In 2025, buyers delegate more decisions to software, from ad targeting to vendor selection. Post labor marketing describes the shift from persuading individuals to earning selection by AI agents that compare options, verify trust, and optimize for outcomes. The winners design for machine evaluation without losing human relevance. What changes when your next customer isn’t a person?
AI buying agents and autonomous purchasing
“AI does the buying” rarely means a robot with a credit card. It usually means an assistant, procurement tool, marketplace algorithm, or workflow automation that shortlists vendors, compares pricing, checks compliance, drafts an order, and then asks a human to approve. In many categories, especially B2B software and services, the evaluation is increasingly machine-mediated.
In 2025, this is happening through:
- Search and recommendation systems that rank products based on relevance, trust signals, and structured data.
- Procurement platforms that enforce policy (security, data residency, insurance, contract terms) and filter out noncompliant suppliers automatically.
- Agentic workflows inside CRMs, IT service management, finance tools, and browser assistants that compile options, summarize reviews, and propose next actions.
- Marketplace dynamics where conversion depends on feed quality, fulfillment reliability, and review integrity as much as copywriting.
For marketers, the implication is direct: your job expands from “create demand” to “make your offer easy to verify, compare, and safely choose.” Humans still matter—especially for strategy, complex tradeoffs, and risk sign-off—but AI will increasingly control the first mile (discovery) and the middle mile (evaluation).
So what does a marketer optimize? Not just attention. You optimize machine readability, trustworthiness, and decision efficiency—while keeping a clear, human-centered story for final approval.
AI-first positioning and machine-readable value propositions
When an AI agent evaluates options, it looks for crisp, comparable answers: what it is, what it does, who it’s for, how it performs, what it costs, and what the risks are. If those answers are hidden behind vague branding, PDF decks, or gated pages, you lose before a salesperson ever joins the thread.
Build an AI-first value proposition that works in two modes: human persuasion and machine comparison.
Do this on your core pages:
- State the category and use case in the first paragraph (e.g., “API security scanning for CI/CD pipelines”). Avoid metaphors as the primary descriptor.
- Use measurable outcomes: time saved, error reduction, SLA improvements, payback period. If you can’t quantify, specify the operational mechanism (“reduces manual reconciliation by auto-matching invoices to POs”).
- Publish constraints and prerequisites: supported integrations, deployment model, required data inputs, and where it does not fit. AI agents penalize ambiguity because it increases risk.
- Create a “compare us” section with honest differentiators, typical switching costs, and migration steps. If you don’t supply comparisons, third parties will.
Answer the follow-up questions proactively right where evaluation happens:
- What does implementation look like in week 1, week 4, and day 90?
- What does success require from the customer (skills, data, admin time)?
- What’s the pricing model, and what causes cost to rise?
- What are the top risks, and how do you mitigate them?
This is not “less marketing.” It is marketing that reduces decision friction. In an AI-mediated funnel, lower friction often beats louder messaging.
Structured data and product feeds for AI discovery
AI systems ingest your information through multiple pipes: web pages, product feeds, app listings, knowledge bases, documentation, reviews, and third-party databases. To be selected, you must be discoverable and parsable.
Priorities for 2025:
- Clean information architecture: stable URLs, clear headings, consistent terminology. If your naming changes by page, you create classification errors.
- Structured product data: clear plans, features by tier, compatibility, geographic availability, and support levels. Keep it consistent across your site, app stores, and partner listings.
- Machine-friendly pricing: publish ranges, minimums, and unit economics. If pricing is custom, define what drives the quote (seats, volume, modules, SLA, data retention).
- Up-to-date inventory of proof: case studies, benchmarks, and docs with timestamps and owners. AI agents look for recency and coherence across sources.
Think like an indexer. If an AI agent had 90 seconds to justify a shortlist, what “fields” would it need? Build pages that behave like a well-structured dataset, not a brochure.
Reduce contradiction across your ecosystem. In practice, that means centralizing definitions (what each feature means), standardizing plan names, and ensuring third-party listings match your canonical positioning. Contradictions create uncertainty, and uncertainty triggers exclusion—especially in procurement contexts.
Make your documentation part of marketing. In post labor marketing, docs are not a post-sale artifact; they are evaluation fuel. Clear setup guides, limitations, API references, and security notes help AI tools and technical reviewers validate fit without meetings.
Digital trust signals, EEAT, and brand authority in 2025
When AI does evaluation, it leans heavily on credibility signals. That maps directly to Google’s helpful content expectations and EEAT principles: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The goal is not to “game” rankings; it is to make your claims verifiable.
Practical EEAT upgrades that influence AI selection:
- Show real operator experience: publish playbooks, implementation checklists, and lessons learned from deployments. Replace generic advice with specifics that prove you have done the work.
- Put experts on the record: name authors, include role credentials, and maintain an editorial review process for technical accuracy. Anonymous content is easier to dismiss.
- Make proof portable: customer quotes with context (industry, size, use case), third-party reviews, and verifiable certifications. If you reference a certification, explain scope and what it covers.
- Strengthen policy transparency: security practices, data handling, uptime history, support SLAs, and incident communication approach. Risk teams and AI tools look for this early now.
- Demonstrate governance: disclose how you handle AI features, model risk, and human oversight if you ship AI. Buyers increasingly require clarity on data usage and guardrails.
Trust is also behavioral. AI systems infer trust from consistency and user outcomes: low refund rates, high retention, responsive support, and stable product performance. Marketing can influence these by aligning promises with reality and by setting accurate expectations.
