MIT projects that by 2030, almost half of all consumer decision-making will be AI-driven. At The Drum Live, futurist Danielle Dodoo shares what that means for brands that have spent decades marketing to humans but need to pivot to market to machines.
Danielle Dodoo speaking at The Drum Live
For more than a century, advertising has thrived on its ability to bypass rational thought and pull on consumers’ emotions. From lipstick as liberation to diamonds as eternal love, brands built their fortunes on what futurist Danielle Dodoo calls “identity engineering.” But, she warned, the era of manipulating the unconscious may be coming to a close. In its place, a new type of consumer is emerging – one whose decisions are increasingly mediated by AI.
Speaking live on stage at The Drum Live, Dodoo challenged marketers to rethink their playbooks. “Advertising completely bypasses the neocortex, our system two thinking, and goes straight to the limbic emotional side,” she explained. “So we are incredible targets for manipulation.” From Edward Bernays selling fantasy to De Beers creating scarcity, the industry’s craft has long been to exploit the “programmable self.” But, she argued, this foundation is eroding fast.
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Dodoo framed consumer identity as fragmented, fluid and inherently insecure. She described three selves that advertisers have historically preyed on: the sore self (“I’m not good enough”), the aspirational self (“If I have this, I’ll be happy”) and the lost self (“I want to feel whole”).
“This is exactly where you guys target – right in the middle, this insecure, unconscious, programmable self,” she told the audience. The problem for marketers is that this battleground is shifting.
If the 20th century was defined by Mad Men and mass media, the early 21st century was shaped by algorithms. Advertising stopped persuading humans directly and began optimizing for platforms. “In the late 2000s, advertising shifted from persuading humans to optimizing for algorithms,” Dodoo noted. Big data allowed platforms to measure, anticipate and feed back consumer behavior, fueling decision fatigue and “cognitive overload.”
The result was what she calls the “age of cognitive outsourcing.” As choices multiplied and attention splintered, consumers increasingly handed over decision-making to algorithms. Recommendation engines, curated feeds and personalized nudges became the default – not because consumers trusted them, but because they were too exhausted to resist.
That quiet outsourcing is now accelerating and with it comes a profound challenge for brands. “Delegating decisions is not new. We’ve been outsourcing our identity for the longest time – to parents, experts, friends, community and advertisers. But now, 24-32% of consumers are comfortable with AI agents making purchases for them. And 12% of shoppers already trust AI to make purchases without approval.”
The generational split is stark: Gen Z is leading the way, with almost a third happy to hand over their wallets to machines. MIT projects that by 2030, 46% of consumer decision-making will be AI-driven. In other words, the buyer that marketers think they are persuading may increasingly be a proxy.
Dodoo illustrated the shift with her own story. Initially skeptical, she began using ChatGPT in 2022 to help her make personal and professional decisions. “I managed to train it explicitly enough for it to understand my values, my wants, my desires, my needs and all of my fears,” she recalled. “So, when I asked it even the most basic question, like should I go for a two-year mortgage or a three-year mortgage, it put in so many more layers of empathy and understanding.”
Over time, she found herself turning to her AI agent instead of friends or social media for advice. “I now go to my ChatGPT agent for pretty much every decision I need to make,” she admitted. “I’m still the strategist, I still have the final say, but when I am hormonal or tired or feeling low, I will allow it to make the decision and I’d say 80 to 90% of the time, it’s the right decision.”
For Dodoo, this created what she calls a “nudge-less life” – freed from notifications, ads and impulse triggers. “Temu can send me a thousand different free things a day and I will not click on that thing. It’s literally impossible. So, I’m your worst enemy,” she joked.
What begins as convenience may soon become necessity. Dodoo argues that consumers worldwide are heading into an “existential crisis of meaning” driven by disrupted jobs, declining disposable income, political mistrust and shifting relationships. In this environment, people will seek needs over desires, meaning over manipulation, belonging over comparison and transparency over deception.
“People are turning to new anchors of trust,” she said. “And unfortunately or fortunately in some ways, they are AI collaborators, therapists, companions and also AI lovers. Welcome to the digital proxy.”
Dodoo distinguished between today’s consumer digital twins (models that predict what you will buy) and emerging human digital twins (models that simulate what you will need). But beyond both lies the true disruptor: the digital proxy.
Proxies are trained not only on consumers’ past behavior but also on their values, quirks, fears and desires. “It reflects you back. It’s more protective, sharper and more consistent than you are,” Dodoo explained. “You train it and it trains you. This is what I call the recursive identity collapse, when we start outsourcing our minds.”
Yet this collapse has two possible paths: identity growth, where the proxy sharpens your values and thinking, or identity erosion, where critical faculties atrophy and external nudges creep back in.
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For brands, the implications are stark. The proxy is immune to the old tricks of scarcity, impulse and manipulation. “Advertising’s biggest challenge will no longer be attention or access to the buyer,” Dodoo warned. “The proxy will align with human values. It will filter, score and optimize offers on our behalf. It won’t fall for the old tricks.”
That means no more relying on abandoned baskets or post-purchase guilt to drive loyalty. Instead, proxies will demand proof: ethical audits, transparency and alignment with strategic goals.
Looking ahead, Dodoo predicted a return to tribe-like affiliations where belonging and values define purchasing choices. “You might get the clip, the scroll, the impulse,” she said. “But you won’t get the purchase-to-repurchase, the brand loyalty and the long-term alignment, unless you deliver value alignment and belonging.”
In other words, unconscious consumerism may be over. The conscious buyer is coming and their gatekeeper will be a machine.
For an industry built on reaching into the subconscious, this shift is seismic. If AI proxies stand between brands and buyers, advertising must evolve from manipulation to alignment. The winners will be those who can prove they deliver not just products, but meaning, trust and community.
“Is this the end of unconscious consumerism? I don’t know. But shit is about to get real weird.”
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