Consumers are disappearing from the reach of brands as Big Tech’s AI innovations accelerate.
Code and Theory
The internet is closing. Not apocalyptically, but architecturally. What’s happening now is a race to own the customer, and it looks nothing like the internet we grew up with.
Google Gemini 3 launched last week, promising more answers with less prompting. This is just the latest AI launch changing the way customers engage with the internet. Where do brands live in all of this? If the tech platforms have their way: deep within their walled gardens.
The early internet was open. It was built on blue links, traffic referrals and users flowing between destinations. Every site did one or two things well, then passed people along. Attention shifted over time as portals, social networks, and search engines fought to become the start of a journey, but rarely the end of it. Businesses learned to navigate each wave, studying algorithms, adapting behavior and understanding the value of owning their customer data.
Formats evolved from static images to video to vertical clips. Entire industries appeared: the creator economy , gig work, direct-to-consumer brands. Each wave created new opportunities without closing off the path for brands to show up. Your identity still mattered. Your owned experiences still had a place.
What’s happening now is different. It’s not another shift. It’s structural closure, the redirection of the entire internet into enclosed environments where the old paths disappear.
Why the Internet is Closing
Big Tech and foundation model companies aren’t just building faster tools. They’re building moats that lock the entire journey inside their platforms. Conversational interfaces keep us typing instead of clicking, holding us inside a stream that feels like consciousness rather than navigation.
The deeper layers compound this in each of these area:
- Social media. Image and video creation tools generate content from prompts or observed behavior. New environments like Sora produce endless AI-generated feeds.
- Dynamic media. Features like Pulse create ephemeral, personalized media mirroring your conversational context.
- Commerce. Transactions now sit inside these interfaces, ChatGPT’s recent shopping integration means you never need to leave to complete a purchase. Just look at Target’s new curated ChatGPT experience for proof.
- Internet co-piloting. And, the agentic browser wars are in full swing. OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet and even agentic capabilities now integrated into Chrome.hey are all competing to become the copilot for every experience across the internet. These systems don’t just search, they browse, compare, decide and transact. It’s like having a sales rep inside your store who doesn’t work for you, comparing your product to every competitor at the moment a customer is ready to buy.
- Agentic browsing. Google’s Project Mariner and OpenAI’s Operator use agentic AI to connect steps that once required separate customer actions. They turn old internet navigation into automated flows with almost no human input. The agent navigates the internet on the customer’s behalf, even when tasks fall outside the platform’s ecosystem, and the customer never needs to look at the screen.
- Dynamic experiences. Meanwhile, lightweight builders (often referred to as vibe coding) can be used to generate entire experiences tailored to users in real-time.
- Hardware. And then there is the evolution of new hardware coming to market. Admittedly, it’s still a little early, but getting closer to reinforcing a closed internet. For example, Meta’s AR/VR push, Google’s Android ecosystem, OpenAI’s rumored multimodal device, and I still wouldn’t count out an inevitable Apple response. These all will include new behaviors of inputs and outputs that may not include traditionally designed open web pages.
When these pieces connect without friction, you get a continuous path from first touch to last. Once content enters these environments, it is broken down, recomposed, and resurfaced without your branding or identity intact. This is also what makes this moment different from past internet revolutions. In earlier eras, even if aggregators controlled traffic, your brand was still visible on the destination. In closed environments, your visibility is neither guaranteed nor controlled. It becomes harder for a customer to see you at all.
What Businesses Are Doing Wrong
Most businesses are responding to AI with efficiency, automation, cost reduction, productivity lifts. It feels sensible, predictable, low-risk, CFO-friendly. Leaders feel pressure to show AI progress quickly, so they reach for use cases that are simple to quantify. You can put it in a spreadsheet, calculate savings, and justify the investment without debate.
But when everyone pursues efficiency with the same stack, gains converge to parity. SaaS providers consolidate and standardize workflows until they become the common baseline. You get more throughput, but not more distinction.
Here’s the deeper problem: while businesses use AI to remove friction from internal processes, Big Tech uses the same AI to remove friction from customer journeys. While you chase efficiency, they chase ownership. The more the internet closes, the wider that gap grows.
Business leaders understand this tension. Recent research from WSJ Intelligence/Code and Theory shows 93% of executives describe their customer experience as broken. 94% agree customer experience drives business success. Yet only 28% use AI to create adaptive or innovative experiences. Companies that do build strong experiences generate 30% more revenue, about $1.4 billion more on average. The priority is clear, but the investment isn’t aligned.
This gap explains why 76% of companies say they’re behind in AI transformation despite massive infrastructure spending. They invest in the foundation but limit use cases to automation. They move faster, but they don’t move differently. The outcome is a more efficient version of the same experience their competitors offer.
The New Playbook for the Closing Internet
This is the moment to put the customer first again. In a closing internet, experience becomes the only durable edge because it shapes identity, trust, and meaning at the exact point where customers live.
Context matters. Emotional resonance matters. Good friction makes people feel human, it gives them space to think, be inspired, and connect. It’s the same behavior that leads someone to spend $10,000 on a handbag instead of taking the free tote. People seek meaning in how they engage, shop, and consume. You cannot see it in a spreadsheet. You need creativity at the exact moment you assumed creativity was dead.
Five Shifts to Consider
- Design an owned ecosystem. Transition from isolated interactions to a comprehensive brand system where experience and storytelling converge. Map functional gaps in a customer journey alongside emotional gaps. Deliver experiences that anticipate needs and express feelings.
- Compose experiences, don’t copy them. Foundation models are generic. Your advantage comes from industry depth and domain knowledge. Train models on your expertise, not just your history. Teach customers new ways to think and better ways to act.
- Use the right data in the right way. Build a first-party layer that holds identity, preference, memory, and emotional logic. Assemble proprietary data, service logic, tone, and rituals into outcomes no one else can reproduce. Modern branding is an engineered, living system, not just a static logo and tag line
- Integrate on your terms. Meet customers inside ChatGPT, Atlas, and emerging AI browsers. Be agentic. Optimize for LLMs so you still show up. Balance meeting people where they are with creating a place they want to be.
- Rethink measurement. Efficiency matters, but it’s not enough for a robust AI transformation. Measure clarity, satisfaction, journeys completed without channel switching. Consider return on relationship (RoR). AI will reshape how customers relate to your brand.
The ecosystem will keep tightening. Platforms will handle more of the journey. You can chase efficiency inside whatever environment dominates, or you can build a system that projects your identity across every surface customers move through.
The future isn’t coming. It’s here. Own the relationship as it closes around your customer. Use AI to create experiences that feel intelligent, anticipatory and unmistakably human.
Efficiency will help you work better.
Experience will help you matter more.
Dan Gardner is co-founder of Code and Theory.