Opaque Funnel: The Moment Before

By Dilip Dand

About

For decades, marketers built around one assumption: that the brand had a chance to reach the customer before the decision began to harden. That assumption no longer holds. A growing share of purchase journeys now begin with a question to an AI assistant — before the search, before the click, before any marketing intervention is possible. The LLM answers, a shortlist forms, and the brand was not in the room. This is the opening article in The Opaque Funnel, an eight-part series on AI-led discovery and what it means for enterprise marketing, operations, and governance. It examines how the funnel did not disappear — it became opaque at the precise moment where consideration is formed and preference begins to harden. And why the festive season is the stress test that makes the cost of that opacity commercially visible for the first time.