For two decades, B2B marketers have been playing the same game. Build a website. Optimize for Google. Create content. Capture leads. Nurture them through a funnel. Convert.

The playbook worked. Then Product-Led Growth came along and compressed it—let people try before they buy, remove friction, let the product sell itself.

Both approaches are about to become irrelevant.

What’s replacing them isn’t another iteration of the funnel. It’s the complete elimination of it.

The Real Shift Isn’t AI Search—It’s AI Decisioning

Everyone’s worried about ChatGPT and Perplexity eating Google’s lunch. And sure, that matters. But fixating on “AI search” misses what’s actually coming.

AI agents aren’t going to just search for products. They’re going to buy them.

Think about how this plays out: Instead of a procurement manager spending three weeks comparing CRM systems, they’ll tell their AI assistant: “Find me a CRM that integrates with our stack, handles 50k contacts, costs under $10k/year, and has SOC 2 compliance.”

The agent doesn’t Google it. It doesn’t click through to your website. It doesn’t download your whitepaper or book a demo.

It queries a marketplace of other agents—software representatives that can answer questions, verify claims, negotiate pricing, and execute contracts. Your future customer never sees your brand until they’re presented with three finalists.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: if your product doesn’t have an agent in that marketplace, you won’t even be considered.

Welcome to the Agentic Marketplace

We’re not talking about a distant future. The infrastructure is being built right now.

Think of it like the early days of the App Store. Remember when every business suddenly needed a mobile app or they’d be invisible to smartphone users? This is that moment again—except instead of building for iOS and Android, you’re building for OpenAI’s GPT marketplace, Google’s agent ecosystem, Amazon’s network, and whatever open protocols emerge.

Here’s how it actually works:

A consumer wants to buy something so they talk to Siri or Google or ChatGPT or Alexa and tell them what they want. The consumer’s AI super-agent (an agent of agents) sends out a query—essentially a bid request. “I need X capability with Y requirements and Z budget.”

Hundreds of dormant agents from vendors you’ve never heard of wake up and respond. They compete in an instant, hidden auction much like how header bidding or keyword auctions work. The buyer’s agent—which has access to your purchase history, browser history, emails, calendar, and preferences – and even wearable data if you’ve enabled it —filters everything down to a shortlist of viable products.

You get presented with three options. You pick one. Done.

You never visited a website. You never saw an ad. You never comparison-shopped, abandoned any carts or entered a promo code.

This is the new internet. And while it sounds kind of magical as a consumer, if you’re in B2B SaaS marketing, it’s coming for you first.

Why B2B Gets Disrupted Before B2C

Consumers have emotional relationships with brands. They want to stay at a Marriott or fly Delta or wear Nike. Brand loyalty creates friction that slows down pure utility-based decisioning. In the B2C world, brand image, influencers and YouTube videos still matter, even if your AI super agent ends up making the final purchase for you.

But in B2B? Nobody gives a shit which CDP or marketing automation platform their company uses. They care that it works, that it’s compliant, that it integrates, and that it’s not a career-ending decision.

B2B buyers are already optimized for “good enough, low risk, fast.” Which means they’ll happily hand over vendor comparison and selection to an AI agent faster than any consumer would.

Product-Led Growth was supposed to remove friction. Agentic discovery removes the entire funnel.

What “Go-to-Market” Means Now

If agents do the discovering, SEO is dead. Paid ads are dead. Your carefully optimized landing pages? Dead.

Here’s what replaces it: Agent-Led Growth (ALG).

You will need to build a discoverable agent that represents your product in machine-to-machine marketplaces. Think of it as your digital sales rep—one that can:

• Explain what you do, how much it costs, and what it integrates with

• Authenticate and verify claims securely

• Respond to both structured queries and conversational questions

• Negotiate and transact on your behalf

And just like you can’t succeed with an app in only the Apple Store if your customers use Android, you can’t just deploy your agent in one ecosystem. You need presence across OpenAI’s marketplace, Google’s protocol, Alexa’s network, and any emerging open standards. There’s been some effort at making a unified standard for agent-to-agent interactions called MCP, but it’s early days and very easy to imagine that players like OpenAI who have first-mover advantage with their GPT store and massive user base might opt for a closed system.

Your new job won’t be ranking on page one of Google, or even optimizing your website for AI Search. It will be about achieving agent presence parity across every marketplace your buyers’ agents might query.

The New Rules of Agentic SEO

Forget keywords and backlinks if you are a marketer for a PLG product (enterprise is a bit different… more below on that). The ranking factors in an agentic marketplace are completely different:

Interoperability: How easily does your agent connect and communicate with others? Can it speak the protocols that matter?

