan.Net Group with very interesting new challenges to help our clients with.