Much has been written recently about how marketing and sales processes change when human buyers and sellers are replaced by buyer and seller agents: abbreviated, inevitably, as “A2A” marketing. It’s a fascinating topic but just one model that will coexist in the near future with human (or, more precisely, non-agentic) buyers interacting with agentic sellers, agentic buyers interacting with human sellers, and, lest we forget, humans interacting with humans. Any consultant will immediately recognize that this cries out for a 2x2 matrix, or perhaps a pair of 2x2 matrices if you want to distinguish business marketing from consumer marketing. For the moment, let’s stick with the single matrix model:

It’s worth making these admittedly-obvious distinctions because each situation raises separate issues, which are otherwise easily jumbled into a confusing heap.…