It happened on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday.

A new guy recently joined the marketing team at one of our clients. He can only be described as an “agency bro” — the kind of person who speaks in declarative sentences and treats every meeting like a TED Talk warm-up. He had philosophies. He had frameworks. He had takes.

And then, apropos of absolutely nothing, he hijacked our weekly call by proclaiming: “The marketing funnel is dead. AI killed it.”

He said it the way people say things they’ve been waiting to say. Confident. Final. Slightly disappointed that nobody was visibly wowed by his wisdom.

So I did something radical: I asked actual humans what they thought.

I emailed this question to seven of the smartest people I know across a range of industries, roles and experiences: Has AI killed the marketing funnel?

Here’s what they said.

Peter Conway, Senior Partner Success Manager, Net at Work
Peter’s take is the one I think about most, because it captures something important about how AI changes things without actually ending them:

“While AI does certainly disrupt practically everything we do, including the marketing funnel and customer journey, I don’t think it is dead. Even in AI search, it is still happening — just short-circuited and often not for the good. Designing ways to use AI to accomplish those intended goals will be of great value.”

Short-circuited. That’s the word. Not dead, just rerouted.

Paul Arvantides, CEO, Don Ryan Center for Innovation
Paul leads an organization that advises businesses, so he’s seeing this play out across a lot of industries. His framing — “evolving, not outdated” — kept coming up in different forms across all seven responses.

“AI search is compressing the journey, allowing buyers to move from awareness to consideration much faster. The shift isn’t about abandoning the funnel; it’s about strengthening positioning, authority and trust so they’re included in AI-driven recommendations. The fundamentals still matter, but success today depends more on credibility, clarity and strategic alignment than traditional top-of-funnel metrics.”

Worth pausing on that last sentence. The game hasn’t changed — be credible, be clear, be trustworthy — but the scoreboard is in a different place now.

David LaCombe, M.S., Fractional CMO, Advisor & Speaker
David said something I think cuts to the heart of the whole conversation:

“The funnel was never really a map of how people buy. It was a map of how marketers hoped people would buy. Real buyers don’t move in clean stages. They bounce around. They ask a friend. They look at reviews. They search in three different ways. They mess with AI. They wait. Then they decide when they’re ready.”

The funnel was always a useful fiction. AI didn’t kill it, it just made the fiction harder to maintain.

David’s conclusion: marketing’s job is to “show up as credible and helpful in the moments that shape the decision.” The brands that win are the ones people trust when they’re trying to make progress on something that matters.

Jane Tabachnick, Author Coach, Book Mentor & Publisher
Jane came at it from a different angle:

“AI can become a rabbit hole, consuming time without providing direction. A well-constructed funnel does the opposite: it creates structure, guiding prospects to the right information at the right moment. The real challenge for brands isn’t abandoning the funnel — it’s building enough trust and authority for it to convert.”

There’s a reason companies hire consultants. Strategy, clarity and a defined path forward don’t become less valuable when the landscape gets more complicated. If anything, they become more valuable.

Hector Vilches, President, ImpressM
Hector offered what might be the most precise framing of all: “conceptually valid but mechanically outdated.”

“Tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity AI compress awareness, research and comparison into a single interaction, collapsing parts of the journey. Customers still move through the psychological stages of discovery, evaluation and decision — but much of that now happens inside AI interfaces. The funnel remains useful for internal strategy, even if the external journey feels fluid and AI-mediated.”

Use the funnel to build your strategy. Just don’t expect your customers to follow it like a map.

Darla Kirchner, Brand & Messaging Strategist, Kirchner Marketing
Darla’s response was the most direct, and probably my favorite sentence in the whole batch:

“If your message is muddy, AI won’t clean it up. It’ll make the mess harder to ignore.”

The full thought: AI compresses the research phase, which raises the bar for clear and consistent messaging at every stage. Buyers still move from awareness to consideration to decision — just faster. They still need clarity, trust and proof.

“The funnel lives. It just moves quicker now.”

Donna Miller, Founder & Chief Visionary Officer, C3Worx
Donna brought the conversation back to something that all the automation in the world hasn’t solved yet:

“I cannot believe the customer journey will ever be outdated. I do think how we nurture our prospects and customers will change dramatically, becoming more automated and more intuitive. However, I still think there will always be ‘high stakes’ moments that I personally have a hard time thinking about trusting to AI.”

High stakes moments. The ones where a real human, on the other end of a real relationship, makes a real decision. Those still happen. And they still matter.

So what do I think?
Seven thoughtful people. Zero agreement that AI killed the funnel.

But a lot of agreement that AI has changed it — in pace, in visibility and in where the work actually happens now. The journey is being compressed. The research phase is moving inside AI interfaces.

The top of the funnel is getting shorter. And the bar for trust and credibility is rising, because when AI recommends you, it’s partly because you’ve already earned it.

The marketing funnel is not dead, and AI didn’t kill it. Sorry, agency bro.

What AI did do is compress the journey, move the research phase inside interfaces you can’t always see and raise the bar for trust and credibility at every stage.

If you’re not showing up as credible and clear before a prospect even reaches your website — in AI search results, in recommendations, in the content that shapes decisions — the funnel still exists. You’re just not in it.

That’s actually more work, not less. Figuring out how to earn the right to be in the room when AI is making introductions — that’s the real strategic question right now.

Thinking about where your content fits in all of this? That’s exactly what we do at Fahoury Ink. Let’s talk.