AI Is Becoming a Key Trusted Advisor
For most of the last twenty years, reputation work has been about visibility. Make sure the right facts, the right rankings, and the right proof points show up when somebody searches your name. Be on the list. Make sure your preferred content sits at the top of it. That was the job.
What I'm realizing - and what we're starting to see in our own pipeline - is that AI is quietly changing the question being asked.
People don't ask AI "what's the best hotel in Puerto Vallarta." They tell it a story. "It's me and my wife, this is the occasion, we're going in June, we want this kind of feeling." They're not asking to be handed a list. They're asking the model to match their narrative to a brand's narrative.
That's a different game.
In the last few weeks, five or six of our own leads have come directly out of AI conversations. The clients who shared their chats with us showed the same pattern every time: they describe a situation, ask the model to match them with something that fits, and then keep refining. "Does this map to this? Does this overlap with that?" It's multi-dimensional, it's iterative, and it feels deeply human.
The implication for PR and Comms is significant. "We won X. We were ranked Y. We are the top of Z." Those are facts. They are not a narrative. A narrative is what people are saying about you across the channels that matter, and the ideas that come to mind when your name comes up.
The goal of our work has always been to get a trusted advisor to recommend you to the right people. What's changed is who that trusted advisor is. Increasingly, it's an AI - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity - and the brands that get mentioned in those conversations will be the ones whose narrative is rich enough, consistent enough, and personal enough to map onto a real human's situation.
That is the conversation we want to have on May 20.
We're co-hosting a virtual town hall with CommPRO, and Fay Shapiro has pulled together a remarkable group of agency leaders, in-house comms heads, and innovators. The honest reason we're doing this: we want to listen. We want to hear what you are seeing in your own work, what is surprising you, and where you think this is going.
