From Attention to Intention

Up until 24 months ago, understanding someone’s intent in digital channels required a bit of guesswork. You might know what someone searched, what they clicked on, their dwell time, their return rate. From that, savvy data-centered brands have done their best to infer intent, but all they really had metrics for was attention. Capturing that attention fueled the rise of what many have termed an Attention Economy: that’s what ads are about; they’re what social media is about; and, in the end, that’s what brands have convinced themselves is the goal.

But what if marketers and digital leaders knew what people were really thinking — what they really need? If you could know what someone really wanted instead of just the faint signals sent to digital systems, you’d be a step ahead of your competitor in hypertargeting those needs. 

With the advent of generative AI, where people have learned to pour detailed prompts into systems to get exactly what they want, the gap between inferring intent and knowing intent has narrowed dramatically, leading some to declare this the start of a new era: the Intention Economy.

Intention Economy Defined

The Intention Economy represents a shift from an economy that competes for our eyeballs to one that truly understands and serves our needs. Just as businesses had to go digital to succeed, a new transformation is necessary again—one that has been driving our work at Huge, a global design and technology agency. Thanks to generative AI, this time the pressure is on brands to offer truly intelligent experiences that supply what someone actually wants.

While Doc Searls first coined the term “Intention Economy” in 2006 to describe a customer-driven marketplace, a paper recently published in the Harvard Data Science Review has given it a provocative new spin. Powered by advancements in AI and machine learning, the authors define a potential future economic landscape where LLMs can effectively capture, interpret and potentially manipulate users' motivations and intentions. In other words, your desires are becoming the new currency.

This isn't just about keywords anymore. As our digital modes of engagement evolve, a new data-scape is emerging. We're talking hundreds of words of rich, contextual data flowing through conversational interfaces. This is the equivalent of evolving from caveman grunts to Shakespeare. And for the first time, AI isn't just listening – it understands.

From Distraction to Direction

The Intention Economy flips the script on the attention-grabbing tactics that still rule us today. Instead of bombarding users with content designed to keep them engaged, AI-powered systems can now interpret subtle cues to anticipate needs and streamline experiences. 

This shift has the potential for several positives, including to:

• Reduce digital clutter and information overload for the user

• Provide more personalized and relevant interactions

• Save users time, and create more delight by predicting and fulfilling intentions proactively

These advancements will start to create a competitive moat for brands (at least for a time), as consumers appreciate the efficiency of something that helps them get things done faster with less “attention-draining” friction.

Moreover, a more recent development has created a new downward pressure on any attention-based business model: agentic AI.

Agentic AI Kills Attention Monetization

At the core of all Attention Economy touchpoints is one key requirement: humans. But technology firms are openly competing to disrupt that for good.

In January, OpenAI offered limited access to its new capability Operator, an AI service that can browse the internet for you. That’s right: you ask it to shop for groceries, book a trip or purchase a new product on your behalf, without having to see a single ad along the way.

And OpenAI isn’t the only one. Claude released a similar feature in October called “Computer Use.” More than a year prior to that, similar experiments had been done by AgentGPT as well as HyperWrite, who then released their Github repo for it.

While “agentic AI” is a term used and abused by many, it’s best defined as AI that has been trained to complete a task, often multi-step, with only the minimum necessary intervention from humans. While none of the agentic offerings are fully assistive or bug-free yet, the future implication is clear: a business reliant on eyeballs (whether on their owned properties or third party) will be threatened.

Is the attention economy disappearing entirely? Hardly. But it may very well go the way of radio or TV advertising. Still great for some things. After all, people will want to be entertained, so brands promising entertainment to get attention aren’t doomed. But attention can’t remain the end-all, be-all it once was.

The Ethics of Intention Systems

Much like with both the Attention Economy and social media, the Intention Economy presents a double-edged sword with both positive and negative impacts on human life. On the benefits side, it promises more personalized and efficient experiences by anticipating people’s needs. This could help people focus on what truly matters, saving time and mental energy.

But as AI ethicists from the University of Cambridge warn, there's a danger of our intentions not just being captured, but potentially manipulated. The emergence of a marketplace for behavioral and psychological data raises serious ethical concerns about privacy and autonomy.

A recent study by Gallup showed that 77% of adults do not trust businesses to use AI responsibly. This skepticism underscores a broader anxiety: are we ceding too much decision-making power to algorithms, and how can we ensure these new tools build trust rather than erode it?

For brands sailing in these murky waters, one early guardrail should be capturing and building on an existing intent rather than using AI to seed intents that aren’t already there. In fact, the brands that prioritize trust could create a distinct advantage over those who become known for manipulation. For a recent retail banking client, Huge developed a Trust Triangle framework inspired by analysis of consumers’ attitudes toward AI, as well as the signals they would look for in an experience to feel comfortable sharing the full context of their intentions.

Navigating the Intention Economy 

For businesses that want to thrive in the Intention Economy, success requires mastering three capabilities: audience intelligence to understand intentions; intelligent data and content to respond to those intentions; and offering what we at Huge call Intelligent Experiences to deliver on the first two.

To enhance audience intelligence, for a large-scale U.S. retail client, we recently applied a behavioral modeling approach we call the Intelligent Twin to not just create typical audience segments, but simulate and mimic actual customer behavior patterns that are based on historical data. This allowed the business to determine factors influencing decisions.

The foundation of intent-based experiences lies in how organizations collect, process and activate their data and content. For NBCU, we tapped into an entirely new data source coming straight from the producers in Paris to fuel OLI, a conversational experience about programming for the Paris Games last summer. 

Finally, Intelligent Experiences go far beyond chatbots (in fact, we think that term should go away) and require just as thorough a change in business strategies as digital and CX transformations once did. For both a global retail bank as well as an enterprise B2B SAAS provider, we envisioned and roadmapped their future product 3-5 years out that fully embraced intelligence as a service.

Wherever brands are in their AI thinking and capabilities, preparing for this next transformation will be critical when the playbook that works in an Attention Economy starts to wear thin. Learn more about how Huge thinks about Intelligent Experiences in one of our recent podcast episodes, “The Value of Intent.”

*A version of this article was previously published on FastCo with the title: "Forget the attention economy. Prepare for the intention economy."