In partnership with
The Future of Shopping? AI + Actual Humans.
AI has changed how consumers shop by speeding up research. But one thing hasn’t changed: shoppers still trust people more than AI.
Levanta’s new Affiliate 3.0 Consumer Report reveals a major shift in how shoppers blend AI tools with human influence. Consumers use AI to explore options, but when it comes time to buy, they still turn to creators, communities, and real experiences to validate their decisions.
The data shows:
Only 10% of shoppers buy through AI-recommended links
87% discover products through creators, blogs, or communities they trust
Human sources like reviews and creators rank higher in trust than AI recommendations
The most effective brands are combining AI discovery with authentic human influence to drive measurable conversions.
Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified by it.
Intent Is the New Access Key
For decades, we treated security like basic Algebra I.
Nothing complicated — just a simple equation with variables on the left and on the right. And our job was to keep everything balanced based on the information we had.
Historically, we always knew the same four variables:
Who the user was
What they were trying to access
When they were accessing it
How they were doing it
We built entire access models around these four knowns. But there was always one variable missing — the one we could never reliably measure:
Why.
And because we couldn’t determine why someone needed access, we built systems that tried to guess the answer for us.
Those guesses turned into:
Roles
Groups
Entitlement bundles
Access profiles
Roles were never about “least privilege.” Roles were our attempt to predict intent at scale. And like most predictions, especially in complex systems, they were right until they weren’t.
People changed jobs.
Processes evolved.
Teams restructured.
New tools appeared.
Old tools stuck around.
Intent changed faster than our access models ever could, and that mismatch is exactly why organizations ended up with overprivileged accounts, access creep, layers of accumulated permissions, and entitlements nobody remembered granting in the first place. Access models aged like old infrastructure—not because teams were bad at governance, but because they were operating without a fundamental variable in the equation.
Instead of front-loading permissions for every possible future scenario, we authorize the current scenario.Identity might still be the new perimeter — but intent is the new access key
Why This Matters Now
AI didn’t just upgrade the stack. AI rewrote what’s possible. For the first time ever, we don’t have to guess why someone needs access. They can tell us — in natural language — and the system can translate that intent into the exact permissions needed to complete the task.
No more guessing. No more overbuilding. No more roles that age like milk. No more access accumulation because “they might need it later.” Security becomes more accurate, more adaptive, and far more rational. It stops being brittle and stops relying on rigid, pre-defined structures that can’t keep up with how people actually work.
This Isn’t the Future — It’s the Pivot Point
Intent-Based Security isn’t another framework to add to the alphabet soup. It’s a recognition that the missing variable has finally been captured — and once you have it, the entire system changes.We spent decades solving the access equation with incomplete information.Now, for the first time, we can balance the equation correctly.
Identity is the perimeter.
But intent?
Intent is the new access key.