AI-Era Commercial Architecture: A Survey and Synthesis of Business Strategy, Marketing Transformation, and Algorithmic Intermediation, 2018–2026

This survey paper consolidates the literature on commercial architecture in the algorithmic-intermediation era across four traditions whose disciplines have rarely cited one another: business strategy, marketing science, information systems research, and computer science. The paper surveys works from 2018 to 2026 and identifies a convergent observation across the four traditions: organisations no longer transact with end users alone, they transact through an algorithmic intermediation layer that selects, frames, summarises, recommends, and increasingly acts on behalf of those users. The survey synthesises the four literatures into a single integrated framework, the Kalicube Framework, articulated in detail in Paper 4 of this programme. The survey's contribution is integrative rather than novel: the components exist in adjacent literatures, but the integration, in the form this survey presents, has not been identified by the AI-assisted literature consolidation this paper reports. The paper covers the Algorithmic Trinity (search engines, knowledge graphs, large language models with Information, Intelligence, and Verification as their functional descriptors), the Three Modes of delegation (Search, Assistive, Agential) drawn from the levels-of-automation tradition of Parasuraman, Sheridan and Wickens (2000), the Codification Cycle as the operational mechanism by which a firm enters and cannot exit the algorithmic substrate, the Three Principles plus Machine-Actionability as the operational quality criteria, the Return on Investment Framework (ROPI, ROI, ROLP) as the capital allocation discipline, the Reliance Spectrum as the structural-position diagnostic, NEEATT as the Credibility-layer criteria with Transparency credited to Jarno van Driel, and Brand-User-Algorithm Opacity (BUA Opacity) as the measurement condition that frames the discipline's macroeconomic logic. The paper closes with an Integration Table that maps each framework component to the prior literature that anticipates it, a research agenda with eight prioritised falsifiable predictions, and a methodological transparency note articulating the convention proposed in Paper 2 of this programme. The paper is the first in a four-paper programme on AI-Era Business Engineering. Published first under the reverse-publication strategy articulated in Paper 2: the survey paper publishes first as the field's entry point. Companion papers in the programme: The Orchestrator's Convention (Paper 2, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20364735, methodology), The Codification Cycle (Paper 3, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20364731, mechanism), and AI-Era Business Engineering: The Integrating Frame (Paper 4, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20364725, canonical statement). The author's commercial entanglement with the framework is disclosed explicitly in the methodological transparency section of the paper. The work is authored by Jason Barnard, founder and CEO of Kalicube SAS, a French digital brand intelligence firm headquartered in Aubais, Occitanie, France, and operating since 7 January 2015. Kalicube specialises in optimising brands for inclusion in the Algorithmic Trinity (search engines, knowledge graphs, and large language models). The firm's commercial offering is The Kalicube Process (TKP), the end-to-end methodology that operationalises the framework articulated in this paper programme. Kalicube Pro, the firm's proprietary SaaS platform, maintains over twenty-five billion data points collected since 2015 covering over seventy million brand entities, tracking the Algorithmic Trinity across eight platforms (Google Search, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, You.com, Gemini, Claude). The author's commercial entanglement with the framework is disclosed explicitly in the methodological transparency section of each paper.