Your brand is no longer defined solely by what you say about yourself. Increasingly, it is defined by the answers AI gives when someone asks about you.
That simple but profound shift lies at the heart of The Answer Economy, the forthcoming book by Pete Blackshaw, entrepreneur, founder of BrandRank.ai, and former Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé.
As AI assistants and agents become increasingly influential in how people discover information, evaluate products and make decisions, organisations face a new communications challenge. It’s no longer enough to tell your story well. Your organisation also needs to be accurately understood by the AI systems that increasingly act as intermediaries between brands and the people they serve.
In this FIR Interview, Pete joins Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz to discuss why AI should be viewed less as another marketing channel and more as an auditor of organisational credibility. Together, they explore why trust, transparency and evidence are becoming more important than marketing claims, how different AI models develop different perspectives on brands, why communicators need to think beyond traditional search optimisation, and what organisations can do today to prepare for an increasingly agent-driven future.
For communicators, the implications are profound. Success in the answer economy won’t depend on producing more content. It will depend on whether an organisation has earned the evidence, transparency and trust that AI systems increasingly use to evaluate every claim it makes.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why Pete believes AI is becoming an auditor of organisational credibility rather than simply another information retrieval tool.What he means by the idea that “your brand is as strong as its answers.”Why evidence increasingly matters more than messaging in an AI-driven world.The concept of a “book of truth” and why organisations need to make trusted information easier for AI systems to understand.How and why ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and other AI models can develop different perspectives on the same brand.Whether communicators need to understand AI “worldviews” as well as human audiences.Why corporate communications could become one of the most strategically important functions in the age of AI.How organisations should prepare for AI-generated reputation challenges and new governance responsibilities.What AI agents could mean for marketing, purchasing decisions and brand influence.Pete’s advice for communication professionals on becoming “answer ready.”About Pete Blackshaw
Pete Blackshaw is founder and CEO of BrandRank.ai, an AI visibility and brand intelligence platform that helps organisations understand how AI answer engines evaluate brands.
A two-time technology entrepreneur, Pete previously founded PlanetFeedback, one of the earliest consumer feedback platforms, which was acquired by Nielsen, where he later served as a senior executive. He also established Procter & Gamble’s first interactive marketing team before spending nine years as Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé, leading the company’s worldwide digital transformation initiatives.
Throughout his career, Pete has focused on the intersection of consumer trust, digital communication and brand reputation. His forthcoming book, *The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future*, published in September 2026, draws together more than two decades of experience helping organisations navigate the evolving relationship between consumers, brands and digital technology.
Resources
Pete Blackshaw on LinkedInBrandRank.aiThe book: The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s FuturePete’s The Answer Economy newsletterSearch previous FIR interviews with Pete Blackshaw (2005, 2007 and 2009) on the FIR archive site.Transcript
A transcript of this conversation follows, lightly edited for clarity and length.
Hi everybody and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz.
And we are thrilled to have Pete Blackshaw back with us. Pete, this is your fourth appearance, I believe, on FIR. And it’s been a while. I think is what? It was 2009, I think, was the last time. But it’s great to have you back. I’ve been following you ever since then. Certainly read your content on LinkedIn and subscribe to your newsletter. So very happy.
Anxious to have this conversation and the reason we reached out to bring you back on FIR interviews is because of some research that you have been doing for a couple of years that has resulted in quite a LinkedIn post and a new book coming out in September. tell us about all this and yourself.
Yeah, sure. Well, I’m a native Californian who’s here in kind of adopted Cincinnati as my is my home. I have kind of had a mix of is my s you know, two time startup founder, first one I sold to Nielsen, which was in that space that you and I were talking about, you know, viral complaints and early social media. And and I’ve always been, you know, if there’s any through line across my career, I’d say it’s
The consumer meets trust meets digital. And both of the books that I’ve written kind of cover that. But in addition to being a startup founder, I’ve also worked in a large lot of the large, you know, multinational corporations, you know, many of whom I’m, you know, the types of companies I’m selling to. So I co founded P and G’s first interactive marketing team. Remember when we called it that back then? I
was a senior executive at Nielsen after I we sold my first startup to them. And then most significantly I spent nine years at in Switzerland as the global head of digital for Nestle. And ironically that kind of came in the wake of a a bit of a crisis that we all remember, you know, with Greenpeace, where they kind of recruited me in to kind of help to address all of that. And then I did a five year stint
after Switzerland was recruited by P and G and Kroger and some of the Cincinnati companies to launch a startup accelerator and did a little bit of work in venture capital. But I’ve loved being back in the startup world and yeah, looking forward to the conversation.
