By Yemi Olagbaiye, director of AI strategy & transformation at digital software consultancy Softwire
After years of search and scroll, the interface economy has rewritten itself. With the launch of ChatGPT Atlas, we’ve entered the AI interface era – and the arrival of the cognitive internet.
Atlas is more than a product update; it’s an entirely new gateway to the web. Acting as an agentic browser, it allows users to search, compare, purchase and manage tasks through a single conversational interface. Instead of clicking between tabs, Atlas interprets intent and completes actions on the user’s behalf, collapsing the old journey from discovery to transaction into one seamless flow.
It builds on a wave of recent OpenAI releases from Pulse, which surfaces insights from your context, messages and calendar, to Instant Checkout, which merges discovery, comparison and payment in a single step. Meanwhile, the addition of new parental controls positions ChatGPT as a household technology that can act safely and responsibly across personal, family and professional contexts. Together, these developments signal a clear shift: the web is no longer something we navigate, but something that increasingly acts on our behalf.
As Sam Altman put it, for Gen Z, ChatGPT is the new operating system. With over 800 million weekly users ChatGPT is becoming the default gateway for how we shop, browse, connect and discover content: a new browser tab where discovery and decision happen in the same space.
The battleground for consumer attention now lies in chat and how best to show up inside it. For marketers, this isn’t just an e-commerce tweak, it’s a fundamental brand strategy rethink.
Here’s a five-point playbook – from data architecture to dialogue design – to help brands win this new highly capable chat interface.
Conduct a “chat as a channel” audit
For brands watching from the sidelines, each new ChatGPT capability – Atlas’s all-in-one interface, Instant Checkout, Pulse – is a call to action. Instant Checkout clears the way for in-chat purchases, potentially at the cost of webpage transactions, while Pulse shows the ability of AI to anticipate intent, meaning brands may likewise be able to nudge demand in the form of customised briefs, reminders and insights.
These developments mean now is the time to undergo a “chat as a channel” audit. Atlas fuses awareness, evaluation and purchase into a single conversational flow, so brands should consider piloting design elements such as agentic checkout, or mapping where proactive AI prompts (like Pulse) could outperform email or push notifications. The goal: to understand how a brand performs when discovery and conversion happen in the same chat.
Optimise for agent legibility
While design still matters, the shift towards chat-powered discovery has made data architecture the new frontier. Ensuring your brand offer is understood by humans is no longer enough, AI agents need to understand too. This is SEO’s evolution into AIO (Agent Interface Optimisation), where discoverability depends on how clearly agentic systems can interpret a brand’s value and context.
AIO is essentially the grammar of the conversational web: it underpins chat-native experiences, combining machine precision with human qualities like tone and intent. Brands now need to structure their product metadata, pricing, stock, delivery and returns so they align with AI chat prompts, making it easy for AI agents to read, reason and recommend them.
Treat trust as a ranking signal
AI systems rank brands by reliability, not persuasion. And that places a new currency on trust as a technical function as opposed to “just” a brand value, or editorial standard. Strong authority signals include pricing and product consistency, use of verifiable sources, coherent APIs and recent, relevant reviews.
The addition of ChatGPT parental controls last month raises another crucial element of trust: regulation. Brands should ensure their policies are up-to-date and transparent, especially when it comes to age-restrictive marketing. Placing limits around how, and why, content is accessed is vital for chat targeting efforts; especially in relation to age restrictions and consent.
Making these trust signals visible and constant helps AI systems confidently surface (or sideline) particular brands as discovery and checkout merge.
Turn governance into brand advantage
With AI entering family life, brand safety and data ethics are also linchpins of the chat generation. Governance within this picture is a matter of robust human oversight. Rigorous hygiene standards include watermarking content, setting out clear data contracts and weaving accountability into all aspects of automation.
It’s about credibility rather than compliance, embedding governance as part of the core product. This, in turn, will give brands a competitive edge on platforms such as ChatGPT that are trained to favour trustworthy, responsible content.
Design your brand for dialogue
The home screen is being rewritten in real time, putting brand visibility on par with conversational fluency. Within this shift, your brand copy becomes conversation while your brand UX becomes dialogue design.
As brand presence increasingly depends on chat visibility, marketers need to look under the bonnet, at prompt libraries, dialogue templates and conversational flows. Analytics should be part of this, too, helping brands identify high-impact exchanges and benchmark their performance against competitors in the AI chat space.
The bigger task is strategic: Atlas ushers in the cognitive internet, where brand visibility depends on how clearly you can be read, reasoned with and recommended. The only question is, who will be ready first?
