By Professor Rocky Scopelliti

For most of advertising history, marketers have tried to understand audiences indirectly. They used demographics, surveys, behavioural segments, purchase histories and, more recently, digital traces. AI is now changing that relationship.

The next generation of systems will not simply analyse what audiences have done. They will increasingly infer what people are feeling, intending, hesitating over and perhaps even becoming vulnerable to in real time. That creates extraordinary possibilities for relevance.

It also creates a new question for marketers: when AI can read the audience, who controls the influence? The marketing industry has traditionally treated personalisation as a question of relevance: show the right message to the right person at the right time.

But AI is pushing personalisation toward something more powerful. A sufficiently capable system may infer that a customer is uncertain, anxious, lonely, impulsive, financially stressed or emotionally receptive. It may then adapt language, timing, tone, imagery and offers accordingly. At that point, the system is no longer merely personalising content. It may be optimising persuasion against an inferred psychological state.

That distinction matters. I describe the concept of perceptual sovereignty as the principle that individuals should retain meaningful control over how machines sense, infer and interpret them.

We have spent years debating data privacy. Perceptual sovereignty asks a different question. Even if a company is legally entitled to possess my data, should its AI be entitled to infer my emotional or psychological state and use that inference to influence me?

That question becomes especially important as AI systems cross what I describe as the Action Threshold – the point at which machines move from analysing and recommending to deciding and acting.

For marketers, that threshold may be crossed when an AI system no longer simply suggests which campaign may work, but dynamically chooses how to influence a particular person, when to intervene and what emotional lever to pull.

This is where another concept becomes important: the Authority Gap. The Authority Gap is the widening distance between what machines are technically capable of doing, and what humans and institutions have consciously authorised them to do.

A marketing AI may be capable of detecting vulnerability. That does not mean it should be authorised to exploit it. Responsible marketers therefore need to define not only what AI can optimise, but what it must never optimise for. That requires a different governance mindset.

The first principle should be transparency. Consumers should know when AI is materially shaping or adapting persuasive communication around inferred characteristics.

The second is restraint. Some inferred states – grief, distress, addiction, financial vulnerability, loneliness, age-related susceptibility – should trigger additional protections, not more aggressive optimisation.

The third is accountability. If an AI-generated interaction causes harm, organisations must be able to reconstruct what the system inferred, what objective it was given, how the message changed and who authorised that form of influence.

And the fourth is human agency. The purpose of marketing should not become maximising behavioural compliance. It should remain creating value, communicating relevance and helping people make informed choices.

The most powerful marketing AI will eventually know far more about audiences than any creative team ever could. That does not mean it should be allowed to use everything it knows. 

The defining ethical challenge of AI-enabled marketing will therefore not be whether machines can understand us. It will be whether organisations can draw a boundary between understanding and exploiting, between personalisation and manipulation, and between influence and control.

The marketers that get this right will not merely protect trust. They will define what responsible influence looks like in the age of perceptive machines.

Professor Rocky Scopelliti is a futurologist and author of The conscious code: From artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness. 

Read more: An algorithm opt-out option makes relevant content more important than ever before