Every budget season, someone in the room says AI will do the work of ten people for the price of one. Forrester's 2027 predictions for B2C marketing, CX, and digital suggest the invoice will be more complicated.
The analyst firm's theme for the year is "the pursuit and peril of control." Brands want to control costs, content, and customer experience. Consumers want control over what they trust, what they see, and how much of the shopping they hand to a machine.
CX Today picked out three predictions from the report, and spoke to Forrester's analysts about what they mean for brands.
Why Conversational Shopping Will Start as a Pastime
Forrester predicts that one in 20 US and UK consumers will abandon traditional shopping for conversations. Most people will treat conversational product discovery as something to pass the time, and the report expects many to leave simply because they get bored, not because they are ready to buy.
The 5% who go further, mostly Gen Z, will hand routine "subscribe and save" purchases to AI agents that look for the best timing and price. Forrester expects them to buy through social chats, their own consumer agents, and non-owned experiences run by players like Amazon and Google.
Emily Pfeiffer, Principal Analyst at Forrester, told CX Today that retailers should not treat this as a marketing problem alone:
“This is more than a marketing strategy. Yes, retailers need to work on their ‘discoverability’ in answer engines. They’ll also need to decide how/whether to expose their site to AI agents shopping on behalf of consumers.”
She added that expectations are already being set elsewhere. Pfeiffer pointed to Google's AI Overview and a Google stat showing a 40% increase in users entering follow-up queries. Her conclusion for retailers was that:
“Consumers will expect the same on every website. Retailers will have to figure out how to enable true conversations with natural language processing and ongoing conversational refinement, in their owned channels.”
Forrester's advice is to start building toward automated buying now, especially for brands whose customers match the early adopters. The report says the winners will be "the most trusted, not the most automated," and recommends that brands measure trust over conversion.
How Human Content Becomes the Proof Point
Forrester's second prediction is that human-generated content will become a top priority for 50% of brands again. As disclosure of AI-generated content becomes standard, the report expects marketers to lean on named experts, real customers, and documented evidence to earn trust.
The firm also predicts that a third of consumers will reject content that cannot prove its source, and says one-third of those in its Market Research Online Community will more often choose organizations that explain how recommendations or decisions are made.
The prediction coincides with a cost squeeze. Forrester separately forecasts that rising token consumption and usage-based pricing will force marketers to scale back a third of their AI initiatives.
That raised an obvious question for Mike Proulx, VP and Research Director at Forrester: do human marketers become more valuable as AI gets more expensive?
He said the challenge for CMOs is workforce balance:
“The nut to crack for CMOs is striking the right workforce balance that’s comprised of both human talent and AI agents. It’s never been an either-or decision.”
He argued that placing more value on humans would imply that AI has less value, which is not the case. In the right roles, he said, the value equation can tip toward AI. Still, Forrester sees greater value placed on humanity in marketing, and Proulx noted that consumers are already growing tired of what he called "AI slop."
