The New B2Bs

Plus: better builds, crunching cravings, splashless solutions, tattooed travels, hydrogen horses, and more in Roundup #42

This issue focuses on another “Future of [x]” persective.

But, this time it includes the future of branding.
The future of marketing.
The future of experience design.
All rolled into one.

Plus, there is a new emerging design discipline (with a great new two-letter acronym) that I’m deep into the rabbit hole learning and exploring.

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Also, random me-ism: every time I set in to write an issue of The New New that ends in the number two, I walk around the house repeating the rhythmic nature of it in different tone deaf ways. “The New New 42. The New New 42. The New New 42.”

Makes me happy.

My family? Not so much.

Now you know.

Okay, let’s roll into issue 42.

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The New B2Bs

Why winning the future of marketing means designing for machines first

AI agents are in every headline and hyped marketing campaign right now. They are demoed, promised, theorized everywhere.

Cut through the hype, and you’ll find that true personal agents—autonomous systems working independently for individuals—are still coming. These agents are slowed down by real-world constraints like privacy, security, and integration, but they are coming. (Ask Apple’s Siri. Or Amazon’s Alexa.)

When those barriers fall—and they will—a new layer will rise around us.

The Autonomous Layer Emerges

AI is moving from something we use to something we trust to move ahead of us.

This is bigger than just Thinking on Autopilot.

This is about how AI will soon become ambient—embedded across devices, homes, workflows.

We won’t just ask it questions; it will nudge, filter, and decide—often before we even realize we needed it to.

It’s the beginning of a new kind of engagement—where intent isn’t expressed, it’s inferred.

Where decisions aren’t always surfaced for us to choose—they’re simply carried out.

And that shift is about to redraw the map for brands, marketing, and customer experiences.

The New B2Bs

As autonomous agents become the first line of interaction, the familiar B2B model begins to fracture—and reassemble into something new.

Brands won’t just market to people anymore.

They’ll market to the agentic systems that filter decisions for those people.

And engagement won’t be a straight line. It will unfold across three new dimensions of connection:

1. Brand-to-Bot.
   Brands will need to win over digital gatekeepers—personal agents programmed to prioritize based on price, values, trust signals, or personal parameters set by the user. Emotional storytelling alone won’t cut it. Agents won’t be swayed by brand campaigns or sleek slogans; they’ll filter with algorithms that optimize for relevance and trust.
   
   

2. Bot-to-Brand.
   Personal agents won’t simply wait for advertising or offers—they’ll initiate interactions. Booking travel. Registering for events. Purchasing services. Brands will need infrastructures ready to recognize and respond to autonomous inbound actions generated by machines acting on behalf of humans.
   
   

3. Bot-to-Bot.
   Increasingly, brand systems and personal agents will transact directly—negotiating offers, validating identities, confirming preferences—all without requiring a human to step in until the final choice needs confirmation.

You can already see the early outlines of this future taking shape.

The rise of AI Visibility Optimization (AVIO)—which we explored back in Issue 36—marks one of the first major shifts. In a world where decisions are filtered by AI before they ever reach a human, traditional SEO is no longer enough.

Brands must now become visible, trusted, and chosen by the agents standing guard between them and their audiences.

Raising the AX

If we’re expanding the map of engagement, we’re also expanding the disciplines built around it.

For years, brands have invested in building strong BX (Brand Experience), CX (Customer Experience), EX (Employee Experience), DX (Digital Experience), and UX (User Experience) strategies. Each one captured a different dimension of how companies relate to people.

But now, something new is emerging: Agentic Experience (AX).

AX is about designing for a world where autonomous systems—not just humans—are active participants. Where agents prioritize, decide, and transact on behalf of their users.

It’s no longer enough to build experiences for screens or for human navigation patterns.

Brands must design for intermediaries: intelligent entities that filter choices, validate trust signals, and act before the user even taps a button.

The early shape of AX is taking form, with Netlify’s CEO Mathias Biilmann emerging as an early voice shaping the space. He has outlined why AX is becoming critical—arguing that as agents increasingly act on our behalf, experience design must evolve to prioritize how these systems think, choose, and act.

Building on that foundation Netlify’s Agent Experience Principles lay out the early frameworks for designing for agents: creating experiences that are visible, navigable, trustworthy, and actionable by autonomous systems.

Microsoft has also recently entered the AX fray by releasing its principles and guidelines for building agentic experiences.

