In five years, digital experiences will be increasingly ambient and platform-native. Buyers won’t go hunting for information — they’ll expect it to find them, in formats that feel native to wherever they already are.

The most effective marketing won’t hinge on driving a click, but on delivering value upfront. Zero-Click Marketing won’t just be a tactic. It’ll be the foundation of how trust and awareness are built.

Agentic AIs are very likely to play a major role in digital experiences in the next five years. Rather than simply reacting to commands, these systems will proactively pursue user goals — handling tasks like booking travel, managing finances, or negotiating offers independently. 

For consumers, this means experiences will feel more like collaborating with a digital partner than navigating an interface. For companies, the challenge will be designing ecosystems that support autonomy, trust and alignment with user intent while ensuring safety, accountability and transparency.

Buyers will trust other humans much more as AI will comprise 99% of internet content. People will search for other humans for experiences that they can trust. Referrals and influencership will be the dominant traffic sources.

How should digital teams prepare for 2030? Stop trying to do SEO. Stop trying to get vanity metrics. Stop trying to sound corporate and professional and digestible. B2B methods will pale in comparison to B2C methods.

The future of digital experiences will be truly experiential, where discovery, storytelling, and transaction happen in seamless moments. By 2030, AI will be a key tool to choreograph these journeys in real time, anticipating needs and removing friction. But the brands that dominate will be those that make it feel human — expert-led, immersive, and unforgettable.

Over the next five years, content marketing and digital teams will completely shift the way they use AI, moving from a strict focus on efficiency gains towards leveraging AI to create truly personal experiences for buyers, prospects and content audiences.

We're already seeing a consumer backlash against the use of AI chatbots that don't understand what site visitors actually want. At a certain point, marketers will be forced to ask ourselves: What would be good for the customer?

So, what if we could take the information we collect about a website visitor or subscriber and quickly create a completely personalized mini-site for them, featuring AI-generated podcasts, research reports and videos that are turned to the specific interests and needs of that person?

I envision a near-future in which my content marketing team can evolve from serving ‘personas’ to serving individual human beings at scale. The tools and technology that are developing right now will actually make this possible.

Digital experiences will heavily rely on and embrace AI technology to create hyper-personalized content and context in digital interactions. All available data provided by the user/customer themselves or acquired externally will be used to individualize and predict buying behavior, loyalty and social group interactions (word-of-mouth, recommendations, etc.).

Hyper-individualized experiences will be so much more effective and fitting, privacy concerns will have a second priority. The risk of abuse of such data is severe and requires strict regulation, which is difficult to establish in a global environment of strong competition between nations' economies.

In the next five years, digital marketing will shift away from traditional SEO as AI-generated content and AI search results increasingly dominate search traffic. Building a strong, trustworthy brand will become crucial to stand out in a sea of generic AI content.

Companies will need to leverage authentic communities and trusted influencers while extracting more value from existing traffic through email nurturing, conversion optimization, and website personalization. Programmatic SEO targeting long-tail keywords will help companies reach audiences that AI overviews can't easily address.

Human-driven storytelling, especially through video content, will remain powerful as AI struggles to create original, engaging content that connects emotionally with viewers.

It's hard to believe that five years from now is 2030. It seems like Science Fiction and yet our digital experiences in 2030 are likely to be characterized by seamless ambient intelligence that anticipates user needs without explicit commands. 

We'll be moving beyond today's reactive AI to truly proactive systems. The journey of the consumer will be transformed towards hyper-personalized experiences, very influenced by the development of ethics in AI which balance customer privacy. Great experiences that feel tailored and yet still respectful of boundaries. 

I think the most significant shift is that you will be moving from destination-based interactions that require deliberate engagement, and seeing these things become almost like an intuitive layer that's just built into daily life. I don't think there'll be a need to constantly be thinking about the technology context. It'll be like electricity — just a part of the daily experience. 

Authentic experiences will require authentic human development. I think what remains to be seen is the degree to which we will promote human agency because I think the public is divided — even if subconsciously — on their commitment to their own agency.