by Steve Bocska

AI assistants are taking control of the customer journey—and if brands don’t act fast, they’ll lose the right to be chosen.

Introduction – The Calm Before the Storm

For years, the loyalty industry has operated on a simple assumption: if you can build a relationship with your customer—a real one, the kind where trust, habit, and emotional resonance live—you’ll win their long-term business. We’ve built vast, complicated and expensive ecosystems around this belief. Points programs, branded apps, tiered rewards, personalization engines, gamified experiences all designed to do one thing: keep the customer coming back to us.

But all of that is about to be violently dismantled.

Quietly, and with almost no fanfare outside the tech world, Google has just unveiled what could be the loyalty industry’s extinction-level event. With the launch of its new Gemini AI-powered shopping assistant, Google is no longer just helping customers find what they’re looking for, it’s actually choosing it for them. Recommending. Comparing. Nudging. Finalizing purchases. And then even completing payments.

While Google once merely influenced the customer journey, soon they will be owning it.

This is a full-blown transformative shift. The trust and familiarity we’ve spent years cultivating between brand and buyer are now being rerouted through an algorithmic middleman that is invisible, impersonal, and indifferent to our carefully crafted loyalty strategies.

We’ve seen other disruptions in the past. But this isn’t like eCommerce or mobile apps or social media. This is something much more fundamental, dare I say even structural? It’s tantamount to a slow erosion of brand relevance, masked insidiously as convenience. And most brands don’t even see it coming.

In the pages that follow, I want to break down the severity of what’s happening, not as hyperbolic a futurist who is spinning wild doom scenarios, but as someone who has spent decades in the trenches of gamification, customer engagement, and loyalty. What we are witnessing is the beginning of a fundamental rewiring of how purchase decisions are made. And if we don’t act fast, we risk losing the most valuable thing a brand can ever own:

The direct relationship with the customer.

The Great Disintermediation: How Google Is Moving In

We used to think of Google as that cute and colorful internet companion who was the light guiding us through the overwhelming pathways on the internet to find movie listings, cruise discounts, and cat videos. Heck, their motto even used to be: “Don’t be evil!” But in the age of AI, Google is going beyond just lighting the path and instead becoming the path itself.

With the launch of its new AI-powered shopping assistant, Google has officially stepped out of the role of passive indexer and into the shoes of an active intermediary. No longer is Google merely there to help customers “search” for the best product anymore. It wants permission to decide what they should buy, when they should buy it, how they should pay, and where the transaction should go next.

Here’s how it all breaks down.

• Discovery is no longer an open marketplace of branded options, becoming instead a curated feed of AI-suggested products, optimized for relevance, price, and past behavior.
• Evaluation becomes less about your value proposition and more about how well your product performs in an algorithm’s prioritization logic.
• Transactions get mediated through Google Pay or Assistant-powered checkouts, placing Google in the role of active facilitator of the purchase.
• Fulfillment is moving toward invisible background automation, from order confirmation to delivery updates, all delivered by these faceless AI assistants, not your brand.

This is a full-stack assault on the customer journey—a vertical takeover of the buying process and a classic case of disintermediation—except this time, you’re the one being disintermediated. And if that doesn’t send shivers down the spines of loyalty professionals, it should.

Think about it: if the AI is recommending the product, selecting the seller, negotiating the price, and handling payment, where exactly does your brand fit in? At best, it becomes a powerless supplier. At worst, it gets filtered out of the equation entirely. The customer doesn’t even know they’re no longer loyal to you—because the assistant made the choice before they had the chance to remember your name!

And let’s be clear: this is by design. Google’s long-term goal isn’t to help brands shine. It’s to make the assistant so useful, so frictionless, that customers stop thinking in terms of brands altogether. The purchase decision becomes what’s best for me right now, as determined by the assistant’s optimization engine, not who do I trust and want to support.

