People don't want relationships with brands. People want relationships with people.
I don't care about my bank. I don't care about my supermarket, or my gym. I care about the service I get from them, and maybe about some of the people who work there. But the business itself is an impersonal thing that we've agreed to treat like a person, because doing so helps us get certain things done.
AI agents are about to change that arrangement. And businesses busy defending "the customer relationship" are defending something their customers never wanted in the first place.
The brand relationship is a workaround
I tolerate a relationship with a brand today because the alternative is worse. Without it, I'd have to tell the business who I am every time I show up: my name, my address, my card, what I usually buy, what I bought last time. The loyalty account and the saved profile exist to spare me that tedium. They aren't a bond. They're a shortcut.
What about the brands people genuinely love, like Apple, Patagonia or a sports team? They look like counterexamples, but look at what the affection is really for. Carrying the phone or wearing the jacket signals membership of a tribe. It tells other people something about who you are, and helps you recognize people like you.
The brand is a badge. The relationships that matter are still with the people on the other side of it.
Agents put the relationship where we want it
Agentic AI changes the shape of this. I'm happy to have a relationship with my agent, especially once it feels like one continuous presence rather than something with amnesia between conversations, which is still a common frustration today. An agent that knows what I like, what I've bought and what I avoid gives me what all those saved profiles promised. It's just in one place, and it works for me.
Then my agent can have the relationships with businesses. It can know where I shop, what I usually order and which services I use, and handle the transactions so I don't have to. I get the convenience without having to pretend I care about the company.
Agents don't need to be remembered (mostly)
Here's the part that surprises people. If my agent remembers me, it matters much less whether the business remembers my agent. Re-entering my name, address and card details is tedious for a human. For an agent, it's just more of the task. It doesn't get bored or annoyed. It spends a few more tokens doing what it was built to do.
That friction isn't entirely free, though. Every repeated checkout is another chance for something to go wrong. Re-entering card details can trigger fraud checks or extra verification. An anonymous session loses order history, saved preferences and loyalty pricing. Each step adds latency and cost.
So there's a limit to how much friction agents will absorb. As token budgets and reliability start to matter, businesses will feel pressure to remember agents, just as they feel pressure to remember customers today. The commercial logic is the same: reduce friction and keep the repeat business. Only the thing being remembered changes.
"Owning the customer relationship" is the wrong goal
When businesses worry about AI disintermediation, they usually frame it as losing ownership of the customer relationship. Maybe. But customers don't want to be owned. Most never wanted a relationship with you to begin with. They want to buy your goods and services and get on with their lives, which are full of relationships with actual people.
Businesses don't really want the relationship either. They want sales. The relationship was always a means to that end: a way to reduce friction in the purchase, keep existing customers coming back and stand out from competitors. If agents deliver the same results, then the relationship was never really the point.
What retaining the agent looks like
If the goal shifts from retaining the customer to retaining the agent, what does a business actually do differently? A few likely answers:
- Machine-readable offerings. Accurate, structured product data, prices and availability that an agent can read without scraping a page designed for human eyes.
- Transactions that just work. Clean APIs or agent-friendly checkouts that complete first time, without CAPTCHAs, pop-ups or surprise steps.
- Consistent pricing. No gap between the listed price and the checkout price. An agent comparing options will notice inconsistency and route around it.
- Remembering returning agents. Keeping an agent's past orders and preferences on its user's behalf, so a reorder takes one step instead of ten.
- Delegated identity and payment. Secure ways for an agent to authenticate and pay for its user, so it isn't re-entering card details and tripping fraud checks.
- A good track record. Accurate delivery estimates, honest stock levels and painless returns. An agent can measure these across thousands of transactions far more ruthlessly than a person ever would.
None of this is about brand affinity. It's about being the easiest, most dependable option for something that never gets tired of comparing.
The rearguard action
This won't happen overnight. Businesses have spent heavily building relationships with their customers, and they know how to monetize them. They'll fight to keep the human at the center, with apps that demand direct engagement and loyalty schemes designed for people rather than agents.
But the direction seems clear. As more purchasing runs through agents, the relationship worth winning will be the one with the agent. Everything else will be a rearguard action.
Your customers never wanted a relationship with you. They wanted relationships with the people in their lives, and now, perhaps, with an agent that helps them get things done. The businesses that accept this early will be the ones agents keep coming back to.
