A year or so ago I wrote a blog summarizing the theme of two keynote speeches I gave on the theme of  “Human+AI: Meet Your Digital Double.” I argued that individuals will increasingly rely on AI counterparts to help them search, decide, and act online. Back in 2024 that was still a future vision. Now, it’s a growing reality.

Your Second Customer Is Here

Our latest research on conversational banking shows this shift is here. Nearly a third of consumers in the UK, US, and Canada now use AI assistants for banking questions – either via their bank’s chatbot or third-party tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. Many of them say they’re satisfied with the answers they get, and in some domains they already prefer AI-powered search to traditional search.

AI-powered search and GenAI tools are driving a rise in zero-click experiences. Customers (and their agents) increasingly get full answers inside the AI interface, without ever visiting any of your owned digital properties. Human traffic to branded properties slips as machine-mediated journeys grow.

In The Age Of Machine Customers, UX Without Structure Won’t Surface

Most firms are still optimizing the old interface. They’re polishing pixels while discovery, comparison, and even advice begin to shift into conversational and agentic environments where no one ever sees navigation or page layout.

AI agents are data-driven, permission-bound, and goal-oriented. They don’t respond to brand stories or glossy imagery; they respond to structure, clarity, and constraints. If your products, policies, and content aren’t machine-readable, you simply won’t be surfaced as an option. This creates three uncomfortable implications:

  • Your classic acquisition funnel of impression, click, landing page, multi-step form erodes as agents jump straight to the ‘answer’.
  • Traditional metrics like click-through rate and page views lose meaning in a zero-click, agent-mediated world.
  • Compliance, risk, and pricing rules that live in PDFs or tribal knowledge never make it into the agent’s field of view.

Design For Humans And Agents

Principal Analyst Aurelie L’Hostis joined me recently on the CX Cast to examine how the strategies banks are implementing now to scale out conversational banking are exactly the strategies that will fuel success as customers begin to embrace agentic financial agents. She outlines three key initiatives

  • Map your two customer journeys. Trace how humans and agents discover, evaluate, and act. Identify where an AI agent is the primary interface and where a human still needs reassurance, explanation, or escalation.
  • Make offers and policies machine-readable. Use consistent naming, structured content, and clean APIs so agents can understand eligibility, pricing, risks, and constraints. If an assistant can’t parse it, your human customer may never see you.
  • Redesign trust for an AI layer. Define what evidence an agent would need — sources, explanations, guardrails — to recommend you. Align your human-facing content with the same backbone so reassurance is consistent across channels.

If you want to go deeper into how conversational banking and AI agents are reshaping discovery and advice, listen to our recent CX Cast episode on the future of conversational banking and watch for upcoming research on agent-ready experiences.