AI-mediated discovery is changing how buyers find information, form opinions and build trust. For marketing leaders, this shift raises new questions about visibility, credibility and influence long before engagement begins.
For a long time, digital discovery felt predictable. Search engines, keywords, SEO and funnels shaped how buyers found information. If content was optimised well enough and distributed widely enough, it would eventually be discovered. That assumption no longer holds.
In an AI-first economy, discovery is increasingly mediated by intelligent systems that interpret intent, assemble knowledge and prioritise answers across fragmented sources. This shift is subtle but profound. It changes not only how buyers find information, but also when relevance is established and where influence is formed. By the time buyers engage directly, their understanding of the problem space, the category and the credible players is often already shaped.
IDC research shows that discovery is evolving from a tactical marketing activity into a strategic capability. Visibility, credibility and authority are formed earlier, indirectly and through systems that organisations do not own or control.
From finding information to making sense of it
Traditional discovery models are reactive. They respond to explicit queries and rely on static indexing and keyword logic. In practice, they answer what users ask, not why they are asking.
Agentic AI introduces a different logic. Instead of retrieving information once, these systems reason about intent, refine discovery paths, validate relevance and adapt outcomes over time. Discovery becomes a continuous sense-making process rather than a single interaction. This distinction matters because most discovery is not transactional. Buyers are trying to understand problems, compare approaches and frame internal conversations long before any commercial intent becomes visible. By the time evaluation begins, discovery has already shaped expectations, trust and default assumptions.
In this context, relevance is no longer defined by ranking alone. What matters is whether perspectives, knowledge and data can be interpreted by AI systems as credible, useful and meaningful in answering real buyer questions.
Why discovery has become a brand issue
As AI systems increasingly summarise, synthesise and prioritise information, they also shape perception. Every generated answer reflects a series of decisions about which sources are trusted, which viewpoints are included and which providers are referenced or excluded. Over time, these decisions influence how markets understand categories, solutions and leadership. Discovery therefore becomes the new front line of authority. Even when buyers are not ready to engage commercially, early informational moments shape narratives and build trust long before demand materialises. Organisations that fail to appear in these moments risk becoming invisible, regardless of innovation or execution quality.
At the same time, many discussions about discovery still rely on outdated assumptions. Discovery is often equated with visibility, SEO or personalisation. In reality, these are outcomes, not the system itself. Agentic discovery does not replace human judgement, nor does it automate buying decisions end to end. It reshapes how relevance is constructed, combining machine reasoning with human context in a continuous feedback loop that begins well before any buying process formally starts. This shift challenges go-to-market models that assume discovery can be compressed into campaigns, launches or early funnel stages.
The European dimension: trust and responsibility
In Europe, discovery carries additional weight. Trust, transparency and data privacy are not only regulatory requirements, but strategic differentiators. As agentic AI matures, organisations that embed governance, GDPR compliance and transparency into how their knowledge is structured and surfaced are better positioned to build long-term credibility.
In this environment, relevance is shaped not only by technological capability, but also by responsibility. Discovery becomes both a performance challenge and a trust challenge.
What this means for marketing leaders
Marketing is not becoming obsolete. It is being redefined.
In an AI-first economy, discovery rewards organisations that invest in structured, machine-readable knowledge, align content with buyer intent rather than campaign logic, and connect content, data and orchestration more deliberately. Linear funnels and campaign-led journeys struggle to reflect how buyers actually navigate information today. The challenge for marketing leaders is no longer how to push content more efficiently, but how to remain relevant inside AI-mediated discovery processes they do not fully control.
These shifts raise practical questions many teams are only beginning to confront. How do AI systems decide which sources to trust? What makes content discoverable in agent-driven environments? And how should go-to-market strategies adapt when discovery happens long before engagement?
Join the conversation
These questions will be explored in more depth in our upcoming webinar on February 24, 2026. IDC analysts Laurie Buczek and Ornella Urso will discuss how discovery, content and buying journeys are evolving in an AI-first economy, and what this means for technology providers that want to stay visible, credible and influential.
