The Consumer Your Data Lost: What We Brought to Makers Next 2026
On stage at the first edition of Makers Next, I explained why consumers now decide alongside an AI, and why yesterday’s research no longer describes the person your next campaign is about to meet.
In short: At Makers Next 2026, held on September 18 in São Paulo, Galaxies presented the talk “The Consumer Your Data Lost.” The thesis: consumers now decide alongside an AI, they change criteria faster than traditional research can track, and brands that shorten the gap between the consumer signal and the brand decision win the preference. Simulating a hypothesis before launch is one way to test without waiting weeks.
On the morning of September 18, I took the stage at Finca 50·62, in Morumbi, for the second talk of the day at Makers Next. It was 9:55 a.m., and Accenture Song had just opened the agenda talking about how AI is redesigning the way we work. The room was small by design: heads and managers from marketing, branding, CRM, media and creative. People who sign off on budgets.
I brought a question I’ve been asking clients for months, one that rarely gets a quick answer: when was the last time you actually sat down to get to know the consumer your brand is talking to today? Not the one from your last research wave. The one you have right now.
This piece lays out what I presented, with the data I used and where each figure comes from, plus what stuck from the conversations after the talk.
What was Makers Next 2026?
Makers Next is the marketing-leaders gathering created by Makers. The first edition took place on September 18, 2026, at Finca 50·62 in São Paulo, with 11 talks on the main stage and four Makers Lab sessions on a second stage capped at 30 people each. The organizers’ stated goal is to discuss what comes next with the people who actually have to decide.
The lineup covered AI in day-to-day operations, measurement and marketing mix modeling (Media Hero), creative effectiveness (Rastro), conversational marketing (Blip), CRM and retention (Braze), and branding (Droga5), among other topics. Our talk sat in the Research and the AI Consumer track.
One detail from the agenda stood out to me: the phrase “share of voice” came up twice that day. Once in our talk, applied to AI-generated answers. Later in the afternoon, in the title of Co-Creators’ talk, applied to the creator economy. I don’t know if that was intentional curation, but it’s a good sign that how brand presence gets measured is being rethought from more than one angle. The full agenda is on the Makers Next website.
Does the consumer decide alone, or alongside an AI?
I started with numbers that are already making the rounds. In January, Clutch published research showing that 65% of consumers use AI to research products before buying. In Brazil, the picture is even more pronounced: PYMNTS’ Global Digital Shopping Index, produced with Visa, surveyed 2,273 Brazilians in March and found that 53% had used AI during their most recent online purchase, ahead of the 46% figure for the United States.
The number that unsettled the room the most came from the same study. Between 2024 and 2026, ChatGPT’s share of product discovery in Brazil jumped from 2% to 32%, while Google’s share fell from 79% to 63%. In two years, a third of the discovery stage changed address.
“If you’re talking to one person, you’re only talking to half the decision.”
The other half happens somewhere the brand can’t see: inside an AI that searches, compares and recommends before the campaign even launches. And that AI isn’t just one system. Superlines analyzed 34,234 AI responses between January and February 2026 and found a 46-times difference in brand-citation rates between platforms. ChatGPT cited brands in 0.59% of responses; Perplexity, in 13.05%.
Translated into a marketing leader’s week: your brand doesn’t have a first impression. It has several, happening in parallel, each shaped by a different model. And brand strategy, at most companies, was built for just one.
The live test we ran in the room
At this point, I asked the audience to grab their phones, open ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, and type: “What’s the best brand of [your category] in 2026?” Then to swap the question for “Which brand should I avoid in [your category]?”
“The room fell silent while the responses loaded. Some people found the brand to be well-positioned, while others did not. The AI was telling a story about each brand there, and no one from the brand was part of that conversation.”
I’d recommend running the same test before you keep reading. Note whether your brand showed up, in what position, and next to whom. It’s the cheapest diagnostic available right now.
What is AI Share of Voice, and why isn’t it in your report yet?
AI Share of Voice is how often a brand appears, gets cited, or gets recommended when someone asks an AI assistant a category question, measured against how often competitors do. It’s the AI-generated-answer equivalent of the metric marketing already tracks in media and search.
It matters because the click stopped being the default path. A SparkToro study using Similarweb panel data found that 68% of Google searches in the United States ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, up from 60% in 2024. When an AI Overview appears on the page, Seer Interactive measured a 61% drop in organic CTR. In that same study, brands cited inside the AI Overview earned 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands not cited in the same search.
In other words: showing up inside the answer is now a condition for getting whatever click is still on offer. Tools to measure this already exist. What I see, talking to marketing teams, is that the metric rarely makes it into the monthly report. And the share lost through absence never shows up in a results meeting. It shows up later, on the balance sheet.
The first word about your brand is no longer yours.
How fast does your consumer data go stale?
Faster than your next campaign’s approval cycle. The same PYMNTS index shows Brazilians average 67 digital shopping days per month, the equivalent of 2.2 shopping activities a day, 8% more than in 2024. That’s a consumer who is learning the category’s vocabulary all the time.
Culture keeps the same pace. In the 2025 Sprout Social Index, 93% of consumers said it matters for brands to keep up with online culture, and 27% said jumping on a trend only works within the first 24 to 48 hours. At Galaxies we sum up the problem this way: a research cycle takes weeks; the conversation changes in days.
During the talk, I put a sector-specific question to the room:
• Beauty: skinification, skin cycling and barrier repair dominated the last few years. Which ones still matter, and what came after them?
