B2AI is the new B2B: Why companies need to start designing products for AI agents

Some common business models can be described as B2C and B2B, which are “business-to-consumer,” and “business-to-business,” respectively. But now, get ready for “B2AI,” or “business-to-AI.”

That’s one of the potential disruptions on the horizon, identified in a new report from Visa and the Institute for the Future. The report digs into the numerous ways that AI will transform commerce, and to some degree personal finance, including how consumers will likely lasso AI for their own means—and how businesses will, in turn, develop AI agents to communicate and correspond with consumers’ AIs.

While many people likely haven’t adopted “personal” AI tools yet, they’re on the market. And similar to how businesses adopted search engine optimization (or SEO) strategies to attract customers, the next technological wave will see those same businesses deploying similar strategies to appeal to AIs.

“It’ll be the new SEO—instead of optimizing for Google, you’re optimizing for the perception of what AI agents are suggesting,” says Dylan Hendricks, director of the ten-year forecast program for the Institute for the Future. “A lot of companies and organizations have teams that are looking at AI and thinking about creating bots, but they’re not thinking about how everybody’s going to have bots. And as people encounter an onslaught of AI bots trying to talk to them, they’ll need their own bots to work to shield them, and act as a vetting system.”

Basically, there’ll be so much AI information being pushed toward consumers, that they’ll need discerning AIs to tell them what’s actually relevant. That will birth new “B2AI” strategies.

And yes, it’ll be weird at first. But there was also a time when search engines were weird, and strategies to game them were seen as strange, too. All of it is commonplace today, as we’ve grown accustomed to the technology and the strategies around them have been normalized. And some are saying we’ll likely have a similar, albeit faster-developing relationship with AI.

That fast pace is surprising even to the experts, says Rajat Taneja, Visa’s president of technology, who says that Visa’s been working with AI in some capacity for more than three decades. “The speed at which this has developed is something we couldn’t have predicted,” he says, adding also that “despite all these advancements, we’re still in the ‘hunt-and-peck’ part” of the AI tech cycle—“it’s not as seamless as we’d like it to be.”

Taneja predicts that personal AI assistants will likely be ubiquitous within a handful of years as the technology improves and becomes more obviously useful, and more people grow accustomed to using it. That, in turn, will spur companies and organizations to adjust their strategies, appealing not only to human consumers, but those AI assistants as well.

Hendricks says that the transition won’t be seamless, but in a few years, it’ll be hard to imagine our lives without AI. “It’s like discovering fire,” he says. “There’s a period where people are just burning down their houses until they learn to use it to cook and heat their homes.” Hendricks thinks that we’re still in the “burn down our houses” phase of learning to use AI assistants, but it’s only a matter of time before the upsides become obvious to most people.

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