---
title: AI is becoming the customer
description: AI is changing how products are discovered, evaluated and chosen. Explore what happens when AI starts behaving less like a tool and more like a customer.
image: https://www.3green.biz/hubfs/Human%20vs%20AI%20Concept%20Sketch-2.png
---

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 May 1, 2026, 1:00:00 PM

# AI is becoming the customer

![Picture of Andrew Mitchell](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/4d6828f57e2fa6ae0430070c3ee4e243) [Andrew Mitchell](https://www.3green.biz/blog/author/andrew-mitchell)

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I know, I know, we’ve all reached peak AI. Endless news, trends, and that delicious daily serving of slop in our social feeds.

But stay with me for a moment. AI isn’t just YOUR secret helper anymore. It's quietly switched sides and right now might be helping your customer to find an angle on you. 

Between you and me, the impact of AI has been increasingly playing on my mind. Like everyone who thinks for a living, I’ve become very aware that everything I’ve learned and practiced over the years could be made redundant overnight.

A few years back, when I first opened ChatGPT for a play, this existential disruption felt a lifetime away. But I always knew it was just a matter of time before I’d be forced to step up or ship out.

#### **This stopped being just experimentation**

Now I’m certainly no luddite, but my approach to the “early AI years” was simply to acclimatise and experiment. This gentlemanly pace to tech adoption led me to make some epic misjudgments which I’ve written about here before. This world was neatly compartmentalised in my head; I continued consulting in the way I’ve always done, while experimenting with my new robot overlords in a wholly separate mental space. In equal parts amazed and confused by the tech, I never felt the need to take any drastic action to adapt my business, as the two worlds didn’t need to intersect yet. In fact, as I gradually adopted more diverse AI tools, it felt the same as adding new products to my stack to lift productivity, just as I’ve always quietly done in the background.

#### **From experimentation to reinvention**

But something has flipped in my attitude recently that I can’t quite put my finger on. I bounded into this year motivated to completely reinvent my positioning practice and build a central new offering, one which is AI optimised to the core. There is a spot more to refine, but I’m excited to say you’ll all see it hit the market in the coming months.

A friend asked me recently what clicked in my mindset, to push me from experimentation last year to re-invention now? It’s a profound question that I find terrifically hard to answer, perhaps I'm just subconsciously trying to take back control in a time of huge market change? But as somebody who strives to create mental order through my work, I find AI adoption exhausting. It's like a game of cerebral whack-a-mole just trying to keep up, so time will tell if my wholesale adoption of an AI-first practice is just me trying to tidy the world again! 

#### **AI can accelerate articulation, not understanding**

I remain incredibly optimistic about the positive impact AI will have on market positioning. However, although LLMs are brilliant at playing with words, I've learned that doesn’t make them automatically brilliant at positioning. The confidence that an LLM can articulate a Value Proposition leads us to overlook the quality or validity of the inputs for that proposition. The grunt work in positioning isn't the final flourish, but the relentless accumulation of meaningful customer and market insight.

AI can streamline, but can't replace this foundational work in positioning projects. When we confuse confidence with truth, we risk just arriving at the wrong answer faster.

However, AI is challenging our traditional methodology for positioning in some less obvious ways too.

#### **AI is becoming the customer**

The most pressing example for us all is how AI has become the universal B2B customer. In many cases, it’s already the first pass filter deciding who even makes the short-list.

The rise of agentic AI in B2B sales is a functional game changer for everybody. These specialised AI interfaces act on behalf of users to discover products, negotiate pricing and execute transactions. Forrester predicts that by the end of 2026, 90% of B2B buying will be AI agent-intermediated, representing a $15 trillion shift in spend.

In other words, AI has jumped from being our assistant to become everybody’s "gatekeeper".

That changes how positioning works. We're no longer just building propositions for humans. We're building propositions that machines have to interpret without us.

> AI now needs to be treated as a "customer" in its own right.

I suspect this will lead to a new layer in positioning. Something along the lines of "Machine-Readable Trust Signals”, but I’ll dive into this for you in a few months when I’ve got a few more test cycles out the way.

#### **Positioning is now always on**

The change of pace this introduces is hard to ignore. Positioning used to be something we could step into periodically. Gone is the luxury of time we used to have, where we could validate thoroughly before committing to a new position.

Agentic AI has to become the eyes on the back of our head, autonomously sifting data into insights, updating our market models so we can keep one step ahead of competitors and trends. Plainly positioning becomes less of a side project, and more of a continuous system.

#### **Disrupt yourself before someone else does**

All of this can feel fast and exhausting. But as we overhaul our products and businesses to fully embrace this tech, our sense of exploration and fun should remain intact. This is a rare moment where the rules are still being written.

We’re in a phase of rapid change, so the more experiments we can all run with our methodology, the faster we can all learn. It’s down to us to encourage each other to rip up the established rules and, to badly paraphrase Christensen, find greater joy in disrupting ourselves before somebody else does it for us.

If this is already affecting how your buyers evaluate you, I’d be interested to hear what you’re experiencing right now.

 

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## Read more from Andy Mitchell

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