The growing use of artificial intelligence in search, comparison, and purchasing decisions is creating a new competitive front for brands, which now have to compete not only for consumer attention, but also for recommendations from AI systems. This topic will be debated on September 16 in Lisbon, at a meeting of the Specialized Commission on Brands + Consumer of Centromarca – Portuguese Association of Brand Product Companies, dedicated to the theme "When machines choose for us. The next brand war".
According to Pedro Pimentel, director-general of Centromarca, if AI begins to help decide which brands enter the set of options presented to the consumer, being or not being in that recommendation could become a new frontier of competition. The transformation will be addressed by Nuno Basto, from Incubeta Portugal, in a session titled "From the Attention Economy to the Recommendation Economy".
According to Incubeta, traffic from AI systems to shopping websites has increased by 393% compared to the previous year, with conversion rates 42% higher than traditional digital traffic. Approximately 80% of searches already present AI-generated answers, and 81% of marketing professionals admit they do not have a clear strategy for interpreting AI-related metrics.
The meeting will feature interventions by Bruno Gouveia, from Care to Beauty, on products and content for AI agents, Madalena Bettencourt, from Auto-Regulação Publicitária, on ethics and transparency in the "Agentic Era", and Vera Santos and Eugeniu Litvinenco, who will present solutions for brand transformation. Founded in 1994, Centromarca brings together more than 60 members, responsible for over a thousand brands, with billing exceeding 7.5 billion euros.
