Dubai: For the last two decades companies have been clamoring to adapt to the digital era. Marketing and sales teams switched storefronts for online pages, and social media presence became almost as important as the product itself.
However, as people become increasingly exhausted by technology and agentic AI promises to completely replace the entire need to browse the web, this status quo is at risk of being completely upended, creating a new dilemma for businesses hoping to stand out.
Speaking to Arab News following a session discussing the future of consumer preferences at the Dubai Future Forum on Monday, Michael Costigan, the leader of Salesforce Futures Department – one of the world’s most popular sales software platforms – said companies would need to create real connections with their customers more than ever before.
“In the last 20 years, we had choke points around social media and search which enabled those companies to amass a lot of power, and that's where attention went; attention was the key commodity,” Costigan said.
“As we move forward in the agentic era, we won't be subject to claims for our attention. We'll have a personal AI agent that will potentially manage a lot of your needs that you previously had to go online yourself to do, and I think people continue to move towards that tech detox kind of attitude.”
