Always Leave Them Wanting
The hook, the handoff, and what happens when AI closes the loop for you.
It’s been a few months since my last issue. My dad passed in May. He was my most faithful reader, always the first to tell me the piece was great, and always quick to add that he wasn’t surprised.
Ask an AI to write something, and it used to just write it. A full answer, beginning to end, delivered. Now it pauses mid-thought and asks: “Would you like me to continue?” Or it finishes a list and offers: “I can go deeper on any of these.” Every session ends with an open door, a small invitation to stay just a little longer.
Those prompts are not a limitation. They are a business decision. The tease is the product.
Here’s why: what these platforms are optimizing for is not your satisfaction. It’s your return. Monthly active users. Time in the loop. Every “would you like me to continue?” is engineered to keep you engaged, which keeps you generating data, which makes the product stickier, which justifies the subscription. Nir Eyal, who literally wrote the book on this, calls it the hook model. Social media built an entire economy on it. AI is running the same play, dressed up as helpfulness.
I spent a lot of years thinking about the opposite problem.
When I started out, fashion magazines treated purchase information as somehow beneath them. You might see a stunning Valentino gown on the page, credited to the designer, the fabric, the model, the photographer. What you would not see is where to buy it, what it cost, or how to get it. That was considered vulgar. The aspiration was the point. The follow-through was someone else’s job.
InStyle was the first major fashion and beauty publication to put pricing, 1-800 numbers, and websites right there in the caption, next to the designer credit and the fabrication note. It was revolutionary enough that it spawned an entire subcategory of imitators — publications so nakedly focused on the transaction that they earned the name “magalogs.” I say that with some affection. I ran one. Cargo, my first magazine as Editor-in-Chief, was proudly in that tradition. A few years later I became EIC of InStyle, which had pioneered the whole idea before magalogs even existed. The point, at both, was never aspiration alone. It was inspiration plus information. Get them excited, then get them there.
The principle behind it was simple: if you created the desire, you own the follow-through. Never leave the reader alone on the page.
Which is why I find it so fascinating that AI, the most powerful editorial engine ever built, has landed on a completely different philosophy.
And it just got more complicated. Because agentic AI is already handling the follow-through. We are in a world where AI does not just recommend the moisturizer, it buys it. Does not just suggest a restaurant, it makes the reservation. In January, Google’s CEO announced the Universal Commerce Protocol at the National Retail Federation conference, effectively marking the official arrival of AI-completed purchases. Bain reports that AI already accounts for up to a quarter of referral traffic for some retailers. The transaction is no longer a handoff from content to consumer. It is happening automatically, invisibly, before the reader even thinks to act.
So the question for brands and marketers shifts. It is no longer just: are we completing the journey or leaving them wanting? It becomes: what is our role when someone else closes the loop?
I don’t think there is one answer. But here is how I am starting to think about it.
Complete when the transaction is the point. If someone is in buying mode, get them there cleanly. No mystery, no open loops. That means clear pricing, obvious next steps, and product information structured so an AI agent can find and act on it. A purchase that feels effortless is still a brand experience.
Leave them wanting when the relationship is the point. The brands I admire most understand that a customer who leaves slightly more curious than when they arrived is a customer who comes back. Not out of frustration, but out of genuine interest. That means giving them something to think about: a point of view, a story, a reason to return that has nothing to do with a transaction. There is a difference between an open loop that irritates and one that intrigues. The best brand experiences know how to create the latter.
And know which one you are doing. Most brands are doing one when they mean to do the other, or attempting both at the same time and achieving neither.
A few questions worth asking your team:
Is the person engaging with this content already in a buying mindset, or are they still forming one?
What does success look like here: a completed transaction, or a deeper relationship with the brand?
If someone walks away without taking action, is that a failure or is it fine?
Are we creating desire and then handing them off to someone else to close it, or are we seeing it through ourselves?
Which leaves me with the question I can’t stop turning over: once an AI agent handles the transaction for your customer, what makes them come back to you specifically? What do you own that the agent doesn’t?
Check out next week’s issue if you want to hear more ;)