For two decades, the internet ran on attention. Brands bought impressions. Platforms sold reach. And a handful of companies like Google, Meta, Amazon captured more than half of all digital ad spend. In the UK and US, digital now makes up nearly 80% of total advertising. But the model is breaking. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) keeps rising. Margins keep shrinking. Funnels leak. And consumers are tired of interruption and clutter. The attention architecture has reached its limit.

AI is forcing a new architecture: one built on intent, not impressions. A person expresses a goal. An agent interprets it, acts on it, and completes the task—often without a click. Discovery, evaluation, and purchase collapse into a single moment: The Interaction Field: value comes from interactions, not interruptions. In the attention world, platforms extracted value. In the intent world, companies must create value at the exact moment of need. The rules of growth are changing.
You no longer fight for reach — you fight to be …

Looking for the answer to this question, I am happy to be sitting here with Erich Joachimsthaler, one of the world’s leading thinkers when it comes to brand strategy and growth. As the founder and CEO of the Vivaldi Group, he has advised global companies on how to build brands that create meaningful customer value and long-term business impact. His work keeps challenging traditional brand thinking and focuses on purpose, customer-centricity, and strategic transformation.

Erich, you argue that the Attention Internet is ending, and an Intent Internet is taking its place — one where AI collapses discovery, evaluation, and purchase into a single moment. For two decades, businesses optimised for attention – impressions, reach, funnels. You predict that this working model is breaking. What is the single biggest misconception leaders still have about this shift from attention to intent?

Erich Joachimsthaler: Most leaders believe the shift from attention to intent is a change of tactics. They think in terms of better targeting, more personalization, improved media efficiency or marketing execution, they apply AI tools everywhere. But AI is not about optimization or improvement. It is about creating a new growth system, a new architecture of growth, and operating it. 

In the attention economy, growth was something you pushed. You organized around categories, you created messages, built salience broadly, bought reach and optimized for frequency, and hoped demand followed. Spray and pray. Marketing sat upstream. If you were lucky, profit showed up downstream. The link between the two was indirect and often assumed rather than proven.

In the intent economy, growth is something you orchestrate, you organize around episodes and moments, and jobs to be done, where intent appears. The system responds. Value is created through resolutions and outcomes not just salience, being the best answer not the loudest brand. Learning compounds through interactions. Economic profit becomes traceable and causal. That’s why I always talk about Brand as a System, a Brand OS or operating system and why I believe we need to focus on economic profit as an outcome of brand and marketing, not vanity and soft metrics like reach, GRPs, impressions, as we do now.

In the intent economy, the customer journey does not disappear, that’s hype. What disappear is the journey as we conceptualized it as a workaround or proxy decades ago, because we could not otherwise. Awareness, consideration and purchase, touchpoints you controlled, optimized via funnels, channels, and attribution models, that’s gone. But advertising does not disappear, interruption does not disappear, and consumers still will make purchase decisions. The journey does not disappear, what disappears is that brands get to design the journey, and control it.

What will fill the vacuum when attention no longer guarantees growth is a new and different organizing logic, a new architecture of growth starting with episodes and moments where intent is expressed, a system that interprets it, this is a decision environment, and the interaction system around it. I wrote before about the system enabled by the SRAL loop of AI, sense, reason, action, and learn, a close system that gets better with every interaction.

Talking outcomes. What are the “best answers” made of? Is it data? Utility? Trust? Speed? Something else? And what is the role of brands? Will they still matter?

Erich Joachimsthaler: All of these, none of these, the best answer is the outcome in the moment, maximizing the success or resolution. The system learns and improves. That is the “L” in the Shared representative appearance learning (SRAL) loop of AI:

And yes, brands still matter. Of course, I will say so. But their role will change. In the attention economy it was about emotional meaning, storytelling, memory structures and interruption and broad reach did most of the work. In the intent economy, brands matter because they deliver reliability, reduce risk and uncertainty, increase confidence in outcomes, shorten decision time, and ideally become defaults in many episodes and moments. Youtility is the term, according to a book by Jay Baer. A strong brand is not the one that just people remember most, it is the one the system trusts most to deliver an outcome, resolve the intent in an episode successfully. Machines don’t feel, they learn. 