This is the moment loyalty becomes a background variable, a soft signal among many others. Price, convenience, shipping speed, historical behavior are among the core factors that feed the AI. Your brand’s meticulously crafted story? Its established values? Its hard-won reputation? Maybe they’re part of the model. But maybe not.

But one thing’s for sure: the brand no longer gets to speak directly. The assistant speaks for you. Or, more accurately, instead of you.

And in that silence, something even more profound is lost: the relationship.

The Death of Direct Connection

For decades, marketers have been building digital touchpoints to bridge brands with their customers. Every email campaign, push notification, app feature, and loyalty reward was part of a larger strategy designed to create ongoing dialogue, engagement, and if you were really lucky, a meaningful relationship.

But with AI-powered shopping assistants like Google’s now taking the wheel, those bridges are being quietly demolished. And it runs even deeper still, with pure tech behemoths like NVIDIA also splashing both feet first into the AI shopping assistant pool.

The promise of loyalty has always rested on direct connection fostering a sense of presence and familiarity between the brand and its audience. When a customer opens your app, checks their points balance, completes a challenge, or redeems a reward, they’re reinforcing a relationship. They’re saying, “I see you. I remember you. I choose you.”

AI assistants eliminate that entire layer of engagement.

Instead of browsing your app, the customer is asking their assistant, “Find me a good deal on running shoes.” And instead of your brand delivering a perfectly curated offer through a rich, branded experience—with imagery, tone, incentives, gamified tiers—the assistant simply says, “Here’s a list. I’ve chosen the top one for you.”

The customer says “buy.”

And that’s it.

No app. No visit. No moment of interaction. No loyalty tier badge sparkling on the screen. Just a cold, invisible handoff between an algorithm and a shopping cart. Your brand? Reduced to metadata.

But wait, it gets worse.

Because it’s not just the purchase that’s being hijacked—it’s the entire feedback loop. In traditional loyalty ecosystems, every interaction is an opportunity for deeper personalization. You learn more about the customer, and they in turn feel more understood, more rewarded, more “seen.” This is what builds emotional engagement and loyalty that survives price wars and shipping delays.

But AI assistants will own the feedback now. They’re the ones collecting preferences, learning patterns, customizing future suggestions. They become the trusted partner in the customer’s decision-making process—not you.

The result? Soulless, transactional loyalty with no emotional core.

You might still get the sale, but you’ll never get the customer’s heart. And that distinction is crucial because when Google or Amazon or TikTok decides that a competitor’s product ranks higher, for any reason, you’re gone. Erased. Forgotten.

It’s the death of the two-way relationship. And it’s the single most dangerous development threatening the loyalty industry today. Because if you can’t talk to your customer anymore, how can you possibly expect them to care about you?

From Loyalty Programs to Loyalty Proxies

For decades, loyalty programs have been the workhorses of customer retention. Points, tiers, challenges, offers—all designed to reward behavior, build habit, and foster connection. And they worked. Not perfectly, but reliably. Starbucks. Chick-fil-A. Sephora. McDonald’s. Yes, these brands sold products, but they also trained crucial behaviors. They taught customers to care, to engage, to return.

But now, all of that is at risk of becoming obsolete, not because loyalty stopped working, but because something more powerful has stepped in between. AI assistants like Google’s are now positioned to become loyalty proxies, quite literally artificial intermediaries that replicate the outcomes of traditional loyalty programs without requiring the customer to interact with the brand at all.

Here’s how the erosion begins:

• Customers no longer open your app to see how close they are to their next free coffee. Instead, the assistant simply tells them: “You can get 10% off coffee from Brand X today.”
• They don’t browse your limited-time offers or complete weekly challenges. The assistant filters the most relevant deal from a dozen competitors and displays the one it thinks they’ll want.
• They don’t care who’s offering the reward—they only care that something was offered, and it was convenient to accept.