• Pharma: mental-health OTC grew, the weight-loss category reorganized itself after the new injectables, longevity became a consumption habit. What has already fallen off that list?
• CPG: shrinkflation became a talking point, the GLP-1 effect reshaped buying patterns, private label gained share. Which of these is in your consumer’s vocabulary this week?
• Finance: installment Pix became routine, deepfakes became a real fear, betting got regulated. Which of these is the new conversation in your customer base?
I want to be clear on one point, because it tends to get misread. Traditional research hasn’t become useless. It’s a photograph: sharp, expensive, and true on the day it was taken. Today’s consumer is a film that keeps changing scenes between the photo and the campaign’s premiere. You can, and should, keep taking photographs, because without them the film doesn’t know what to shoot. What’s changed is that the next campaign’s decision needs a frame from today.
Historical data is your brand’s biography. It doesn’t describe the consumer you have now.
Journey or loop: how does the consumer decide now?
Since 2020, Google has called the messy stretch between first interest and purchase the “messy middle,” where consumers bounce between exploring and evaluating with no fixed order. Generative AI has made that middle even more circular. In the talk, I introduced what we call the AI Consumer Loop: the consumer discovers, understands, buys, learns, and comes back around. On every pass, they run into an AI that has already formed an opinion about the category, and often about your brand too.
The funnel is still useful for planning spend. As a description of how people actually decide, it falls short. Everyone in that room knows how to build brand awareness in the consumer’s mind. The question I left them with was a different one: does your brand have awareness inside the AI’s mind?
How many loops does the consumer run while your campaign waits for sign-off?
I proposed a simple calculation. Think about how many weeks passed between the brief for your last big campaign and the day it actually launched. Multiply that by seven. That’s how many days the consumer had to change their mind about your category while the company was still approving copy, creative, channel and budget.
On a campaign with eight weeks of approvals, that’s 56 days. If each week equals one lap of the loop, the message reaches someone who has already reshuffled their decision criteria eight times over, and much of that reshuffling happened inside an AI answering questions on the brand’s behalf.
This is where the money is made or lost. AI has sped up the consumer’s side. On the company’s side, the funnel still stalls at the human layer, when a piece of creative takes days to get signed off. Whoever shortens the gap between the consumer signal and the brand’s decision wins the consumer. And it all starts with the audience: creative, category, journey and measurement are all downstream of understanding who’s on the other side. If the read on the audience is out of date, everything after it inherits the error.
How do you test a hypothesis before it becomes a plan?
The page we published about the talk sums up the idea in one question: what if you could ask before you launch? That’s what we do with Nexus.
Nexus is Galaxies’ platform for simulating marketing decisions using synthetic personas built from a company’s own data. It doesn’t replace market research. It works as a simulation layer before launch, used to test messaging, creative, an offer or a positioning while there’s still time to change course. Research takes the photograph; simulation helps decide the next frame.
One concrete example: with Bradesco Seguros, each validation wave delivered 1,000 synthetic respondents in 48 hours, at a 93% lower cost per respondent (from R\$17.00 down to R\$1.20) and 10.5 times faster validation. The full case study is on our customers page. If you want to estimate the impact for your own scenario, the ROI calculator runs the numbers with your inputs.
The question I left in the room
I closed the talk with the same question that opens this piece. You know your brand better than anyone. When was the last time you stopped to get to know the consumer it’s talking to today?
Thank you to Makers for the invitation and for curating a first edition that put the people making these decisions in the same room. The page with the highlights from our talk is here. And if the question stuck with you too, see how Nexus works.
Frequently asked questions
What was Makers Next 2026?
It was the first edition of the marketing-leaders event organized by Makers, held on September 18, 2026 at Finca 50·62 in São Paulo. The event featured 11 talks on the main stage and four Makers Lab sessions, covering topics such as AI, measurement, branding, CRM and consumer research.
What was the topic of Galaxies’ talk at Makers Next?
The talk “The Consumer Your Data Lost,” presented by Daniel Victorino, CEO of Galaxies, covered how AI has become part of purchase decisions, why consumer data goes stale quickly, and how to shorten the gap between the consumer signal and the brand’s decision.
What is AI Share of Voice?
AI Share of Voice is how often a brand appears, gets cited, or gets recommended when someone asks an AI assistant, such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, a category question, compared with how often competitors do.
Do synthetic personas replace market research?
No. Traditional research remains the foundation for understanding the consumer. Synthetic personas, like the ones in Nexus, work as a complementary simulation layer, used to test marketing hypotheses before launch, while there’s still time to change the plan.
Why does consumer data go stale so fast?
Because consumers interact with a category constantly. In Brazil, the average is 67 digital shopping days a month, according to PYMNTS, and a growing share of product research now runs through AI assistants. A research cycle that takes weeks can land after the consumer has already changed their criteria.
Sources cited
• Makers. Makers Next 2026. Event agenda and details.
• Clutch. Agentic Commerce: How AI Is Changing Online Shopping Behavior, Jan. 2026.
• PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa Acceptance Solutions. Global Digital Shopping Index: Brazil Playbook, 2026.
• Payments Industry Intelligence. Brazil’s AI shoppers point to the next phase of Agentic Commerce, Aug. 2026.
• Superlines. AI Search Statistics 2026, Mar. 2026.
• SparkToro. In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click, Jun. 2026.
• Sprout Social. The 2025 Sprout Social Index, Jan. 2025.