Site icon John Rector

The New Customer Has an AI Friend

John Rector

If you could rewind and do the last 25 years of technology over again, you wouldn’t make the same moves.

You wouldn’t dump money into a pretty brochure website and ignore SEO.
You wouldn’t burn six figures on a custom app no one used.
You wouldn’t let your agency “throw in social for free” while someone else learned how to print money with Facebook and YouTube.

From where we stand in 2025, hindsight really is 20/20.

We can see now that the web wave was secretly about search and intent, not pixels.
The smartphone wave was secretly about social behavior and influencers, not native apps.

And now we are at the next inflection point with AI—and you can already feel the same mistakes forming.

This time, the stakes are higher, because the real shift isn’t just that you’ll have more AI workers inside your company.

The real shift is that your customer now walks in with an AI friend.

What We Got Wrong With the Web

When the web hit, everyone thought the game was:

“We need a website.”

And to be fair, that instinct was mostly right. If you didn’t have a website, you basically didn’t exist.

But if you could replay that era knowing what you know now, you wouldn’t obsess over:

You’d obsess over Google.

You’d be maniacal about:

Because a small number of businesses figured out that the real game wasn’t having a website. The real game was owning the pathways by which people found websites.

SEO and Google Ads allowed a tiny minority of players to quietly redirect the economy. Traffic that “should” have gone to the big, established brands instead went to whoever understood how the new physics of discovery worked.

Most businesses built sites.
A few businesses built funnels into those sites, fueled by search.

Everyone was technically online.
Almost no one truly controlled demand.

What We Got Wrong With Smartphones

Then came the smartphone, and the reflex repeated.

“We need an app.”

It felt logical. People were spending hours a day on their phones. The App Store was exploding. Agencies were selling app builds like it was the new gold rush.

Again, in hindsight, you can see the mistake.

Most businesses did not need an app. An app that nobody opens lives in the same graveyard as an unread email newsletter.

If you could do it over, you would not:

You would fixate on where attention actually pooled:

And you would have realized something important:

There was no such thing as an “influencer” when smartphones launched.
There were no “selfies.”
There was just an emerging behavior: people pointing a camera at themselves and at their lives, and audiences forming around that.

The real power turned out to be:

If you could rewind, you’d spend far less on your own app and far more on:

Smartphones looked like a hardware moment.
They were actually a social behavior moment.

Pattern Recognition: How You Get Run Over

If you zoom out, the pattern is nasty and simple:

  1. A new technology wave arrives.
  2. Businesses grab the most obvious artifact (site, app, page) and feel modern.
  3. A smaller group quietly learns the new physics of discovery and decision-making in that wave.
  4. That small group ends up redirecting demand and profit while everyone else checks boxes.

Web → The leverage was search, not just “having a site.”
Smartphone → The leverage was social media and influencers, not “having an app.”

Now we hit AI. And you can already hear the same surface-level instincts:

You can do all of that and still get completely run over.

Because the real shift this time is not inside your company first. It’s outside, in the person who buys from you.

Say Hello to My AI Friend

With the web, the customer changed channels: they walked into your store and visited your website. Still the same human.

With the smartphone, the customer changed context: they saw you on a five-inch screen, tapped your link from social, maybe downloaded your app. Still the same human.

With AI, something new happens:

Every customer—B2C and B2B—is about to say:
“Say hello to my AI friend.”

That line is playful, but the shift is deadly serious.

For the first time in history:

Your customer will talk to their AI:

Their AI friend will:

Then it will say to your customer:

“Here are your top three options. This one is technically cheaper, but the reviews are weak and the return policy is tricky. This one is slightly more expensive but more reliable and faster. Based on your preferences, I recommend this one.”

The customer will not argue with the AI.
They asked for a recommendation. They’ll take it.

That’s the new customer journey.

Why Your Own Chatbot Is the New “We Need an App”

In that world, what is the value of your AI chatbot?

It’s mostly the same value your custom app turned out to have: low.

Your chatbot is, at best, a convenience layer for humans who still want to click around your site. That’s fine. But it’s not the main event.

The main event is:

They care about:

Your chatbot is cosmetic.
Your legibility to other AIs is existential.

If you pour money into your own “AI experience” while ignoring how you look from the perspective of a third-party AI friend, you are replaying the app mistake in slow motion.

What AI Friends Actually Care About

Think about what your customer’s AI friend needs in order to advocate for you.

It’s not cinematic brand videos. It’s not clever wordplay. It’s not a Super Bowl ad.

It’s structured, reliable truth:

AI friends can read all of this.
They can compare it across vendors instantly.
They can notice patterns humans rarely see.

If your story and your reality diverge, the AI will spot it.

If your SKU data is messy, your docs are vague, your policies are fuzzy, and your inventory is fiction, the AI will detect that too—and quietly steer business elsewhere.

This is the new SEO.
Not “How do I rank on page one?” but:

“How do I become the obvious, low-friction, low-regret choice in the eyes of a machine that has my customer’s full trust?”

The New Priorities (If You Don’t Want to Get Run Over Again)

So if you’re standing in 2025, looking forward instead of backward, how would you spend your money differently this time?

You would not lead with:

You would lead with questions like:

  1. Are we machine-readable?
    • Do we have clean, structured product and service data?
    • Are our specs, prices, and policies exposed in ways that AI systems can ingest and trust?
    • Is our documentation clear, consistent, and up to date?
  2. Are we truthful and consistent?
    • Do our marketing claims, legal terms, and actual behavior align?
    • Do our reviews and reputation corroborate what we say?
    • Are we minimizing fine print and “gotchas” that an AI would flag as risk?
  3. Are we instrumented for AI-native customer experience?
    • Can external AIs check order status, availability, and returns without friction?
    • Do we offer APIs or at least well-structured interfaces that make it easy for agents to interact with us?
    • Are our support flows documented clearly enough that an AI can navigate them on behalf of a human?
  4. Are we designing for the AI friend as a first-class customer?
    • When we create a new product, are we thinking about how it will look in an AI’s comparison matrix?
    • When we change policies, are we thinking about how that affects risk scoring by AI advisors?
    • When we invest in “brand,” are we making sure the underlying reality is something an AI can verify and endorse?

That is a very different capital allocation plan than:

It’s deeper, more operational, less glamorous—and far more decisive.

The Elephant in the Room

Yes, your internal workforce will change.
Yes, your art department, copywriters, and customer service team will increasingly work alongside AI.

But that’s not the elephant in the room.

The elephant in the room is this:

For the first time, your customer is not alone.
They are arriving with an AI friend who does the thinking, comparing, reading, and remembering on their behalf.

Every technology wave so far has changed how the customer reaches you.
This one changes who is actually doing the choosing.

If you ignore that and obsess over your own AI toys, you will look back in 2030 with the same regret you feel now about SEO you never did, social you never learned, and app budgets you wish you had redirected.

If you take it seriously, you’ll start designing your business for a world where:

You don’t need another app.
You don’t need a gimmicky chatbot.

You need to become the company that every AI friend looks at and says,
“For what my human cares about, this is the safest, smartest choice.”

That’s the game now. Everything else is just decoration.

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