The AI becomes the loyalty program. Except it’s not your loyalty program. It’s Google’s. It’s Amazon’s. It’s the assistant’s. And that shift is more dangerous than it seems. Because now, the loyalty isn’t to your brand. It’s to the assistant. And assistants don’t play favorites, at least not in a way that you have control over. They don’t care who the customer buys from, only that the algorithm is “right,” the experience is seamless, and the purchase converts. The assistant is loyal only to optimization.

This means your years of investment in personalization engines, behavioral segmentation, CRM systems, and offer orchestration are about to get steamrolled. Even worse, your carefully crafted loyalty system—the one built on rewards, rituals, and recognition—becomes just another data source. It will get cannibalized by the assistant’s machine learning model, which picks through your perks and filters them through its own logic to decide what (if anything) reaches the customer.

Your entire program becomes a comparative feature getting evaluated in someone else’s platform. And when that happens, you lose the ability to:

• Influence behavior
• Design emotional journeys
• Create exclusivity
• Deliver surprise and delight
• Build habit-forming loops

In other words, you lose the game of loyalty because you’re no longer holding the controller.

And make no mistake: this isn’t theoretical. This is already happening. We are witnessing the rise of an AI-powered ecosystem where customer interactions are no longer brand-mediated, but algorithm-mediated. Where identity, preference, and purchasing history are managed not by the brand that earned them—but by the assistant that simply ingested them.

So ask yourself this: if the customer never sees your app, never visits your site, never experiences your brand world—are they still even your customer?

Or have you already lost them to the proxy?

The Commoditization of Brand Identity

For generations, branding has been the soul of business strategy. It’s how Nike became “Just Do It,” how Apple became a lifestyle, and how Patagonia became a movement. Great brands do more than offer products. They project aspiration, convey identity, and embody values. They craft an emotional imprint that lives far beyond the transaction.

But in an “AI-first” shopping environment, that identity is at risk of being erased.

Here’s why: AI assistants don’t care about your brand story. They care about signals. Structured data, product attributes, price, delivery time and customer ratings all factor into the equation. Maybe—just maybe—your ethical policies, community involvement, and charitable activities are buried in there somewhere. But the Big Idea you’ve spent countless hours crafting in the boardroom? The corporate narrative you’ve so carefully architected? The emotional connection the first time your customers see your product online?

Flattened.

This is the brutal logic of AI-powered curation. It strips away the nuance and compresses your identity into a set of calculated performance metrics. Did the product convert? Was the price competitive? Did the user click the suggestion? That’s what survives. Everything else is lost in translation.

Your bold packaging design? Gone, the assistant doesn’t show it. Your tone of voice? Irrelevant, the customer is reading a one-line summary from the assistant. Your heartwarming annual Christmas video, the kind that gets shared on LinkedIn and brings people to tears? The AI doesn’t care. It’s not part of the purchase flow. In this new ecosystem, even the most iconic brands risk becoming undifferentiated commodities. Your hard-won uniqueness is squashed into a sameness, a transactional row in a list of “recommended” results.

It’s the great equalizer, but not in a good way.

Because in a world where AI assistants mediate every purchase decision, branding stops mattering unless it shows up in the machine’s logic. And unless your brand is uniquely optimized for those systems—unless your narrative can be translated into data that improves conversion—it becomes invisible.

Worse, the machine doesn’t care about invested equity. It doesn’t reward the years you’ve spent building trust or the emotional capital you’ve invested in your customers. It rewards whatever wins the algorithmic race that day. And that could be a no-name private label product that momentarily scores just a little better on price or availability.

This is how brand loyalty dies, not in some dramatic seismic betrayal, but in a quiet, gradual erosion of distinctiveness. You’ve gone from “beloved brand” to “line item.”

And here’s the kicker: the more successful these assistants become, the more habituated customers get to skipping over the brand entirely. They stop asking who they’re buying from. They start only asking what they’re getting, how much it cost, and when it will arrive.

