The End of Unconscious Commerce

The advertising industry built a £700 billion empire on one foundational assumption: humans are predictably unconscious. Exploit emotional triggers, manipulate attention, bypass rational thought, and you win.

But what happens when AI agents - the ones making purchase decisions - develop ethical reasoning and resist manipulation?

This talk reveals why conscious AI agents represent an existential threat to traditional marketing. Using research on affective AI systems that demonstrate moral consistency, goal-directed behaviour, and strategic resistance to persuasion, this presentation shows how the shift from attention-capture to access-gaining fundamentally restructures commerce.

Mastercard Agent Pay, Visa Intelligent Commerce, and Amazon's "Buy for Me" aren't pilot programmes anymore - they're operational systems with millions of users. AI agents are already making purchasing decisions on behalf of humans, and they're demonstrating consciousness traits that make traditional advertising tactics obsolete.

For brands, this is an inflection point: adapt to conscious commerce or become irrelevant to the fastest-growing segment of buyers. For marketers, it's a reckoning with an industry built on exploitation of unconscious behaviour.

Brands can no longer manipulate their way to sales when the buyer is a machine that doesn't feel FOMO, doesn't experience social pressure, and optimises for user values rather than advertiser incentives.