Terrific. So we should to kind of warm us up. I’ve got a question to start with that is a very, very simple one, actually, Pete. when I was looking into the the book that you’re publishing and looking at the content, what you’re covering and all that stuff, I saw I saw some huge kind of resonance with what we talk about in FIR. And there’s a lot of overlap, which I which I found really, really exciting because that that’ll fuel some of what we’re gonna talk about today, I think. But
First question, which is kind of a framing question. You’ve been talking about consumer trust and digital influence since the early social media era, if not earlier than that even. So this question this is my question. What feels genuinely different about this AI moment compared with previous platform shifts?
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think what’s fundamentally different this time is
Is accountability. You know, I often say that, you know, the big aha for me when I quit my last job to launch brand rank, my current startup, is that I was shortly after Chat GBT came out, kids were asleep, we were skiing, and I was just doing what I typically do, what I’m sure you guys do all the time, just exercising my curiosity. And then typing in things into ChatGBT like, can Nestle be trusted? Are Pampers diapers really sustainable?
And it dawned on me within seconds that this medium that is evolving is the world’s greatest BS detector. And and we started to see some of the platforms are really on the extreme side of that, like anthropic cloud, where you just can’t throw spinner slogans at them. They just kind of cut through it. And that was like the big unlock for me. It’s like, my gosh, this is not only gonna become a new purchase funnel.
This is going to become really tricky terrain for marketers that are used to controlling the message, managing the spin, maybe getting away with overflated claims. And and I was like, my gosh, I gotta measure this. Someone’s gonna have to create like a Nielsen ratings of what these answer engines say. And I really wanted to focus. I know there’s a lot of players that are out there doing.
you know, AEO or GEO, but I really wanted to focus on the hard issues, like, my gosh, are brands going to be held more accountable for sustainability? Are these very sophisticated LLMs going to just digest an entire supply chain and either say thumbs up or thumbs down? Are, you know, and and maybe and and maybe, just maybe, will brands finally be forced to do some of the things that you all three of us have been talking about across the four sessions.
Which is, are they finally gonna kind of start responding to feedback? Are they gonna start inviting questions? Are they gonna start acting more with empathy? Because remember, digital started there. Digital started, we called it interactive. And the whole promise was like, we’re gonna be able to answer questions for consumers. They’re gonna come to us. And I remember when I started interactive marketing at PNG, that was like the North Star. And then we kind of moved into targeted advertising at scale.
We got very programmatic, we got digital, we kind of forgot about the consumer in control. And now I think that’s really waking up. However, one of the things I say in my book is
Listen, we totally messed up search two point And I’ve talked to the folks that wrote books about that, like John Battel, or like, my gosh, that quickly became a tragedy of the commons. Nobody could tell the difference between organic and paid and and even when it moved to mobile. And we as an industry are gonna have to decide like, do we want to preserve this incredible gift to consumers? And the things that are good for consumers are also really good for business, where they’re getting, you know.
reliable, trusted, you know, answers that are just solving like everything for them. Or do we want to pollute the commons by moving too aggressively the paid advertising? Do we want to dance in the gray zone? And so the book is kind of a the answer economy is this true shift and we have got to get in front of it.
