Somewhere around 2015, someone in our industry placed the last significant display order by hand.
Nobody knows who it was. There was no farewell drink, no press notice, no line in an annual report. Programmatic simply crossed over, algorithms took the majority of digital inventory, and within a few years the logic of the industry had quietly changed. I was in this industry when it happened. I did not notice either.
I think about that person now because the same thing is happening one step further down the chain. Not to the person who buys the media. To the person who buys the product.
I was never any good at puzzles as a child. I always looked at the picture on the box, even when that was considered cheating. It turns out to have been the correct instinct.
For a decade the technology industry handed us four revolutions and invited us to judge each one on its own terms. The metaverse. Blockchain. Artificial intelligence. Humanoid robotics.
We did not misread them. We read them separately. That was the blind spot.
They arrived as 4 product launches with 4 sets of promises and 4 hype cycles that peaked and collapsed on different timetables. Read one at a time, three of them look unfinished and one looks like a bubble. Read together, they form the outline of a new system.
The metaverse was buried, then quietly rebuilt as spatial computing and as the simulation environments where humanoid robots now learn to move.
Blockchain was reduced to crypto speculation while the contract layer underneath it became part of the transparent and traceable infrastructure machine-speed commerce requires: in June, Mastercard launched a payment system for transactions executed between machines (AP4M), some worth only fractions of a cent.
Humanoid robots are still filed under science fiction while Figure units work production shifts at BMW.
Artificial intelligence deserves a more careful sentence, because it is the one nobody is underestimating. The hype around it is visible and justified, and I would not bet against any part of it.
But the loudest conversation is about the model, and the change that reaches commerce and marketing first is happening one layer down, at the agent. Not the software that answers a question. The software that completes a task, transacts and settles.
If the customer in 2030 is increasingly an agent acting on human preferences, what exactly is our job as marketers?
The answer starts with the shape of the journey, because the shape is what most of us actually manage.
The funnel was honest about its own logic. It was wide at the top and narrow at the bottom because it was designed to lose people. You poured in awareness and accepted attrition at every stage, and an entire discipline was built on reducing the losses.
The funnel has not disappeared. It has deformed. What we have now is an hourglass.
The top is as wide as it ever was, and getting wider. People still fall for things on Instagram, in a shop in Milan, in a conversation with a friend, in a film they were not expecting to love. Desire is still formed where it has always been formed. What has changed is what happens next.
The bottom is as wide as the top. Everything a person wants can be found, bought, paid for, delivered and returned with less friction. Execution has not shrunk. It has moved to agents, platforms and logistics.
On 2 July, Visa confirmed that AI agents had completed live purchases at independent merchant websites across Europe, working inside li…