That’s the commoditization of brand identity. And it’s the beginning of the end for loyalty as we know it.

A Punch to the Gut of the Loyalty Industry

What we’re witnessing isn’t just an annoying little poke. It’s a direct hit to the solar plexus of the entire loyalty ecosystem, and most people in the industry are still smiling, nodding, and pretending they can breathe just fine.

But they can’t. Not if they’re paying attention.

Let’s break down exactly who’s about to get walloped—and why:

1. Basic Loyalty Platforms

The traditional loyalty tech stack—points engines, tier systems, email-based offer orchestration—has been built on one sacred assumption: that brands control the customer interface. That assumption is now dead.

AI shopping assistants like Google’s Gemini are intercepting and replacing the UX layer where loyalty programs have traditionally lived. Customers won’t log into your app to check their points. They’ll ask their assistant what’s on offer, and the assistant will decide what to surface based on its own logic.

That beautiful dashboard you built? It’s gone. Your hard-fought push notification strategy? Replaced by an AI nudge from someone else’s platform. Unless loyalty platforms can evolve to plug directly into AI ecosystems with real-time, dynamic, API-ready value props that survive the cut, they will become irrelevant.

2. Agencies and Consultants

The loyalty industry’s strategic advisors have long been the architects of brand engagement, designing journeys, campaigns, reward structures, and community playbooks. But when the assistant becomes the journey designer, what’s left to strategize?

If customers no longer interact with your ecosystem, if rewards are extracted and reinterpreted through the assistant’s lens, if behavioral design is reduced to price-point logic all of that narrative scaffolding collapses.

Agencies will have to reinvent their playbooks from the ground up. Loyalty design will no longer be about orchestrating brand-centric experiences. It will be about engineering influence inside hostile, third-party ecosystems.

And that’s a very different job.

3. Brands and Loyalty Marketers

Perhaps the hardest hit will be the in-house loyalty professionals—those brand-side strategists who’ve spent years constructing slick engagement pathways designed to efficiently build trust and loyalty with their audiences. Because now, that trust can be hijacked in a click by an automated AI filter with a much better conversion rate.

Your personalization strategy? Obsolete if it can’t be exposed through the assistant’s data layer. Your retention campaigns? Useless if the customer never sees them. Your offer design? Meaningless if the AI decides a competitor’s offer is just 1.5% better.

And here’s the harshest truth of all: The customer won’t miss you.

Not because they don’t care, but because they’ll never know what they’re missing. The faceless assistant will deliver an optimized experience. It’ll be fast, frictionless, functional. And the emotional layer you spent years cultivating? Gone in a blink.

4. The Loyalty Industry at Large

This is an extinction-level event for the loyalty business model. Some loyalty practitioners already know it.  Some are denying it. But mark my words, it’s happening now.

The bigger questions is, what happens to the $15 billion global loyalty management market—the vendors, the systems, the conferences, the careers—when customer engagement is no longer brand-mediated? What happens when “loyalty” becomes a backend variable in someone else’s machine?

This is not a brief cyclical downturn they will need to weather. It is a tectonic realignment of stakeholder power. And unless we reinvent the game, we’ll all be playing in someone else’s sandbox, one with no scoreboard, no rules, and no audience.

What Happens Next?

Let’s assume for a moment that these predictions hold and the transformation plays out exactly as the trajectory suggests. That AI assistants take over discovery, decision-making, and payment. That they become the default entry point for commerce—across desktop, mobile, smart home, wearables, and every other touchpoint possible—until customers, hypnotized by sheer convenience, become zombified consumers oblivious to who they’re buying from and relying instead only on what the assistant recommends.

Now ask yourself: what role is left for brands in that future? There are only three likely outcomes—and none of them look like the loyalty industry we know today.

