What marketing trends should businesses watch this year? (2026)

You now have two customers, and they want opposite things. The human still wants to feel something: trust, recognition, reassurance. The machine wants the opposite, namely clean, structured, accessible data it can read and act on instantly. Most businesses are built to charm the human and confuse the machine. Winning this year means designing for both at once, which almost nobody is doing well yet.

“Agent readability” is becoming the new SEO. If an AI agent cannot parse your pricing, availability, and product details through structured data and APIs, you simply will not appear in its recommendation. You can own the strongest brand in your category and still be invisible to the software doing the shopping. The brands treating their product data as a marketing asset, rather than an IT afterthought, will quietly pull ahead.

As machines mediate more, human authenticity becomes more valuable, not less. This is the contradiction I find most fascinating. The more AI floods feeds and inboxes, the more people hunt for proof that something real sits behind the message. Gartner found that half of US consumers would rather buy from brands that avoid using generative AI in their content, and it predicts verified creators and authenticity will define influence in 2026 as deepfakes make trust scarce. Automation raises the price of the genuinely human touch.

The marketing team is flattening. As agents take over execution, the work that survives is judgement: taste, strategy, narrative, and knowing which questions are worth asking. Gartner expects marketing organisations to reorganise into leaner, more modular shapes. Roles tied to manual output are exposed. Skill tied to thinking is not.