When AI Becomes the Ad Target: How Intelligent Agents Could Supplant Human Attention in Digital Advertising

The End of the Attention Economy?

Imagine a world where you never see another ad—at least, not directly. Instead, your AI assistant processes every marketing pitch on your behalf, quietly choosing what’s most relevant based on your preferences. That’s the future Perplexity AI founder Aravind Srinivas is proposing: a shift from human attention to AI agent attention. It’s a vision that could rewrite the entire business model of digital advertising.

This new model imagines a reality where advertisers no longer compete for your clicks or eyeballs, but rather for the attention of intelligent digital agents acting as personalized gatekeepers. These agents would decide which offers, products, or services are shown to you—if anything is shown at all.

Perplexity’s Big Bet

At the heart of this disruption is Perplexity AI, a fast-rising player in the conversational search engine space. The company experienced a meteoric rise in 2024, scaling from a modest few million in revenue to over $70 million in annual recurring income. Its user base expanded rapidly, with daily queries growing eightfold in a matter of months.

Perplexity doesn’t operate like traditional search engines. It provides synthesized answers using large language models, skipping the typical blue link format. Responses are enriched with context and direct answers, appealing to users seeking clarity and speed. But now, the company is pushing further into uncharted territory by proposing an entirely new monetization model.

Srinivas argues that once AI agents can reliably perform tasks like booking travel or purchasing items, they’ll become the true audience for ads. Instead of pushing marketing messages directly to users, companies would target these agents. This setup requires significant computational resources, but it offers the promise of ultra-personalized, efficient transactions.

Agents in Control

The idea of agents as intermediaries challenges one of the foundational principles of modern advertising: the value of human attention. In this new system, agents would evaluate competing offers, filtering them according to user-defined preferences. These preferences could be explicit, like avoiding certain brands, or implicit, based on past behavior.

Consumers could gain greater control over their interactions with the commercial world. If an AI agent knows that you dislike fast food chains or favor sustainable brands, it could screen out irrelevant ads entirely. The result is a quieter, more intentional digital experience—one where trust shifts from brands to bots.

Of course, this model also introduces new concerns. If AI agents become monetized through brand bidding, can they truly remain neutral? What ensures that your agent is serving your best interests rather than those of the highest bidder? Transparency, trust, and ethics will become central issues in this evolving landscape.

Redefining Monetization

Perplexity envisions a future where revenue doesn’t come solely from traditional display or search ads. Instead, it imagines multiple income streams, including user subscriptions, task-specific fees, transaction commissions, and brand payments for agent access. Yet even with this diversity, Srinivas admits the margins may not match the lucrative returns of conventional advertising.

Nevertheless, the strategic pivot could allow AI companies to tap into deeper and longer-lasting customer relationships. If agents become indispensable tools for daily life—handling everything from shopping to information retrieval—they’ll hold immense influence over consumer behavior, offering a new kind of value that isn’t measured by clicks or impressions.

Risks, Rewards, and Resistance

The advertising world is watching closely. While some marketers are excited by the possibility of hyper-targeted, frictionless transactions, others worry about the opacity of agent decision-making. How will brands know whether they’re reaching users—or even being fairly considered—if agents control the flow of information?

Perplexity, for its part, is attempting to address some of these concerns by exploring more traditional ad formats on its own platform, including partnerships with publishers and transparent revenue-sharing models. But the long-term vision remains centered on agents—not ads—as the primary interface between brands and consumers.

Looking Ahead

Perplexity’s proposal may seem radical today, but it fits within broader shifts in how we interact with technology. As generative AI becomes more capable and embedded in everyday life, it’s natural for our relationships with digital systems to evolve. AI assistants could become not just tools, but proxies—standing in for us in everything from commerce to content curation.

Whether or not this future materializes depends on many factors: technological readiness, user trust, brand adoption, and regulatory oversight. But the direction is clear. The age of direct advertising to humans may be waning, and a new era is emerging—one where attention is mediated, filtered, and, perhaps, finally freed.