When I wrote the book: The Interaction Field, I envisioned a new logic of growth through interactions, but I did not know or could possibly imagine that AI would operationalize this logic of growth and deliver the required infrastructure. Agents now make the shift to the new architecture of growth executable at scale, sensing intent, etc. 

AI removes the constraints. Value is created through meaningful interactions that help people achieve something, not advertising interruptions.  Advantage shifts from firm-controlled value chains or pipelines to shared interaction fields, and what is best is that growth becomes non-linear. Back then, I spoke about exponential growth and shared value creation.

How does an interaction field work when many interactions happen inside AI agents, outside the brand’s own touchpoints? How to keep „control“?

Erich Joachimsthaler: Of course a number of interactions will take place outside of a brand’s control, and owned touchpoints. But that does not mean that brands are excluded. An interaction field is defied by who creates value at the moment of interaction and whose capabilities the system relies on to resolve intent. The question is, if the agent owns the interaction, how can companies still orchestrate or participate in an interaction field without being disintermediated? 

The answer is: brands become means of delivering capability to resolve intent, achieve resolution quality, not just a means of communications. The interaction field becomes a capability field, not a communications field.

In an AI-mediated world, you don’t win by being seen a.k.a. attention and interruption, brands now win by being necessary, not just communications but performance, orchestration and learning.

Erich Joachimsthaler: There are a number of businesses that are exposed, but this isn’t about what category or industry is at risk but where value comes from. Brands just need to learn what real differentiation looks when AI mediates decisions. It is not just awareness, image, and storytelling, messaging, brand personality, etc. In the attention economy, extraction could come first, value creation was optional or delayed. In the intent economy, extraction is only allowed after value is proven in interactions.

Value creation comes from outcomes, resolution quality or interaction quality as I wrote in my book: Did you solve the problem of consumers, did you learn from it, how does learning compound, how does your system make interactions more relevant over time, over moments and episodes, etc.? The company or brand that does have built the system that enables learning will lose.

Many executive still operate with KPIs and structures built for the attention world. What would be your advice to lead: what to stop, what to start, what to accelerate and how to begin? 

Erich Joachimsthaler: What to do in the first 100 days? My experience shows that you start with mapping demand and where intent happens (see my book called Hidden in Plain Sight where I outlined how to map episodes, moments and aggregate them into a demand landscape), then, you build a pilot of your new growth system by implementing the SRAL loop, and finally prove economic causality to economic profit. This can be done in 100 days. 

1. Stop treating reach and impressions as leading indicators of growth, stop optimizing functions, AI does not respect silos. Optimize the system. Stop focusing on message consistency, it is not about frequency. Agents don’t reward repetition.
   
2. Start managing growth from where intent forms, episodes, moments, context. Measure interaction quality not media efficiency. Start treating brand investments as capital, not spend. Link capital allocation to economic profit and trace back to where intent forms.
   
3. Accelerate building your own brand OS, you got to build the learning loop, revisit how you define your portfolio and brand architecture, AI is not kind to a portfolio or brand architecture that it does not understand. And finally, don’t think this is a brand or marketing problem, you need to rewrite your entire logic of growth, not your marketing practices, and accelerate building a new growth system. The system that built your company until today is dying fast.

My final and one piece of advise for CEOs: don’t stop funding attention, but stop thinking that it will create lasting advantage. It won’t. The attention game, getting seen by more, more often, shouting louder is a bankrupt enterprise. In order to stay relevant, you got to build a system, a brand operating system or brand OS that will be granted permission, you got to earn it, interaction by interaction. 

Thank you very much for this first interaction, Erich Joachimsthaler!
www.erichjoachimsthaler.com