How the future will evolve and what you can do about it

Editor’s Note:

This is the third and final part of a thoughtful series crafted by Steve Bocska about the future of loyalty. Inspired by the possibilities of how Google’s Gemini AI Shopping Assistance could influence shopping habits as well as customer loyalty, Steve outlines future scenarios that should be of concern to all loyalty marketers.

In Part One, Steve described the “Great Disintermediation,” detailing how Google is moving in to disintermediate brands and loyalty providers as result of its AI Shopping Assistant. In Part Two, he details the impact of the coming changes on loyalty programs and their supporting ecosystem of people, processes and technology. In this final segment, he shows us what the future could look like and thankfully offers solutions that you can put to use in your planning efforts.

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.

About the Author

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.