Avoid inflated claims. In an AI-mediated world, exaggerated promises are easier to cross-check and more likely to backfire when agents compare reviews, forums, and documentation. Make your claims auditable: what data supports them, and in what conditions do they hold?
Agent-optimized funnels: from persuasion to verification
Traditional funnels assume humans progress from awareness to consideration to decision through content and relationships. Agent-optimized funnels assume AI tools compress or skip stages by assembling evidence quickly. Your funnel becomes less about “nurture” and more about verification pathways.
Design the journey around common verification tasks:
- Fit verification: compatibility matrices, integration lists, requirements, and clear “best for / not for” guidance.
- Outcome verification: benchmarks, ROI calculators with transparent assumptions, and case studies tied to measurable metrics.
- Risk verification: security pages, compliance mappings, data flow diagrams, and procurement-ready documents.
- Cost verification: pricing pages that answer “what will this cost at our scale?” without a call.
- Switching verification: migration playbooks, timelines, and references for similar migrations.
Replace “book a demo” as the only path. Keep demos, but add agent-friendly alternatives:
- Interactive product tours that can be evaluated asynchronously.
- Sandbox access with realistic sample data and clear success criteria.
- Procurement packets downloadable without friction (or with minimal friction): security overview, DPA templates, SOC report access instructions, and support terms.
Sales and marketing alignment changes too. Sales teams become validators and risk reducers, not primary educators. Marketing should supply “answer libraries” that reps and agents can reuse: standardized responses on security, implementation, pricing drivers, and competitive positioning.
Measure new conversion signals. Beyond MQLs, track:
- Percentage of opportunities that arrive with a prebuilt shortlist.
- Time from first visit to security review initiation.
- Self-serve evaluation completion (tour, sandbox, calculator) to pipeline conversion.
- Procurement cycle time changes after publishing verification assets.
Pricing, negotiation, and lifecycle marketing when software chooses
AI-mediated buying increases price transparency and reduces tolerance for confusing packaging. It also changes negotiation dynamics: agents can benchmark alternatives instantly and challenge add-ons that don’t map to outcomes.
Packaging that survives AI comparison:
- Outcome-aligned tiers: define tiers by use case maturity or scale, not by arbitrary feature fragmentation.
- Clear unit metrics: seats, usage, volume, or value-based units. Explain how to estimate usage and avoid surprise overages.
- Contract clarity: renewal terms, cancellation, data export, and support scope. Hidden constraints are selection killers.
Make negotiation less necessary. If a product is repeatedly negotiated, agents learn that list price is unreliable. Consider published bands, standardized discounts for commitment lengths, or transparent volume breaks. This helps procurement automation approve faster.
Shift lifecycle marketing from “engagement” to “compounding proof.” When AI agents influence renewals and expansions, retention is partly an information problem: do stakeholders and systems have continuous evidence of value?
- Automated value reporting: dashboards and quarterly summaries that translate usage into outcomes.
- Referenceable milestones: publish anonymized benchmarks or maturity models customers can map themselves to.
- Operational content: guides that help customers succeed without tickets, improving satisfaction signals that algorithms may incorporate (reviews, retention, reduced churn).
Finally, ensure your brand can be safely recommended by a machine. That means fewer surprises: predictable onboarding, transparent data handling, stable performance, and a clear escalation path when something breaks.
FAQs
What is post labor marketing?
Post labor marketing is marketing built for a world where software and AI agents perform more of the discovery, evaluation, and purchasing work. It prioritizes machine-readable positioning, verifiable trust signals, and low-friction evaluation paths, while still supporting humans who approve complex or high-risk decisions.
Will AI replace marketing teams?
AI will automate parts of execution (drafting, testing, reporting), but it raises the importance of strategy, differentiation, evidence, governance, and cross-functional alignment. The teams that win will treat marketing as a product of truth: accurate claims, measurable outcomes, and reliable customer experience signals.
How do I market to AI buying agents without losing brand voice?
Separate “identity” from “clarity.” Keep distinctive tone in narratives and stories, but ensure every core page also contains plain-language definitions, measurable benefits, constraints, pricing drivers, and proof. AI agents need structured clarity; humans still appreciate style and perspective.
What content matters most when AI is evaluating vendors?
Fit and verification assets: integration lists, requirements, implementation timelines, security and compliance documentation, pricing transparency, case studies with metrics, and honest comparisons. Documentation and support policies often influence selection earlier than they used to.
How can a smaller brand compete against larger incumbents?
Win on verifiability and speed: publish clearer proof, tighter positioning, transparent pricing logic, and faster evaluation paths (sandbox, tours, procurement packet). AI agents penalize ambiguity; smaller brands can outperform by being easier to validate and lower risk to adopt.
What metrics should I track for AI-mediated buying?
Track shortlist inclusion rate, self-serve evaluation completion, time-to-procurement, security review starts, content-assisted cycle time reduction, and retention/expansion signals tied to demonstrated value. Also monitor consistency across listings and review platforms to reduce contradictory signals.
Post labor marketing in 2025 rewards brands that make themselves easy to understand, verify, and choose—by both humans and machines. Build machine-readable positioning, publish structured proof, and design funnels around evaluation tasks like fit, risk, outcomes, and cost. When AI does the buying, your advantage comes from clarity, credibility, and frictionless validation that speeds confident decisions.