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.
Most organisations begin with the audit, because it is the cheapest way to replace opinion with evidence. What it finds usually decides the rest.
The Counter Intelligence Report
The new rules of retail, in full.
Our flagship research programme on how AI is reshaping discovery, decision-making and demand, published as a substantial editorial report and supported by shorter briefings on particular shifts and sectors. Free to read, and the reason most conversations start.
You get the argument, the evidence behind it and the implications for your category.
Agentic Visibility Audit
How your brand actually appears to AI.
What the leading models say about you, the questions you surface against and the ones you do not, how you are described relative to competitors, and where the information gaps sit. Run with the scoring framework behind our index of UK retailers, so the result is a position rather than an impression.
You get a visibility position, a competitor comparison and a ranked list of the gaps worth closing first.
AI Commerce Readiness Diagnostic
Whether you are ready to be bought by an agent.
An assessment of content, product information, data structure and customer experience against agent-led discovery and purchase. Less about whether your site is fast, more about whether a machine can establish what you sell, why it is different and whether it can be trusted.
You get a readiness assessment across the stack and the specific groundwork each gap requires.
Executive Briefing
The provocation, delivered to the people who can act on it.
A session for a board or leadership team: what is changing, what it means for this category specifically, and what they should do about it in the next two quarters. Built on our own research rather than vendor material, and designed to end in decisions.
You get a shared understanding across the leadership team, and an honest read on where you stand.
Counter Intelligence Strategy Sprint
From shifts to a roadmap you can fund.
A focused engagement translating the shifts into priorities, experiments and a practical sequence of work. It draws on the audit and diagnostic where they exist, and produces something a leadership team can put a budget and an owner against.
You get prioritised opportunities, a set of experiments worth running and a sequenced roadmap.
Retail Transformation Programme
The deeper work, across the whole business.
A longer engagement spanning customer experience, brand, channels, operating model and technology. This is where the machine layer stops being a marketing problem and becomes a question about how the organisation is built, what it knows about itself and how quickly it can act on it.
You get a transformation designed across the full system, with us alongside you while it lands.
Ongoing Intelligence Monitor
Because the answer changes every month.
Regular tracking of how your brand, your category and your competitors appear across the emerging AI ecosystem. Models change, and so does what they say about you. This is the difference between a snapshot and a position you can actually manage.
You get a regular read on movement, with the changes that matter flagged rather than buried.
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.