The Economy of Intention: How AI Redefines the Consumer Journey

Interview with Adrien Lepage, Executive Director, Data, Tech & Analytics at WPP Media.

In recent years, marketing has been dominated by a single obsession: capturing consumer attention. In a world where consumers are scrolling rapidly, brands have fought for seconds of visibility. However, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming this paradigm into an extraordinary opportunity. It no longer just captures our gaze—it anticipates our choices with remarkable precision. We are enthusiastically shifting from the economy of attention to the economy of intention.

To understand this new “AI Consumer Journey” and the strategic framework developed by WPP, we met with Adrien Lepage.

WPP Media: Adrien, there’s a lot of talk about AI’s impact on Search. Is that really where the revolution is happening?

Adrien Lepage: It’s an excellent starting point, but the opportunity is much broader. Historically, for over 20 years with Google, when you needed a service, you typed it in to get blue links. Today, LLMs like Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT provide instant, personalized, and concise analysis. The numbers prove it: 37% of American consumers now start their product search with an AI tool. More broadly, about 50% of consumers use AI Search for their purchasing decisions.

But AI infiltrates far beyond Search, at every stage of the journey. Visits to retail sites driven by AI assistants increased by a staggering 4,700% by mid-2025. We are no longer just capturing attention; we are identifying and converting consumer intentions. At WPP Media, thanks to our investments in our own technology, Open Intelligence, we turn data into predictive intelligence to deliver personalization and performance at scale.

WPP Media: The traditional attention funnel (awareness, consideration, intent, purchase, loyalty) seems restrictive given these new behaviors. How is the consumer journey concretely evolving?

Adrien Lepage: The attention funnel is well defined, and we’ve developed very granular internal tools to measure it. But it’s no longer enough. Anything “messy” (like Google’s famous “messy middle”) doesn’t suit us; our clients come to us for precision. That’s why WPP has modeled a new dynamic flow in five steps for the AI era—the AI Consumer Journey:

1. The Spark: This is the moment of inspiration, discovery, or surprise regarding a brand. It materializes through bold and inspiring advertising formats, whether on social media, video, CTV (Connected TV), cinema, or in the street via OOH.

2. Questioning: This is the period when the consumer may consult AIs, but also friends, references, the press, or influencers to validate a piece of clothing, a trip, or an investment in a tech device.

3. The Match: This is the precise moment when the intention to buy a product or service meets the final checks (via AI, peers, or trustworthy content sources).

4. Closing: This is the purchase, subscription, or sign-up. What’s fascinating here is the emergence of Agentic Commerce. AI takes over from humans from a technical, administrative, or legal standpoint to remove all friction. Imagine delegating to an AI the drafting of a negotiation email to an electric scooter seller, saying: “Get me a free helmet, an extra year of insurance, or 20% off.” During Cyber Week 2025, one in five purchases already involved an AI agent. Tomorrow, conversion will happen agent-to-agent.

5. Scale: This is how the consumer spreads their experience, loyalty systems, and the desire to share a good deal with family or peers.

WPP Media: We know that 84% of purchase decisions are based on a pre-existing brand preference. How can brands remain desirable and, above all, how can they concretely adapt?

Adrien Lepage: That’s where our expertise makes the difference. AI facilitates and accelerates conversion, but you have to be the brand chosen by the algorithm and the consumer!

To help our advertiser clients navigate this complexity and generate growth, WPP has developed an extremely powerful global framework: the 8 Cs to win the AI Consumer Journey. It’s not just a checklist—it’s a true business transformation plan based on all of WPP’s combined expertise, like AKQA for digital experience, Burson for reputation, and of course WPP Media for media.

Here’s how we translate this into impact for our clients:

• Capture the share of response: We no longer talk about “share of voice” but “share of response.” The challenge for a brand is to be the unique and indisputable answer provided by ChatGPT or Gemini when a consumer asks a question about their product category.

• Centralize your truth: AIs feed on data available on the web. If your information (prices, product sheets, values, etc.) is scattered or contradictory, AI hallucinates or ignores you. We help brands create a unique and structured source of truth to effectively inform algorithms.

• Convert intention: When AI recommends your product, the path to purchase must be instant. We work on the absolute reduction of friction between algorithmic recommendation and the shopping cart.

• Connect to commerce: The journey is no longer linear. We synchronize media strategies with Retail Media platforms (Amazon, Carrefour, etc.) so that the intention detected by AI immediately turns into a transaction where the product is available.

• Cultivate authority: LLMs place significant emphasis on reputation. Press relations, customer reviews, and “earned media” are no longer merely tools for image building—they’ve become essential technical inputs for optimizing your AI referencing (GEO).

• Build verifiable creations: In the era of deepfakes, trust is the new luxury. We help advertisers certify the authenticity of their content and campaigns to reassure increasingly wary consumers.

• Calculate real influence: We go beyond “vanity metrics” (likes, views) to measure how interactions with AI and content creators generate real business incrementality.

• Capitalize on your data: This is the nerve center of the battle. We support brands in using their first-party data to train custom AI models capable of personalizing their clients’ journeys at industrial scale.

WPP Media: Concretely, how can an advertiser activate this framework tomorrow?

Adrien Lepage: We designed it to be immediately actionable. Thanks to our WPP Open platform, we seamlessly bring together the expertise of WPP Media, WPP Creative, and WPP Enterprise Solutions. We offer dedicated workshops to assess brands’ maturity on these eight pillars. If, for example, we detect a weakness in the “Cultivate authority” pillar, we immediately activate our reputation experts. AI is a tremendous growth opportunity, but it requires perfect orchestration. You have to test, learn, and innovate promptly to capitalize on the renowned economy of intention!

Want to deploy this framework within your organization? Contact your usual contacts.

The 3 key takeaways:

1. Beyond Search: AI infiltrates every stage of the journey to detect and convert purchase intention thanks to predictive intelligence.

2. A new journey (AI Consumer Journey): The funnel evolves into a five-step model, supported by the 8 Cs framework to structure brands’ approach.

3. Orchestration as the keystone: Faced with complexity, WPP becomes the preferred growth partner to align expertise via our WPP Open platform.

💡 AI Glossary to decode the tech:

• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): A new discipline aimed at optimizing a brand’s presence so it is cited and recommended by generative AI-based search engines.

• LLM (Large Language Model): An artificial intelligence model trained on vast amounts of textual data to understand and generate natural language (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude).

• Agentic AI: Autonomous AI capable of acting and making decisions (such as making a purchase or negotiating) on behalf of the user, without direct human intervention.