The next era of brand-building won’t be won on attention. As agentic AI takes hold, increasingly selecting, recommending, and transacting on consumers’ behalf, brands face a new competitive frontier: becoming the default chosen by machines before a human ever weighs in.

The shift collapses old certainties. Paid, owned, and earned blur into a single connected experience. Creative effectiveness is no longer measured in cultural resonance alone, but in neurological signals, with the brain deciding before awareness catches up. Thus, the first “customer” a brand meets is today often not a person at all.

How can the world’s most influential brands compete and win when human values such as trust and authenticity have become the currency customers value most in an increasingly impersonal, automated agentic world? And how can CMOs navigate the tension between mastering platform gatekeepers and staying personally connected to their customers?

This session brings together two category-defining marketers, Jennifer Treiber-Ruckenbrod of MINI and Lara Balazs of Adobe, and Karin Zimmermann, from dentsu's business transformation practice, to unpack what it takes to build brands that machines recommend and humans love.