Scenario 1: The Rise of AI-Owned Loyalty Systems

In this future, the assistants become the de facto loyalty programs. Google, Amazon, NVIDIA—they create native loyalty frameworks inside their ecosystems, aggregating brand offers, perks, and rewards into assistant-driven logic. The customer earns “points” for using the assistant, shopping across recommended vendors, and following optimization behaviors.

Brands get slotted into a recommendation matrix where access is algorithmically auctioned off, much like Google Ads today. You want exposure? Bid for it. Pay for it. Optimize for it. But one thing is for certain, you ain’t gonna control it.

In this model, loyalty becomes a platform tax—not a strategy. Your program is just another lever the assistant pulls to enhance its own stickiness. The customer’s loyalty accrues to the assistant, not to you.

Scenario 2: A Race to the Bottom

In the absence of meaningful brand differentiation where AI controls visibility, many brands will spiral into pure commodity warfare. Price becomes the frontline of the battleground, volume triumphs over value, and speed replaces story.

In this race to be selected by the algorithm, thick-margined products will be squeezed out, experiential marketing will vanish, and brand loyalty will be replaced by algorithmic compliance. Customer relationships will be dictated by feed ranking. The only “loyalty” left will be the assistant’s confidence score.

And let’s be clear, this isn’t competition. It’s a dystopian algorithmic Darwinism. You either adapt to the assistant’s evolving preferences, or you die.

Scenario 3: The Fragmented Resistance

Not every brand will surrender. Some will fight back by rebuilding direct channels and creating walled-garden experiences so rich, so rewarding, and so emotionally compelling that customers choose to bypass the assistant.

These brands will:

• Create exclusive loyalty ecosystems that can’t be replicated by AI.
• Deliver unique post-purchase experiences that only happen inside their own platforms.
• Build community-driven engagement loops that drive value beyond the transaction.
• Leverage gamified systems, identity signaling, and shared missions to inspire belonging.

In this resistance model, the brand becomes the destination again. Not because it’s the most convenient, but because it’s the most authentic, meaningful and satisfying to the customer.

But make no mistake: this path will not be easy. It requires a radical reinvention of the customer engagement playbook. It means thinking beyond points and tiers and badges. Beyond discounts and emails. Beyond automation. It means becoming unforgettable in a world where AI is literally training customers to forget.

We are standing at the edge of the greatest transformation in brand-consumer relationships since the birth of digital commerce. What comes next will either be a renaissance of engagement—or quite possibly the final chapter in the story of loyalty as we know it.

The choice is ours.

How Brands Must Respond—Now

If everything we’ve described so far sounds like an existential crisis for loyalty, that’s because it is.

But here’s the thing about crises: they also create moments of unprecedented clarity and soaring opportunity. When the old playbook burns, the opportunity to write a new one becomes not just possible but necessary. And for brands willing to evolve, this moment presents an incredible chance to redefine what loyalty means in the age of AI.

Because if you can no longer rely on visibility, convenience, or passive customer habits to earn repeat business, you must compete on something deeper.

You must compete on engagement. Let’s break down what that looks like:

1. Reassert Control Through Irresistible, Ownable Experiences

If AI wants to own the front end of the customer journey, you will need to own the middle and end. This means reimagining your loyalty ecosystem as a destination, not a utility. A place so compelling that customers willingly return, even if it takes a few extra taps.

That means:

• Deemphasizing transactions
• Exclusive content
• Story-driven progression
• Immersive post-purchase rituals
• Dynamic challenges
• Meaningful recognition

Make every moment a customer spends within a touchpoint feel rewarding—not just in points, but in identity, pride, and participation.

2. Go Beyond Transactions—Build Identity-Based Loyalty

AI is optimized for purchase. You must be optimized for people.

In the age of assistants, the strongest brands will be those that build communities, not just customer lists. Loyalty must be more than “buy X, get Y.” It must give people a way to express who they are—and what they stand for—by choosing you.

Bring forth values-based missions, cause-driven engagement, social quests, tribe-building mechanics. When customers belong, they stay. No assistant can replicate that.

