Counter Intelligence
AI is undoubtedly transforming the customer journey. Changing who (or what) discovers, evaluates, recommends and ultimately chooses a product. Counter Intelligence helps brands and retailers understand how that reshapes discovery, decision-making and demand, and turn it into practical strategy, stronger experiences and new sources of growth.
When AI joins the buying decision, will it choose your brand?
Plenty of people now offer technical AI-visibility services. Far fewer can connect the machine layer to brand, culture, customer behaviour and genuine retail transformation. That join is the whole point of this practice.
Because two things have to be true at once. Your brand has to be understood by machines: found, parsed, trusted and confidently recommended. And it has to remain preferred by people, who still buy on emotion, meaning and trust. Optimise for one and you lose the other.
The new rules of retail, decoded.
Counter Intelligence examines five shifts that together change how a product gets found, judged and bought. They are connected: move one and the others move with it.
From searching to asking
Consumers are moving from searching and scrolling to asking and delegating. When a question replaces a query, and an agent replaces a browse, the first moment of demand no longer happens where brands have spent twenty years learning to show up.
How machines compare
Models and agents filter, rank and recommend using logic that is neither a search algorithm nor a human shortlist. Understanding how a brand is compared — and against whom — is now a commercial question, not a technical one.
What AI can actually find
What information about a brand exists, is machine-readable, and is trusted enough to be repeated? Most organisations have never audited this, and most are surprised by the answer.
Where humans still decide
Parts of shopping will be automated away, and should be. Other parts are where preference is actually formed: desire, reassurance, belonging, delight. Knowing which is which is the difference between efficiency and erosion.
What has to change
Data, content, brand, customer experience, technology and operating model. None of this is a marketing fix. It reaches into how the business is organised and what it is able to say about itself.
Understand how machines see you. Shape how people choose you.
Most leadership teams can answer the first question badly and have never considered the fourth. The gap between them is where the work sits.
- Will your brand be found when discovery begins with a question?
- Will AI understand what makes it distinctive?
- Will an agent have enough confidence to recommend or buy it?
- What will make a human continue to prefer it?
Start with what is true today. Then decide what to change.
Seven ways to work with us, in four steps. Most organisations start with the audit, because it is the quickest way to replace opinion with evidence. What it finds usually decides the rest.
The Counter Intelligence Briefing
A quick way in. Every place includes the Counter Intelligence Report and credit towards an Agentic Visibility Audit, valid until 31 December.
See where you stand, from the outside and the inside.
The Counter Intelligence Report
The new rules of retail, in full.
Our research on how AI is reshaping discovery, decision-making and demand. The reason most conversations start.
Get it when it lands →Agentic Visibility Audit
How AI sees your brand.
What the leading models say about you, which questions you appear in, and how you compare with competitors. Scored with the framework behind our index of UK retailers.
You get a visibility position, a competitor comparison and a ranked list of the gaps worth closing first.
Request an audit →AI Commerce Readiness Diagnostic
Whether you are ready to be bought by an agent.
Content, product information, data structure and customer experience, assessed against agent-led discovery and purchase. Can a machine establish what you sell, why it is different and whether to trust it?
You get a readiness assessment across the stack and the specific groundwork each gap requires.
Ask about the diagnostic →Turn the evidence into decisions and a plan.
Executive Briefing
The provocation, delivered to the people who can act on it.
A private session on what is changing in your category and what to do about it in the next two quarters. Designed to end in decisions.
You get a shared understanding across the team, and an honest read on where you stand.
Arrange a briefing →Counter Intelligence Strategy Sprint
From shifts to a roadmap you can fund.
A focused engagement that turns the shifts into priorities, experiments and a sequence of work you can put a budget and an owner against.
You get prioritised opportunities, experiments worth running and a sequenced roadmap.
Plan a sprint →Make the change across the business.
Retail Transformation Programme
Where the machine layer stops being a marketing problem.
The deeper work across customer experience, brand, channels, operating model and technology, and how quickly the organisation can act on what it learns.
You get a transformation designed across the full system, with us alongside you while it lands.
Start a conversation →Keep track as the models, and your market, move.
Ongoing Intelligence Monitor
Because the answer changes every month.
Regular tracking of how your brand, category and competitors appear across AI. Models change, and so does what they say about you.
You get a regular read on movement, with the changes that matter flagged rather than buried.
Ask about the monitor →Two lenses on the same question.
Counter Intelligence is led by Matt Parry, who brings the AI, technology and retail-transformation side: the architecture of how intelligence flows through a business, and what it does to the way that business competes.
Kate Shepherd brings the other half: brand, culture, customer behaviour and foresight — why people prefer what they prefer, and what still has to be true for a human to choose you once the machine has done its filtering. The combination is the proposition.
Optimising for machines at the expense of people wins the recommendation and loses the customer. Optimising for people while invisible to machines means never reaching the moment where preference matters. Both, or neither.
Find out what AI already says about your brand.
The fastest way in is a briefing for your leadership team, or a visibility audit on your own brand and two competitors. Both take weeks rather than months, and both tend to change the conversation about what to do next.
Tell us the brand, the category and who needs convincing. We will come back with what we would run and what it would cost.