The Great Collapse: The Traditional Customer Funnel is Dead

For the last twenty years, we’ve all been worshiping at the same church in digital retail: the customer funnel.

It was our religion. Discovery at the top (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Ads, Myspace, AOL), Consideration in the middle (Google, reviews), and Purchase at the bottom (Amazon, Ebay, ecom storefronts). The entire digital economy was built on optimizing the slow, leaky journey between these three steps. Billions were spent trying to own a piece of it.

This week, OpenAI took a sledgehammer to the entire cathedral.

On Monday, they gave us the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), a tool that lets an AI transact on our behalf. Most of the analysis I saw focused on this single tool and audience size. It was like analyzing the engineering of a new engine without asking what kind of vehicle it was going into.

On Tuesday, they showed us the vehicle: the Sora social app. And it’s not a car; it’s a completely new means of transportation altogether.

The combination of a generative content feed (Sora) with an autonomous transaction layer (ACP) doesn't just "disrupt the funnel." It makes the very idea of a funnel obsolete. It represents the Great Collapse of the customer journey.

Think about the old way:

1. See an ad for a jacket on a social feed.

2. Click a link to a website.

3. Scroll through product photos.

4. Read reviews.

5. Add to cart.

6. Enter payment and shipping. A journey of minutes, hours, or even days.

Now, consider the new reality:

1. See an AI-generated video in your Sora feed of someone who looks like you, in a place that looks like your neighborhood, wearing a jacket. You ask the AI, "Put me in that video and let me see the jacket from the back." It does. You say, "I like it. Buy it for me."

The journey from Discovery to Purchase is now seven seconds long.

This isn't a new competitor to Shopify or TikTok. It's a fundamentally new physics for commerce. The brands that will win in this new world aren't the ones with the best checkout flow or the most viral social media manager.

They will be the ones who understand how to exist inside that seven-second loop.

Of course, the real hurdles aren't technological anymore. They are human. Trust, data privacy, product prioritization, and the looming question of regulation are the new battlegrounds. Will we allow a single entity to become our inspiration, our advisor, and our wallet?

That's the real question. Because the technology is already here. The cathedral has already fallen. We just have to decide what to build in its place.