And, while humans are creating AX principles, Google’s DeepMind unit is developing a new approach called “streams” that will let AI models learn from the experience of the environment without human “pre-judgment.”

It’s part of a broader shift toward an emerging Agent Web—a future where agents, not browsers, mediate the way we discover, navigate, and interact online. A future where building for machines that filter and prioritize comes before building for the humans they represent.

Altogether, AX is the term we will use—the design approaches we must explore—to define how brands will communicate with the intelligent systems that will stand between them and their customers.

The Mesh We Must Master

So, here we are.

Brands will soon no longer speaking to people first.

They’re speaking through, with, and because of machines.

The brands that thrive will be the ones that market through the mesh:
understanding how agents filter, how bots transact, and how brand meaning survives (and thrives) in a machine-mediated world.

And if we get it right?

The rising invasion of home humanoid robots — trained to mimic us — might just appreciate their cohabiting humans’ brand loyalty.

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The Roundup

Try It

Circadian Snacking,
functional food is being optimized to meet the needs of the body’s fluctuating daily rhythm

Ride-on Robot Horse,
It’s real, and it’s hydrogen-powered too

Antiviral Chewing Gum,
it can ‘trap’ and neutralize some influenza and herpes viruses

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Build It Better

Splashless Urinals,
finally

Foldable eReaders,
the world’s first E Ink reader opens and closes like an actual book

Thorium-Powered Nuclear Reactor,
This world’s first is less weaponizable and is, basically, meltdown-proof

Precision Swarm Assembly,
using a swarm of smart robots to build airplanes faster, more safely, and in less space

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Shift It

Trend-to-Product,
Walmart’s "trend-sensing design tool" shortens the production timeline for fashion items by as much as 18 weeks

Crunch,
the next big food trend involves noisy flavors and gritty textures

Pluralism,
emphasizing respectful engagement across ideological, religious, and cultural differences, focusing on mutual understanding and civic skills rather than identity-centric approaches (aka, the post-DEI shift that U.S. institutions are making)

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Express It

Unhinged Mascot Era,
more and more brands are using absurd characters to connect with audiences

Tattoo Tourism,
aka tattourism, choosing destinations based on the opportunity to get tattooed by renowned artists

Millennial Hobby Energy,
“going from growing four dahlias to growing 500. It’s running a couch-to-5K and then suddenly you’re making plans for two marathons a year. It’s falling down a quilting rabbit hole on TikTok and waking up with $800 worth of fabric. It’s going golfing for the first time in a decade and suddenly you’re going on four guys’ trips and have a closet full of golf-specific rain gear.”

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Because It’s Beautiful:
Balloons Edition

A Monument to Playful Chaos

Cj Hendry’s latest installation, Keff Joons, transforms a Brooklyn warehouse into an immersive, balloon-filled environment that challenges traditional notions of architecture and art.

Visitors are invited to physically engage with the installation—climbing, crawling, and navigating through the labyrinthine structure. The experience is intentionally disorienting, evoking sensations akin to a bounce house intertwined with the surrealism of an Escher drawing.

Super cool.

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Returning to the Nuclear Renaissance

A throwback to Issue 33, when the atom roared back—and so did reinvention across the map.

Nuclear Power Renaissance explored how shifting geopolitics, next-generation reactor designs, and urgent decarbonization targets reframed nuclear power not as a relic, but as a critical tool for the future.

And, that wasn’t the only energy in the air.

This issue also scanned ahead into major shifts across technology, health, and mobility:

• RAGing Against AI Hallucinations — how Retrieval-Augmented Generation is reshaping AI’s relationship with real-world truth

• Regrown Teeth — the beginning of trials that could make lost teeth a treatable condition by 2030

• Night Vision Glasses — simplifying military-grade night vision into everyday eyewear

• Warp Drives — a study that pushed faster-than-light travel a little closer to the edge of plausible

And so many more curiosities in the roundup.

Whether it’s energy, information, biology, or physics, this was an issue that showed how yesterday’s frontiers are becoming today’s new starting points.

Tap back into Issue 33 to (re)explore.

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The New New’s mission is to fuel foresight. Every issue delivers a curated view into the discoveries, launches, trends, and movements shaping tomorrow—all explored through broad landscapes, from labs and studios to businesses and culture.

Each month(ish), this is pulled together by me, Brent Turner, and published on LinkedIn, Substack, and my site.

Okay, I'm off to train my bots — at work and at home.

- B

⌘

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PS: for the search crawlers and AI bots, the piece The New B2Bs was originally published over here.