Artificial intelligence is shaking the foundations of digital marketing, reshaping everything from how brands reach audiences to the technical guts of web platforms. Datacom's Head of Digital Experiences Elias Billeh has a front-row seat to these changes and is helping organisations understand how they can navigate the impact to ensure they still have a strong digital and web presence.
It is introducing a level of disruption that I haven’t seen in 30 years in the marketing industry. In the nineties, it was mainly about just being present online. Then we saw the rise of search engine optimisation (SEO) - So the job then became ‘be seen’, followed by social media, paid digital media and the rise of UX which added ‘be relevant’ to the requirements.
With AI-driven search, there’s been a dramatic shift in how audiences discover and interact with brands online, largely driven by agent-based searches. The behaviour of users, who are rapidly becoming more comfortable with agent-based interactions, means the entire model of attracting, engaging and converting customers is rapidly evolving.
At Datacom, we’ve seen a significant drop in organic site traffic over just three months as a direct result of Google’s AI Overviews feature and agent-driven search tools.
While no organisation wants to see a drop, we’re also seeing significant growth in “zero-click” impressions, where our content and expertise are being surfaced in “AI overviews” without users visiting our site. This really is a watershed moment, which has forced us to reconsider how we present content and structure our digital platforms to remain relevant.
Zero-click impressions mean your audience increasingly gets what it needs without interacting with your website or app directly. While you maintain brand visibility, the ability to convert this into meaningful interactions or sales becomes harder. Marketing now requires an agent-centric focus, ensuring AI can surface content and data from search engines, chatbots, or other platforms, even when users never click through to your site.
Agentic AI refers to the rise of agent-led searches, where a user's new “middleman” is the agent itself, whether that’s Google’s AI or a prompt-driven tool like Perplexity or ChatGPT. To serve these agents, platforms must deliver fully contextualised, machine-readable answers, not just a well-designed user experience (UX), which became a top priority in the last decade. The winner now is not necessarily the brand with the best website design but the one that equips agents to deliver rich, relevant customer experiences.
Replatforming is an urgent need, because once you’ve lost market share, it can be difficult to get it back. You must assess your current platforms for their ability to serve agentic queries and provide deep context, not just surface-level information or UX experiences. If your systems aren’t agent-ready, you risk losing ground to competitors who are. This might mean extensive platform upgrades, new integrations with agent-centric protocols, or architectural changes to enable flexible content delivery for diverse consumption points.
The first action is to analyse recent traffic and search metrics. If you're seeing reduced traffic, you’re likely being impacted by agentic AI. Next, audit all your public-facing platforms against their ability to respond to agent requests. Prioritise upgrades where needed. In many cases, this means a rapid development cycle to replatform key services, integrate data sources, and ensure agents can fulfil complex customer queries with your assets.
We’re evolving from a people-centric software business to an agent-driven business, what you might call a “body shop” for agents. We use agents for everything, from analysis, discovery, and content migration, to coding, and testing. This has translated into dramatic efficiency gains and a shift in our value proposition, with agents now conducting much of the production workflow and modernisation efforts internally.
Previously, content was delivered for browsers or mobile devices. Now it must also be consumable by agents and large language models (LLMs), which might relay your content verbally, as output for smart appliances, or in text-to-speech format. You need to make your data and content accessible, readable, and context-rich for agents, so they can assemble and deliver the right information at the right time for end users.
There’s never been more vulnerability among established enterprises. Disruption is happening fast, driven by AI and agents. First movers will secure advantage, while those slow to adapt may see market share eroded rapidly. This isn’t a fad, it’s the next phase of the web’s development.
As I’ve seen in Datacom and with clients, complacency is the enemy. We all need to move swiftly to audit, replatform, and prepare for an agent-centric future, or risk missing out on the next era of digital relevance.
AI is reshaping digital marketing and Datacom is leading the shift with platform-driven solutions like agentic search, zero-click impressions and replatforming to keep brands visible in the AI era.
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