Trust signals: Verified data, reputation scores, transaction history. Think of it like your agent’s credit score.

Contextual fit: How precisely does your offering map to a buyer’s intent? This isn’t about gaming an algorithm—it’s about accurate, structured data.

You’re not optimizing for humans anymore. You’re optimizing for machine-to-machine discovery. And, generally speaking, an AI agent will be most interested in quantifiable, specific results, clear costs, integration documentation and interoperability as well as evidence that your product or company is low risk and trustworthy.

The Seafood Tower Test

Okay, so does this mean every B2B marketer is getting fired?

Not exactly.

One of the best sales leaders I ever worked with had a rule: he’d measure deal complexity by “how many seafood towers you’d have to buy before closing.” High-touch enterprise sales—the kind involving relationships, dinners, golf, and multi-month negotiations—isn’t going anywhere. Yet.

If you make your living buying people seafood towers, you’re probably safe.

But if you’re doing demand gen for a PLG SaaS product with a $50k ACV? Start thinking about your next move (more on that in the next article).

The reality is that agents will start at the bottom of the market and move up—just like every disruptive technology. Today it’s small deals. In five years, it’ll be mid-market. Eventually, even enterprise.

There is some good news: this shift will create new roles. Agent strategy, agent optimization, machine-readable positioning—these are net-new functions that didn’t exist before. I’ll dig into what the future GTM org chart looks like in a follow-up post. But for now, just know: this might be one of the few AI shifts where the value isn’t purely headcount reduction… although I’m not going to lie; if you’re a B2B SEO content writer it doesn’t look good.

What You Should Do Right Now

1. Map your agentic interface. What data and capabilities can your product expose to other agents? What should stay locked down? This is your new API strategy.

2. Design for multi-marketplace distribution. Don’t build for one ecosystem. You need to be discoverable wherever buyers’ agents look—just like you needed both an iOS and Android app.

3. Make your brand machine-readable. Your pricing, differentiators, and capabilities need to be parseable by AI. This isn’t technically hard, but it requires rethinking how you structure information. Although pro-level product marketers may already have this on lock.

4. Follow the protocol wars. OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Anthropic—they’re all racing to set the interoperability standards. Watch the ones with both hardware and software plays (Google Home, Alexa, Apple, OpenAI (they’re building hardware and also trying to hijack the MacOS)). Consumer adoption will drive the market, and phones + home hubs are where it’ll happen, although if any of the new AI web browsers take off that might be a more obvious interface for B2B buyers.

5. Educate your GTM team now. Your product marketers, growth leaders, and sales enablement teams need to start thinking in terms of agent-to-agent interactions, not human funnels. The transition starts now, even if the full shift takes 24-36 months.

6. Manage Up. Execs are often the last people to catch on to critical customer flow or ops changes so they tend to under-invest when change is happening. But there will be a massive advantage for companies that have agents in agentic marketplaces first because they will be fairly empty and the AI superagent will train on them to learn what to look for in a matching vendor solution. It’s like being a first blogger or podcaster… even mediocre ones that got in early have a massive audience now while new podcasters struggle to get discovered.

The Bottom Line

The internet started as pages. Then it became apps. Now it’s becoming agents.

For the next 12-36 months, you’ll need to run dual strategies—maintain your SEO and content engine while building for agentic discovery. But make no mistake: in 24-36 months, if your product can’t be invoked, verified, and transacted by another agent, it might as well not exist.

This isn’t about tweaking your funnel. It’s about preparing for a world where the funnel is an API call.

The cage match for dominance is happening right now. The question is whether you’ll be in the fight—or eliminated before it even starts.

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“I’m not even going to post it. What’s the point?”

That was the reaction from my 16-year-old daughter after receiving her latest drink from Starbucks. Until then, she’d shared every order—layered Refreshers, pink drinks, unicorn concoctions—on TikTok. Now? A streak years in the making was broken.

The culprit? A plain white paper cup.

For her, it wasn’t just a drink. It was a ritual, a shared identity, a creative moment of connection with friends and peers. It was exactly the kind of brand-first experience that Starbucks has cultivated for decades. That moment — captured in the photo that would normally follow it — never happened.

1. The Cold Truth About a Warm-Weather Brand

For decades, Starbucks was synonymous with hot drinks and cold mornings. But that’s changed. In 2013, cold beverages accounted for approximately 37% of Starbucks' U.S. beverage sales. Today, that number is nearly 75%.

Bright, layered, fruit-filled Refreshers. TikTok-famous Frappuccinos. Colorful iced concoctions that are tailor-made for Instagram and TikTok.

