OpenAI Is Merging Search, Ads, and Social… The Moat for Brands Is Human Connection.

Victoria Alvarez, Sr. Brand & Content Specialist

The Moment We’re In

OpenAI’s recent privacy policy changes aren’t shocking, but they do signal a much bigger shift than a simple, innocuous update. The company is positioning itself as an ad platform with a social graph, meaning it will be where people discover things, it will sell ads against that discovery, and it will own the peer recommendations that drive decisions. For OpenAI, this is the natural next step in a shift that has been building for years. And if one thing is to be expected, it’s that every major platform will eventually monetize, control distribution and, with that, relationships. The window to build, own, and maintain relationships outside of these platforms is closing, but not all hope is lost. AI can help drive an inherently human experience, yes, but it cannot fully replicate it.

Meanwhile, the urgency has never felt more real: according to McKinsey, 88% of organizations report that they are now using AI in at least one business function (2025). This adoption curve is faster than social media’s early growth, meaning platform consolidation is happening at rapid speeds. For brands built on direct customer relationships, this is the moment to double down on loyalty and connection before the AI layer becomes another expensive middleman standing between them and their audience.

The Human Undercurrent

At the same time, AI is everywhere: from chatbots, images, videos, to music, the conversation about it is constant. People everywhere are beginning to feel the onset of AI fatigue, to say the least. Trust is even lagging behind adoption: a 2024 Gallup study found that 77% of adults do not trust businesses much (44%) or at all (33%) to use AI responsibly.

There is a growing yearning for community, genuine connection, and reciprocal human experiences—things only humans can offer in ways AI cannot. Brands win when they lean on the human expertise that they already have in-house and use AI as an aid, not a replacement, to deliver a deeply human experience.

The Psychology of Connection

Humans, by nature, seek connection and community. In doing so, they signal who they are: their wants, needs, emotions, and lifestyles. We see this on social platforms every day: community-based content is rising in popularity; every post is a bid for connection, and every customer service message is a bid for acknowledgment.

Community-based experiences consistently outperform generic digital interactions. Research by CMX and Bevy found that 86% of brand community members say they feel a stronger connection to the brand, and 69% are more likely to recommend it. Accordingly, data from The Bond Loyalty Report found that when a program has a community of members, there is a 3.5x lift on loyalty to program and a 2.8x lift on likelihood to recommend the program (2025). Human validation drives loyalty more effectively than algorithmic engagement. The moment people feel their content is being received by ads or bots, instead of other humans, they disengage. Human receipt and validation are essential and, without them, the psychology of signaling breaks down.

The Sacred Spaces & Implication for Brands

Consider communities like LEGO Ideas or Lululemon’s Sweat Life. The incentive for customers is connection, belonging, and the feeling of being part of something greater than themselves among other individuals. In a world where third spaces are increasingly hard to come by, these community-based sacred spaces will soon become some of the most valuable assets that brands have. Why? Because they are void of ads, AI noise, and platform interference. Most importantly, they are inherently human, and they replicate that which many are missing as of late: a space to be recognized and “affirm our own identities and build empathy for identities different from our own” (University of Chicago).

For brands like LEGO or Lululemon, where one of their strongest loyalty assets is community, any attempt to redirect those conversations poses a direct threat. OpenAI’s emerging social graph strategy aims to bring those exchanges into a monetized AI environment, potentially shifting the center of gravity away from the brands’ own community spaces.

The Pattern of Channel Loss

We’ve seen brands lose control of their customer relationships before, one channel at a time. First, retail shelf space: brands lost direct relationships to retailers. Then, Google: brands lost the discovery moment to search and had to buy it back through PPC. Then, social media: brands built audiences only to have their organic reach replaced with paid amplification.

The monetization trend is undeniable: organic reach on Facebook fell from 16% in 2012 to under 2% by 2020 (HubSpot), forcing brands into paid amplification. Google’s first page is now over 65% paid or owned content (SparkToro), making organic discovery increasingly rare. Each time, there was somewhere else to go: lose on Google, win on social; lose organic reach, invest in community, email lists, or loyalty programs.

Why This Shift Is Different

This time is different. The escape routes are inside the same platform. OpenAI’s announcement essentially says: “We’re going to be where people discover things. We’re going to sell ads against that. And we’re going to own the social graph that drives peer recommendations.”

Search, advertising, and word-of-mouth (three channels that previously existed independently) are collapsing into one platform simultaneously. Email lists, loyalty programs, and direct communities still exist outside of it, but consolidation is happening faster and more completely than any previous shift.

The Social Graph Play

One underreported element is contact syncing. It sounds harmless; LinkedIn and Facebook did it early on, but inside ChatGPT, it’s transformative. Once your contacts live inside the AI platform, peer recommendations become intermediated by an AI with commercial incentives. Conversations that once happened in Slack, LinkedIn, or group chats will happen inside ChatGPT, where OpenAI can see them, influence them, and monetize them.

Facebook’s monetization of its social graph turned it into a $100B+ advertising business, with over 60% of recommendations on the platform now mediated by algorithms (Meta internal data). If OpenAI follows a similar trajectory, the majority of peer recommendations could soon be filtered and monetized within AI environments.

AI as General-Purpose Tech… And Its Limits

AI is a general-purpose technology. It will improve, innovate, change, and produce constantly. It will evolve rapidly, impact our economy, and transform society. This is a truth that brands can and should leverage. But it will never replicate the experience of being human, feeling seen, and connecting with a likeminded community.

A Motista study shows that customers who feel emotionally connected to a brand have 306% higher lifetime value. That is the intrinsic value humans bring, and the competitive edge brands must protect.

What Brands Must Do Now

The answer for brands is not simply to “invest more in loyalty”—that’s table stakes. Instead, they must create relationships so deep and direct they survive platform intermediation. That means owning behavioral data, not just transactional data. It means knowing what customers do, think, and feel—not just what they buy, so you can stay relevant without relying on a platform. It means building identity relationships where customers see themselves as part of something, not just users of a tool. And it means creating network effects inside your own ecosystem so that your community thrives on your brand’s platform and has little incentive to move conversations elsewhere.

The Crux: Human Connection Will Always Win

Every previous platform shift gave brands somewhere else to go. This one is trying to own all channels at once, and the window to build relationships outside of it is closing. AI can help drive an inherently human experience, but it cannot fully replicate it.

It will never be able to replicate the experience of receiving a personalized recommendation for a water-based moisturizer over an oil-based one from an in-store associate because you bonded over perioral dermatitis; it will never be able to replicate the feeling of finding your community on Substack after reading a New York-based influencer’s heart-wrenching personal essay about living there in your 30s. And it will never replace the comfort of knowing that what you put out is being received by another human, not just a faceless sea of R2-D2s.

The brands that will stand apart will lean on human expertise, human value, and humanity. They will use and own valuable customer intelligence and data responsibly to make people feel seen, and build communities that foster belonging—otherwise, they’ll be paying a premium to reach the very audience that they already had. They will use AI as an aid, yes, but never as the be-all end-all. In an era of AI consolidation, human connection is the last competitive advantage.

Bond helps brands understand customers deeply and act on what truly drives loyalty and value. We use our Bond Intelligence to unite customer data, research, and behavioral insights into one, actionable view. That way, brands can pinpoint what drives loyalty and how to focus investment so that every engagement is measurable. Learn more here.