THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY IS DEAD: HOW TO SELL IN 2026

The customer journey is having its Wikipedia moment. You know, when everyone suddenly realizes something they've accepted as gospel is completely wrong. CX leaders need to redesign their approach to the customer journey because "your journey can't start at your website" or "on social media." Instead, they must acknowledge that a large percentage of people are doing primary research within an AI answer engine. ## The Bumblebee Problem For decades, brands mapped the "customer journey" like a well-behaved road trip with a clear starting point and logical path to purchase. But the reality in 2025 looks nothing like that tidy funnel. Today's consumers are buzzing, hopping, swiping, streaming, buying, pausing, searching, and sharing all at once. Google organizes consumer behavior around four fluid, overlapping behaviors: streaming, scrolling, shopping, and searching. These are not siloed steps but ambient behaviors that define modern life. Consumers move fluidly between them, often within minutes, sometimes all at once. The funnel is dead. Welcome to the swarm. Shopping-related searches on generative AI platforms grew 4,700 percent between 2024 and 2025. Your customers aren't following your carefully crafted journey anymore. They're getting product recommendations from ChatGPT before they even know your brand exists. ## The Activity Revolution Amazon doesn't just map buying journeys. It maps life activities: shopping, watching, reading, listening, eating, hosting, gaming. They aim to serve all of it. Same with Apple. Same with Google. These companies don't just reduce friction. They reshape activity systems, embedding their brand into the rhythm of everyday life. In 2026, customer journeys are non-linear networks where buyers move fluidly between channels, devices, and contexts. Illuminating the customer journey black hole is the only way to see where these paths are actually leading. Agentic AI is the latest development, referring to autonomous AI shopping agents that can complete multi-step tasks, conduct research across multiple sites, and even complete checkout on customers' behalf. OpenAI announced a partnership with Etsy and Shopify to allow users to check out directly through ChatGPT. The value is predicted to grow by $3-5 trillion by 2030. ## What Actually Works Now In 2026 the focus will shift from adoption to strategic integration. The most successful merchants will use AI to scale their business, removing internal and external friction points to make the buying journey seamless and personal for shoppers that builds trust and drives loyalty. Economic pressures are still weighing down consumers, causing them to prioritize value and price above their loyalty to a brand. The brands winning this moment aren't just optimizing touchpoints. They're becoming infrastructure for how people live. Stop mapping journeys. Start understanding activities. Use AI not just to predict behavior but to participate in it. Build systems that enhance customer actions, not just track them. The customer journey isn't broken. It never existed the way we thought it did. The sooner brands accept this reality, the sooner they can start building something that actually works.