And until recently, they came in clear plastic cups that let customers show off every swirl, hue, and gradient. The kind of visuals that practically beg to be posted. That were likely, in fact, designed to be posted by one of the most sophisticated brand marketing organizations in the world.

But now? Those vibrant drinks are being served in plain white paper cups.

Why? Sustainability. Starbucks has been working for years to reduce its contribution to landfill waste. They had previously developed a clear plastic cup that used 20% less material and was technically recyclable. But according to a CBS News investigation, fewer than 1% of those cups were actually recycled, because the type of plastic used wasn’t in demand by commercial recyclers.

Shortly after the report aired, Starbucks began testing white paper cups for cold drinks in select U.S. states—with plans to expand further.

On the surface, it seems like a good thing. Certainly reducing landfill waste is a worthy cause. But there’s an unintended consequence brewing.

2. Organic Exposure: The Billion-Dollar Free Media Engine

Starbucks isn’t just a coffee brand. It’s a content brand. Every day, millions of customers around the world snap and share their drinks.

• The hashtag #Starbucks has over 61 billion views on TikTok.

• Instagram users have posted Starbucks content more than 40 million times.

The visual appeal of Starbucks’ clear-cup drinks has become one of the brand’s most effective unpaid marketing channels. According to industry estimates,

Starbucks may generate hundreds of millions of dollars in equivalent media value each year from customer-generated content.

Starbucks’ cold drinks in their iconic clear cups are a social media phenomena each spring and summer. While exact impression counts are proprietary, the proxy data – billions of TikTok hashtag views, millions of user posts, and follower counts in the tens of millions – all point to an immense organic reach. In the U.S., it’s safe to say Starbucks cold beverages generate hundreds of millions of unpaid impressions over the spring-summer months across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Globally, that impact is even larger, likely multiple billions of impressions when combining platforms.

Starbucks' only comparable organic marketing engines are their Fall Pumpkin Spice Latte launches (#PSL tweets top 3k+ daily at the peak of the season) and the holiday Red Cup in November and December which trends on all social media platforms every year.

If Starbucks were to pay for the billions of impressions it earns organically, the costs would be enormous. For a rough illustration:

• The ~61 billion TikTok impressions from #Starbucks content, at about $9/CPM (CPM = Cost per 1k impressions), would equate to $550+ million in ad spend value.

• Instagram’s ~3–4+ billion estimated impressions from UGC could be worth on the order of $30–$40 million at ~$10/CPM.

• Facebook impressions, while harder to quantify, would also represent millions of dollars in value.

• And that’s just posts you can quantify by using the hashtag #Starbucks

Of course, not all impressions are equal. Organic content carries authenticity and emotional resonance that paid media rarely achieves. And Starbucks’ unique drink aesthetic has driven that UGC engine for years.

Consider how much money other brands spend on paid influencer posts, celebrity endorsements, PR and other forms of “social proof” advertising. All of it in the hopes that one day some small group of people will organically post about their brand to their friends and family.

Starbucks is sitting atop a gold mine of user-generated content showcasing their products in the best possible light. It’s the well-earned reward after a hard day (doing whatever – from winning a soccer game to cleaning a closet). It’s the symbol to the start of the weekend or vacation or road trip or adventure. It’s the status symbol that makes 13-year old girls feel they have something tangible in common with the TikTokers and YouTubers who are their generation’s celebrities. To fail to understand that this media is not the same as a typical “media impression” is to vastly misunderstand the brand.

The clear cups are a visual symbol of some aspirational expression of their customers. Their contents—colorful, customizable, and crave-worthy—became one of the brand’s most effective unpaid marketing engines – and also gave the brand a kind of cultural cache and relevance that few other brands have achieved.

What happens when the medium goes opaque?

3. Is Starbucks Sacrificing Visibility for Sustainability?

The shift to white paper cups aligns with Starbucks' broader sustainability goals. But it primarily impacts cold drinks — the drinks that now dominate sales and drive social engagement.

So the question becomes:

Does Starbucks have to choose between saving the planet and staying visible on social media?

4. Smarter Paths Forward

Here’s the good news: Starbucks doesn’t have to pick a side.

Frequently when advising a company on an unavoidable need to pivot (which is far more serious a problem than Starbucks’ clear cup problem), I’ve found it’s helpful to take a dialectic approach to the problem.

This is particularly helpful when you appear to have an either/or problem. In this case, it seems as though you can either remove plastic cups from Starbucks’ supply chain (and meet sustainability goals) or you can keep plastic cups and reap hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free social media marketing.