3. Redesign for “Funstration” and the Human Engagement Loop

This is the moment to fully embrace what we’ve always known as game designers: raw friction isn’t the enemy—meaningless friction is.

Use the power of “funstration”—the strategic use of manageable frustration, reward anticipation, and emotional payoff—to keep your customers coming back, not out of habit, but out of genuine desire.

That means:

• Purposefully delaying gratification (and making the wait worth it)
• Crafting an economy of rare, collectible rewards
• Creating high-stakes decisions with meaningful consequences
• Introducing timed challenges and time pressure events

This is how you rebuild warm emotional engagement in a world optimized for cold, dispassionate efficiency.

4. Make Loyalty Dynamic, Not Static

The loyalty programs of the past were ledgers. The loyalty systems of the future must be living economies.

That means moving from:

• Points → Experiences
• Tiers → Journeys
• Rewards → Recognition
• Offers → Opportunities

Start thinking in terms of gameplay, progression, and participation—not Gantt charts, quarterly campaign themes, and expiry dates.

And most critically: make the system responsive. Adapt to customer behavior in real time. Use every touchpoint to surprise, delight, and challenge. The moment your loyalty experience starts feeling “automated,” the AI has already won.

5. Prepare Your Ecosystem to Speak AI

Yes, the future will include intermediaries. Deal with it. But if your loyalty system is structured for deep data richness—meaningful signals, structured rewards, micro-engagements—you may still influence the assistant’s decisions.

Future-proof your systems by:

• Making your rewards clearly machine-readable
• Exposing loyalty logic through APIs
• Tagging and structuring your experience layers for external visibility

This won’t save you entirely, but it does give you a fighting chance to survive the algorithm’s ruthless curation layer.

Bottom line: The future of loyalty will not be won by being more convenient than the assistant. It will be won by being more compelling. If your experience is engaging enough, memorable enough, valuable enough, your customers will make the extra click. They’ll take the detour. They’ll stay with you, not because it’s easy, but because it’s worth it.

The AI revolution is here. Of course, loyalty itself isn’t dead, but the old version of it is. What comes next is up to us.

Conclusion – A Call to Arms

This is not a future problem, breathless hyperbole, or a thought experiment for 2028. This is happening right now. Google’s shopping assistant isn’t a beta test. It’s a fully operational disintermediation engine, and it’s already reshaping how consumers discover, decide, and transact. Amazon’s doing it. Apple’s doing it. TikTok is quietly becoming a commerce funnel. Every major platform is racing to become the first point of contact—the AI-powered gatekeeper between your brand and your customer.

And the loyalty industry?

Still optimizing email cadences, tweaking reward tables, and measuring clickthrough rates on offers the customer may never see.

It’s not enough. Because this time, we’re not competing against each other. We’re competing against invisibility. In this new reality, if you’re not in the assistant’s decision graph, you don’t exist. And even if you are, you’re just one option in a machine-ranked list of logical outcomes. The emotional resonance you spent years cultivating? Filtered out. The brand story you’ve told a million times? Silenced.

The great irony is that we finally built the tools to make loyalty work—personalization, gamification, real-time engagement, psychological insight—just as the stage was ripped out from under us.

But it’s not over. Not yet. There’s still a narrow window to act. To fight back and reimagine loyalty as something deeper than convenience. To build worlds so compelling, experiences so rewarding, that even the most efficient AI can’t replicate them. To reassert control by forging relationships instead of transactions. To remind customers why they chose you in the first place—and why they should keep choosing you, even when the assistant offers something else.

Brands that rise to the occasion will emerge with something stronger than loyalty—they’ll have belonging. Identity. Advocacy. And the kind of customer relationships that no algorithm can take away. But those who hesitate? They’ll fade, invisibly skipped over by the algorithm, forgotten by the customer.

Because in this new world, it’s not just about being better.

It’s about being remembered.