Marketing to the Machine: Rethinking Global Marketing for the AI Era

This article argues that AI has become a central force in how global demand forms. Consumers now make decisions through hybrid human–AI configurations that shape what they see, how preferences develop, and how choices are routed. We conceptualize this as consumer–AI symbiosis, a persistent configuration in which human intention and machine inference are reciprocally adjusted so that preference and choice are jointly produced. We outline four shifts driving this change: the rise of the hybrid consumer, the emergence of algorithmic borders, the growth of intermediated demand, and the spread of generative consumption. These operate at distinct levels of the marketplace, the actor, the ecosystem, the gatekeeping layer, and representation, yet interact recursively as behavior becomes the training data that reshapes future exposure. Together these shifts suggest that demand is increasingly coauthored by people and the systems that interpret them, relocating demand formation from the bounded consumer to a distributed socio-technical architecture. As a result, marketing becomes as much about influencing the systems that interpret consumers as persuading consumers themselves. We propose new strategic imperatives for global marketing and identify research opportunities around preference formation, algorithmic presence, and AI sovereignty.