There’s a growing narrative that AI is fundamentally changing the customer journey. It’s a convenient framing, especially given how quickly tools like ChatGPT have reshaped how people find and process information.
But it’s not entirely accurate.
If anything, AI is revealing something that’s been true all along: the customer journey was never as linear as we made it out to be.
That idea came up repeatedly during a recent panel our VP of Creative, Jason Mastroianni, joined titled AI and the Customer Journey: Redefining Engagement, Personalization, and Loyalty; it was hosted by Slice Communications, and Jason spoke alongside leaders from Rensa Filtration and &Marketing.
While the conversation covered everything from personalization to how brands are adapting to shifting buyer behavior, one point Jason made in particular cut through: “Buying has always been an incredibly dynamic process. What GenAI’s explosion has really surfaced is how dynamic that is.”
For years, the funnel gave us a way to organize that complexity into something actionable. It helped marketing teams align, measure progress, and justify investment. But it also smoothed over the reality of how people actually behave, jumping between channels, revisiting decisions, and often skipping entire steps.
In short: AI made it harder to pretend that it was ever a perfect representation of the truth.
What AI Is Actually Changing (and What It Isn’t)
It’s tempting to frame this moment as a complete reset, but the underlying behavior hasn’t shifted as much as it might seem.
One of the most immediate shifts is speed. Customers no longer need to click through multiple sources or piece together information on their own. They can ask a question and receive a synthesized response in seconds, often with enough confidence to move forward. As the panel discussed, the journey is now simply way faster, which compresses what used to be a multi-step process into a much tighter window.
That compression changes the role of marketing. When fewer interactions are required to reach a decision, each one carries more weight. There’s less opportunity to gradually shape perception, which means the moments where your brand does appear need to do more heavy lifting.
At the same time, those moments are happening in different places. Customers aren’t necessarily starting with your website anymore. Increasingly, they begin in AI-driven environments and only visit a brand when they’re already close to taking action. We’re seeing direct traffic from AI programs to high-value pages, with fewer users moving through traditional website paths.
That changes how we think about entry points altogether. The idea of carefully guiding someone from awareness to consideration through a controlled path becomes less relevant when they can drop into the journey at any stage.
What emerges instead is something more adaptive. Rather than moving step-by-step, customers are responding to context in real time, making decisions when the right information is available and acting on it immediately. As John Fung, VP of Marketing at Rensa Filtration, described it during the panel, AI enables brands to show up in those “micro moments” where decisions are actually being made.
None of this behavior is new. What’s new is how easy it has become to act on it.
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The Bigger Shift: Information Is No Longer Your Advantage
For much of the last decade, marketing strategy has been built around owning and distributing information. If you created the right content, optimized it effectively, and showed up in search, you could capture attention and move people through the funnel.
That model is starting to erode.
AI tools now sit between the customer and the brand, handling many of the questions that used to drive traffic in the first place. Definitions, comparisons, and even recommendations can be delivered without requiring someone to engage directly with your content.
This doesn’t make content irrelevant, but it does change its role. Being a source of information is no longer enough on its own, because that information can be accessed and often summarized elsewhere.
So the question becomes less about how to be found, and more about what happens when you are.
Why Brand Just Became More Important Again
When AI handles the informational layer, differentiation has to happen somewhere else. In many cases, that “somewhere else” is brand.
Jason framed it this way during the discussion: “People aren’t getting those answers from blogs and websites anymore… they’re getting them via generative AI. That’s challenging brands to be far more distinctive.”
That shift has real implications. If AI narrows down options before a customer ever interacts with you, the role of brand becomes more concentrated. You’re no longer influencing a long sequence of touchpoints but instead making an impression in a smaller number of higher-stakes moments.
That’s why, as Jason put it more directly, “brand building is big again.”
For organizations that have leaned heavily into performance marketing over the past decade, this can feel like a reversal. But it’s less about going backward and more about rebalancing. Optimization still matters, but it can’t compensate for a lack of distinctiveness.
The Risk: A Growing Sea of Sameness
There’s a parallel challenge happening at the same time. The same tools that make it easier to access information also make it easier to produce content at scale.
On the surface, that seems like a win. Teams can move faster, generate more variations, and reduce the time spent on execution. But there’s a tradeoff that’s becoming harder to ignore.
When everyone is using similar tools in similar ways, outputs start to converge:
- Voice flattens
- Messaging becomes interchangeable
- Visual design begins to look and feel the same
- What once felt differentiated begins to blur together
Jason didn’t sugarcoat this during the panel: “You’ll end up with monotonous style… a sea of sameness out there.”
This is what happens when efficiency becomes the primary goal and creative judgment takes a back seat.
What This Means for Marketing Leaders
If the customer journey was never truly linear—and AI is making that impossible to ignore—then the way we approach strategy needs to evolve along with it.
One of the most important shifts is letting go of the idea that you can design a single, controlled path to conversion. Frameworks still have value internally, but they shouldn’t dictate how you engage with real people. Instead, it’s more useful to think in terms of entry points and moments: where someone might encounter your brand, what they need in that moment, and how you can meet them there in a way that feels relevant and memorable.
Content strategy also needs to adjust. Informational content still plays a role, but it’s no longer differentiation on its own. If AI can summarize the basics, then your content needs to go further by offering perspective, clarity, and a point of view that can’t be easily replicated.
That naturally leads to a renewed focus on brand and creative. When the number of meaningful touchpoints decreases, the quality of each one matters more. Voice, tone, copy, visual design, and overall experience become critical, not just for aesthetics, but for how your brand is understood and remembered.
There’s also a need for more intentionality around personalization. AI makes it easier to tailor messaging, but more data doesn’t automatically translate into better experiences. As discussed in the panel, the goal is to create something that feels helpful rather than invasive.
The Funnel Isn’t Dead, It Was Just Never Reality
The funnel will likely continue to exist as a planning tool. Why? Because it’s familiar, it’s simple, and it still serves a purpose when it comes to organizing internal efforts. But treating it as a literal representation of how people buy is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
It simply brings us back to something that’s always been true: buying is nonlinear, context-driven, and often unpredictable. The brands that succeed won’t be the ones trying to force that reality into a cleaner model. They’ll be the ones that design for it, embracing the messiness rather than trying to eliminate it.
Want to be part of the conversation?
Watch the full webinar, AI and the Customer Journey: Redefining Engagement, Personalization, and Loyalty, on YouTube.
Or continue the conversation with us on LinkedIn: connect with Jason Mastroianni or follow Liquid to share how you’re rethinking the customer journey.