Adapted from iQuanti CEO Arnab Sen’s session at Zero Click by Profound on how brands can stay part of the decision as AI takes over the consumer journey.
Arnab Sen opened his session with a question: what can AI do in the 15 minutes it takes to have a hot cup of coffee? To find out, he had earlier asked an AI assistant to plan a trip from New York to Singapore. In one prompt, it covered flights, hotels, food, local transport, car hire and payments. His argument: AI is moving from answers to decision orchestration, and brands need a unified, real-time view of the consumer to stay part of the decision. The premise running through the whole session was that a brand can succeed only when the consumer is at the center.
Key takeaways:
If you’re not in the answer, you’re not in the decision. In that trip example, each answer AI gave was effectively a decision. Arnab’s point was that if a brand isn’t in those answers, it isn’t part of the decisions.
- The journey is collapsing. It used to run through search, publishers, comparison sites and reviews. Now it runs from a person to an AI assistant to a set of recommendations, and next from a person’s agent directly to a brand’s agent, with decision and transaction happening together. Brands control only the last stages, so the guidance was to be present where it matters rather than everywhere.
- Consumers are ready, with a catch. Arnab cited a survey by Forrester and Experian of credit-active consumers in Singapore. Between 83% and 87% were comfortable with AI doing the analysis. Only 49% were comfortable with AI submitting applications, rising to 77% when the brand was trusted. The agent commits behind a name it knows.
- The signals already exist, but they’re fragmented. AI answers draw on search queries, AI prompts, community discussions, journey drop-offs, citation share and first-party data. Most enterprises split these across eight teams (SEO and GEO, paid, social, PR, content, CRM, UX and data), while AI reads across all of them at once. The fix is to put the consumer at the center and have everything else work towards them.
- Visibility alone is not the target. Arnab mapped brands on AI discoverability and agent accessibility: invisible incumbents, visible bottlenecks, hidden engines and, at the top, agentic leaders. To get there, a brand has to be visible and actionable, not visible alone.
iQ.Impact: connecting intelligence to real-time action
Becoming an agentic leader, visible in AI answers and able to act on the decision, takes more than isolated AI tools or channel-level optimization. It takes a connected operating model that continuously turns consumer intelligence into action. That is the approach behind iQ.Impact, iQuanti’s proprietary AI-powered intelligence and activation platform, which combines data, AI-driven insights and agentic solutions with hands-on marketing and customer experience execution. It connects three capabilities:
- Connect the signals: unify consumer, market, competitive and first-party data across the journey.
- Generate predictive intelligence: interpret signals to anticipate intent, identify emerging opportunities and prioritize the moments that matter.
- Activate and optimize: translate intelligence into coordinated execution across GEO, SEO, paid media, content, creative, digital experiences and agentic commerce readiness.
Crucially, this is a continuous feedback loop. Every action generates new signals, sharpening how brands understand the consumer, adapt their strategy and improve outcomes in real time. In doing so, iQ.Impact closes the gap between knowing what consumers need and acting on it, bringing strategy, technology and execution together across the consumer journey.
The question for marketers: Are you ready for AI-mediated consumer journeys? To be the choice, your brand needs to show up in the moments that matter. And to become the agentic leader, being visible is not enough: you also have to be actionable.
Want to know where your brand sits on the path to becoming the agentic leader? Connect with the iQuanti team to start the conversation.