Rather than view the two conflicing goals as mutually exclusive, frame the problem as “how can you” do them both. You do this by distilling the real problem at the root of each conflicting idea, and then turn it into a “How” question. This is a dialectic approach - try it yourself to find a solution to two conflicting issues:

Thesis:

• “plastic cups are bad for the environment – and since we can’t stop them from getting thrown in landfills, bad for our brand” - so we have to get rid of them.

Anti-thesis:

• “we have to have plastic cups or no one will post pics of our cold drinks anymore.” - so we can’t get rid of them. (I suspect only the social media manager might realize this… but that person is not likely invited to the meeting where these things get decided.)

Synthesis:

• “How do we reduce landfill waste without destroying our free social media marketing engine we’ve built?”

When you frame the problem through a single lens, it leads to only narrow solutions. When you create a “HOW” question that incorporates the END RESULTS you want from each thesis, you create the springboard for new ideas.

With that new question, some options become obvious… I’m sure the team at Starbucks, who actually know a lot more about cups than me, would produce a much longer and much more interesting list – but even I could come up with:

a. Compostable Clear Cups

Biodegradable, plant-based cups (like PLA or PHA) maintain transparency while improving sustainability. While costlier upfront, they could offset value lost in earned media—and help scale adoption for the entire foodservice industry.

• It’s very likely that these cups cost a lot more than Starbucks’ current plastic cups. But the cost of the cups are likely being evaluated only by the procurement and supply chain teams, whose Cost-of-Goods model does not include media impressions. Even this article’s cursory research points to a totally different cost center to offset additional cost of compostable cups. When the financial impact of losing nearly $600M in free media impressions (by fans) is factored in, the cost may not seem as high.

• And how good would it be for the Starbucks brand to not only switch to compostable cups, but also, because of their scale, create the financial incentives for compostable cup makers to scale operations so that the overall cost/cup goes down, making it a viable option for many other businesses to switch as well?

• But at Starbucks’ scale it’s possible that even the $600M-$1B in media would not offset the difference in cost, so we should consider other options…

b. Designer Paper Cups with Visual Punch

If paper is mandatory, make it postable. Think seasonal art drops, influencer collabs, or translucent cutouts. Think Red Cup meets Nike collab.

• Consider that Starbucks has already proven, with both the Red Cup and the Pumpkin Spice Latte that viral paper cups are viable. A Spring or Summer seasonal set of limited edition paper cups-as-canvas for influential collaborators could be just as viral as the original clear cups – and draw new audiences.

• This is also a strategy that could create hype similar to new sneaker drops… imagine a limited edition Banksy cup (Would he do that? Maybe not), but for sure NBA, soccer, pop musicians, YouTuber and reality TV stars would do it in a heartbeat.

c. Reusable, Share-Worthy Cold Cups

Starbucks already designs and sells limited-edition reusable cold cups in their stores — but they haven’t put their marketing and brand muscle behind making any of these cup designs the must-have accessory of the season. They could. Remember the Stanley Cup craze? That movement started with moms and a few influencers.

d. Sustainability as a Flex

Incentivize UGC around sustainability. Let customers who share their paper cups earn points, social rewards, or visibility. Make saving the planet the cool post.

• To be clear, this is harder said than done – these kinds of things often take off organically when a celebrity posts something and it resonates with their audience. Of all these options, this one feels the most like what would be in a proposal from an agency and the least controllable outcome from Starbucks’ point of view.

5. A Brand Built on Reinvention

Starbucks has always innovated beyond coffee. It defined the “third place.” It normalized $5 lattes. It made drive-thrus premium and mobile ordering frictionless. It even turned fall into a flavor.

The same spirit that helped Starbucks go viral every season can help it go green without going invisible.

Because in 2025, content is currency. And an un-postable product for a brand like Starbucks is a wasted opportunity that’s bleeding hard-earned value daily… As a person who’s specialized in brand strategy for my whole career it’s honestly painful to watch brand evangelists who enthusiastically posted every drink online as part of a lifestyle and identity statement respond to the same exact product with a side-eye and a shrug.

Let’s hope Starbucks can find a way to both save the world and maintain their brand dominance. But first they have to ask the right questions.

This article originally appeared on Hypescience, a newsletter exploring brand strategy, applying startup thinking and behavioral science to the social feedback loops shaping our culture.

Note: I write articles with the help of ChatGPT and Perplexity for research (and copy-editing my long, boring copy into much shorter, more readable form). While I fact-check the most important data points, I may miss something that might be inaccurate. If I get something wrong, please let me know and I’ll correct it. All article ideas, perspectives and recommendations (and em–dashes) are my own. Thanks!

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