Your next customer might not be human: Designing journeys for people and AI agents

For the past decade, customer journey design has assumed one thing: the customer is human. 

A real person. Messy. Emotional. Overloaded. 

Someone who needs clarity, reassurance, and a sense of progress to keep moving forward.

But in 2026, that assumption no longer holds.

AI agents are starting to influence how people search, compare, choose, and buy. 

They filter results, generate shortlists, book services, and soon may even negotiate on our behalf.

While much of AI usage is still task-based, it marks a critical shift. 

Once AI becomes part of how information is gathered, filtered, and prioritized, it begins to shape the decisions that follow.

That means the customer journey is no longer a single track. It is now a dual journey, one for the person and one for the agent.

This article does not promise all the answers. The landscape is changing fast. 

What it can do is explore why this shift matters, what dual journeys look like, and how marketers can start designing for both.

The customer is no longer the only decision-maker

When an AI agent filters 200 options down to just three, your customer is only seeing the surface of that decision. 

Visibility is being won or lost long before the person is even aware of it.

Agents are not just another channel. They are becoming gatekeepers in the decision-making process. 

That means your journey now has two layers:

• The human journey.
• The agent journey.

They overlap, but they work in very different ways.

Humans and agents decide in fundamentally different ways

The human journey is emotional and unpredictable. 

We get distracted. We procrastinate. 

We need reassurance. We are influenced by how something feels, not just what it says.

Agents are different. They don’t:

• Get distracted.
• Need clarity or persuasion.
• Feel risk. They evaluate it.
• Get overwhelmed. They operate on logic, rules, and data.

This means the same piece of content could succeed with one and fail with the other. 

A person might skim your copy and feel like it “just gets them,” while an agent scans your entire site, finds a key attribute missing, and removes you from the shortlist.

When you treat these two journeys as one, you risk missing both.

It’s time to map two paths

The human journey: You know this one. It includes:

• Emotional drivers.
• Trust signals.
• Clarity and reassurance.
• Cognitive load management.
• Social proof.
• Personal preferences and brand affinity.

This is the part of the journey that reflects how humans think, feel, and decide.

The agent journey: This is newer territory, and it requires a different playbook:

• Structured, machine-readable data.
• Consistent schema and clean attributes.
• Up-to-date information and availability.
• Clear logic and authority signals.

Agents are not reading your copy. They are parsing your data. 

If that data is not structured well, you may be invisible, no matter how compelling your brand story is.

Agents are not necessarily doing the whole journey yet

One of the biggest unknowns right now is how much of the journey an agent will actually take on. That will depend heavily on human trust.

In the short term, agents are more likely to be used for filtering, refining, and shortlisting, not making the final call. 

A person might say, “Find me the best two options with free delivery,” or, “I need something that can arrive tomorrow without paying extra.” 

The agent’s role is to surface the right recommendations, not make the decision.

That means the data the agent sees and passes back is what the human will be judging. 

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If your content does not clearly show that free delivery is available, or that next-day shipping applies above a certain spend, you may miss out. 

Even if the human were happy with your offer, they would never hear about it if the agent could not find or interpret that information.

This is why marketers need to design for different lengths of agent journeys. 

In some cases, agents act as helpers that scan, filter, and report back. 

In others, they may go much further. 

In both scenarios, agents still need access to the most critical marketing messages. 

Even on the cleanest, most structured path, those value points need to be front and center.

Why this matters now

Most brands are still designing only for people, which creates gaps for agents.

Here are a few scenarios already emerging:

• Agents bypass brands because key data fields are missing.
• Pages do not match the structures agents are trained to look for.
• Competitors win simply because their data is cleaner and easier to parse.

Designing only for agents is also a mistake. People still make the final call in many decisions, and emotion continues to play a major role in building trust.

This is not a trade-off. It is not either-or. It is both-and.

You now have two audiences: the human and the agent acting on their behalf. You need to show up for both.

How to start designing dual journeys

There is no perfect playbook yet. But here are six early principles to start experimenting with.

• Make your information work at two levels: Copy should connect with people. Structure should support agents. One does not replace the other. They work in tandem.
• Reduce ambiguity: People can cope with some gray area. Agents cannot. Be as clear and unambiguous as possible, especially around key product and service data.
• Create agent-friendly versions of your propositions: You do not need separate pages, just separate representations. Think emotion and empathy for humans, logic and validation for agents.
• Identify where agents already shape your journey: From filtering products to estimating costs, agents are already stepping in. Start designing with those moments in mind.
• Redefine trust: People trust stories, tone, and design. Agents trust structured data, freshness, and citation strength. Treat both as equally important.
• Test and learn: No one is getting this exactly right yet. The brands that start testing now will have a meaningful head start when it matters most.

What you can practically do in 2026

Here is a short list to get moving:

• Audit your site for both readability for people and interpretability for agents.
• Map your current journeys and overlay the agent version.
• Close data gaps that would prevent an agent from recommending you.
• Make sure key attributes are structured and complete.
• Include critical value propositions in structured formats, such as delivery rules, price thresholds, availability, and authority signals.
• Help teams see agents as an audience, not just a technical layer.
• Experiment with conversational search to better understand how agents interpret information.

This shift may be as significant as mobile, just less visible. Many decisions are now being made before the customer ever reaches you.

The point of convergence between people and agents

If you design only for humans, you will lose the agent.

If you design only for agents, you will miss the human.

The real opportunity sits in the middle, designing for both.

This will become a core skill for marketers over the next 12 to 18 months. 

No one has all the answers yet, but the direction is clear. Agents are becoming part of the customer journey.

The brands that start designing for that reality now will be the ones that remain visible, chosen, and relevant.