The robots are here… so is the fourth industrial revolution

AI is not just changing how consumers search, but also influencing how and where they shop, which raises questions about data ownership and the state of affiliate marketing, writes Jyoti Rambhai, SBC’s Affiliate Editor.

Self-driving cars, vacuum cleaners, and voice-controlled AI assistants for smart home systems like Alexa and Google are essentially robots, already part of our daily lives. While they are not the humanoids that we have seen in the movies (think Chappie, The Terminator or Blade Runner), artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly influential in our decision-making on purchases.

Last week I had the pleasure of being invited to Criteo’s headquarters in Paris to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary. The adtech firm – known for connecting brands, retailers and publishers – held a day of talks and presentations about the future of commerce in the world of agentic AI.

Diarmuid Gill, Chief Technology Officer, calls this new world of AI the fourth industrial revolution. The first centred around steam engines in the late 1700s to 1800s; the second was electricity in the late 19th, early 20th century; the third was the IT revolution of the 1970s and 1980s leading to the internet; and now we have the AI revolution.

Unlike the previous revolutions, which took years, even decades to roll out at scale, the pace of change is a matter of weeks. As a result, “what is state of the art today is obsolete next week”, says Gill. Nevertheless, it is “going to completely transform society […] and things will never be the same again”.

He describes the current state of the tech ecosystem as like an arms race – a battle between the AI providers – and the winners will be those that can leverage the “best off the shelf” platform and marry it with data.

At the ‘heart of great AI, is great data’

But what does that exactly mean for affiliate marketers?

Agentic commerce seems to be the buzzword right now. This is where AI assistants inside platforms like Criteo help marketers create creative assets, build and refine audience segments and optimise campaigns in real-time – essentially becoming a one-stop shop for some brands.

While Criteo’s technology is centred around retail, the same principle can be applied to other verticals including travel, hospitality and iGaming. That’s because at the “heart of great AI, is great data”, says Gill.

AI is making tech smarter, enabling different tools to become interconnected. It is not only changing how marketers do this, it’s elevating it. We’re at a point in time when AI can even predict non-linear shopping journeys, optimise across multiple objectives and supercharge relevance. And all you need is access to good quality data.

For affiliates, this is going to be key as the industry moves away from relying solely on CPAs. It’s no longer about attracting as many people as possible now, it’s about “attracting as many of the right people”, Gill explains.

But with AI-powered chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity integrating payment systems enabling users to automatically buy products without leaving the platform, it raises the question of who owns that purchasing data?

Amazon recently filed a lawsuit against Perplexity over allegedly accessing customer accounts unlawfully and disguising its automated shopping tool as human browsing. This has opened up this grey area over how these agentic tools tap into data itself, and it will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

So where does that leave affiliate marketing? Liva Ralaivola, Vice President Research Director AI, at Criteo believes the industry is still in the experimental and “building phase” when it comes to these agentic tools, meaning these advertising channels still exist, “it’s not going to disappear just yet”.

Brands and agencies are experimenting with partnerships, investing in technology, but there is no standardised way of doing things yet. So the bigger question he poses is how is agentic AI going to transform the adtech space?

But one thing is for sure, “affiliates need to accept they are going to have to use these new tools”, Ralaivola says. “There may be an analogy or a way to translate affiliate links in the agentic world. Marketers will have to think about new ways to tweak their commercial agents – if they don’t, they could be in a bad position.”

These agents… lets call them the marketing robots, are currently what the future looks like for adland. The way brands interact with consumers; the way players interact with operators; the way users book holidays; it’s all evolving.

This shift in how people’s purchasing power is influenced is where the AI revolution is happening and that’s the space marketers need to be watching if they want to keep up with the pace of change.