Has AI changed how people decide what to buy?

Yes, profoundly. For a decade, buyers researched before they bought: searching, comparing, reading reviews across a dozen tabs. Now a growing share skip all of it. They ask an AI what to get and act on the answer. The research still happens; the machine just does it for them.

In 2011, Google gave the modern buying journey a name: the Zero Moment of Truth. The idea was that before anyone walked into a store or clicked buy, they went online first: searching, comparing, reading reviews, watching videos (Google, Jim Lecinski, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth, 2011). That messy middle became the battleground of marketing for the next decade. Whole teams existed to be present in it.

That middle is collapsing.

Think about the last time you bought something you did not know much about. A monitor for a new desk. A supplement for your knees. Software to run payroll. Be honest about what you actually did. You probably did not open Google and work down a page of links, opening tabs and weighing them yourself. You described your situation to ChatGPT or Perplexity in a sentence and asked what to get. And it did not hand you ten options. It named one or two, with a reason.

The research did not disappear. It moved. The comparing, the weighing, the reading of reviews, the work the buyer used to do, is now done by the machine, in a second, out of sight. What the person receives is not a set of raw materials to judge. It is a conclusion.

That is a genuine change in human behaviour, not just in technology. The buyer has handed the decision to something they trust and is acting on what it says. Which, stripped of the software, is the oldest behaviour in commerce: asking someone you trust what to do, and doing it. Long before search, there was a neighbour, a shopkeeper, a friend who had bought one already. The AI has simply become that trusted adviser, at scale.

For brands, the implication is sharp. The moment you spent a decade learning to influence, the researching buyer, mid-funnel, comparing you against rivals, is now answered by a machine before you ever see it. You are not persuading the shopper anymore. You are persuading the thing the shopper asks.