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

Editor’s Note

This thought-provoking article about the impact of AI Shopping on how people make purchase decisions and form loyalty to the brands they patronize goes way beyond the provocative headline. As you read this, we hope the hairs begin to stand on your neck and that your emotions go beyond resistance to the concepts described here and cause you to imagine solutions that will preserve brand loyalty in an increasingly digital world.

Steve is an award-winning engagement designer, brand-customer relationship orchestrator, and business strategist. He has 25+ years of direct experience in the video game industry, having designed and produced AAA games for Disney Interactive, Electronic Arts, Sega, and Ubisoft that have generated sales in excess of $650 million. He has spoken at a variety of premier events, including Game Developer’s Conference (San Jose, California), South by Southwest (Austin, Texas), SIGGRAPH, Juarez Competitiva (Mexico), Gamification Summit (Amsterdam), Banff New Media Festival, GameON Finance (Toronto, Ontario), GDCNext (Los Angeles, California), Digital Entertainment Leadership Forum (Hong Kong), Interface Summit, and several others.

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, and 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 a 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?