The greatest disruption in the history of marketing isn’t coming for your job. It’s coming for your customer.

Artificial Intelligence is changing the way people think, feel, decide, and connect. Your next customer will be less patient, more trusting of machines, less loyal to brands, and possibly searching for meaning in new and unexpected places.

If you don’t understand these shifts, your marketing playbook will be obsolete.

Bestselling author and futurist Mark Schaefer takes you on a deep, human-centered journey through the new realities of consumer behavior in the age of AI. This is not a book about algorithms and prompts. It’s a book about people, and how to keep reaching them when everything about them is changing.

Through fresh research, vivid stories, and a marketer’s practical lens, you’ll explore how AI is reshaping core human capacities:

• Deep Thinking – Why mental shortcuts are multiplying, and how to stand out in a world of shallow attention.
• Empathy – How automation changes our capacity to care, and the surprising ways brands can still create emotional resonance.
• Confidence and Agency – When decisions are outsourced to machines, how do you keep customers feeling in control?
• Purpose and Meaning – Why AI is disrupting our “why,” and where your brand can help people rediscover it.
• Connection and Belonging – Building community when humans prefer their bots.
• Decision Making – Understanding the new role of algorithms in every customer choice.

This is the essential business guide to humanity’s next chapter.