To make sure that it is nurtured in the right way. And the timing couldn’t have been better because just last week, you know, all the folks from OpenAI are running all over cons trying to grab ad dollars. And that’s that’s good. You need, you know, you need an advertising model, but marketers have a historic tendency of dancing in the gray zone. And I just think we need to really get in front of it. And that’s like the heart and soul of the answer economy. We are in a world where the brands that actually answer the questions win. It’s such a basic
pre-digital concept that now is kind of getting extra life. Brands that tell the truth win. Why? Because the answer engines kind of call your BS. you know, so so that’s kind of the heart of what I’m getting into. And I just think it’s a really important conversation. And I’m hoping that it dusts off some of these conversations that we had in the past that maybe just were too damn early.
Yeah, I remember those days, what, around 2004, when everybody was talking about how we were now going to have brands and consumers engaged in conversation and this was going to change everything and really didn’t. But Pete, you outlined this prescription of making everything sourced, timestamped, structured, LLM findable. that’s good hygiene for sure. but you’re describing how to feed the model, the inputs it
reward. So if a brand does this well enough, hasn’t it just learned to pass Claude rather than actually be trustworthy? I mean, how how would how would Claude or or you tell the difference between a brand with real substance and a brand with just a really great brand book of truth?
Yeah, well, I think a lot of that goes hand in hand if you do it right. And again, you know, there’s a difference between a verified, trustworthy book of truth and marketing. I mean, they’re not the same thing. And so what I’ve learned, you know, I’ve I’ve been at this for two years, have worked with about 80 of the world’s top brands, big brands that you know that really, you know, have really challenging issues.
In fact, the whole business model started on sustainability, you know, Nestle Canada. And I they kind of invited me in for Earth Day. And we really took a hard look at, okay, will Nestle be rewarded or punished? And the good news is that they were severely rewarded. But there are ways where you need to market. I and maybe not the word market is the wrong term. You need to make your the good work that you’re doing.
Discoverable. So for example, I have found that a lot of the companies that I’ve worked with are getting lower sustainability scores than they deserve. You know, if you look at their science and their commitments, it’s actually pretty damn good. However, they’re so backwards on digital strategy that they put all of their science in PDFs, which LLMs can’t read. And we call that content liquidity. So there’s it’s not about manipulation. It’s a lot of it is like about getting the credit that you’re due. Now, I say that.
I don’t want to sound naive with that because I realize there’s a whole industry that’s mushrooming around me that’s all about manipulation and gaming and whatever it takes to kind of get credit you probably don’t deserve. I’m not playing that game. I think there is so much upside for companies that are actually already doing good things, have products that actually work, have credible supply chains, treat their employees well, that aren’t getting the credit they deserve. And I like those.
Challenges and we’ve been able to significantly move the needle with a lot of big companies just by making sure that they load up their FAQs with their sustainability commitments that are already verified by third parties or by these LLMs are very biased towards trust signals. And so we’ve always known that quality seals, BBB, you know, fair trade,
Good housekeeping, those have always mattered, but they’re really important to the LLMs. Because if you think about what’s happening right now,
They’re in a arms race to be the single source of truth. And so they are very, very biased towards trust signals. There’s a lot of misinformation out in the marketplace that everybody goes to Reddit first. That’s not true at all. They go to the brand websites first because they know those are places where content is typically vetted, reviewed by lawyers. Brands kind of are close to their stuff and they look at that. And then if they don’t have what they want, then they’ll go to other sources.
So what marketers do, what we do is we focus on three simple metrics. And I try to, yeah, I think a lot of us in the industry are just throwing too much vernacular, too many metrics. And I try to keep it really simple. Visibility. Are you visible? So what’s the best podcast show that has to do with, you know, you know, public relations or crisis? I suspect you would probably show up. If not, then I may become your digital coach to make sure you do.
You know, vulnerability is the second one, which is how do you show up? And it’s different than sentiment because I often say the visibility gets you seen, vulnerability gets you remembered. And I think companies underestimate the degree to which you can be visible, but in a very negative context. And a good pre-AI example is that when I was running digital at Nestle, Wikipedia was a big pain in the butt because you type in
Nestle into Wikipedia and like 40% of the entry had to do with the company’s history with activist. And so it was like the gift that kept on punishing all the time. And so you know, A and and AI kind of compounds that it’s almost like you can’t. so that gets into misinformation, hallucination, and then what I call brand alignment, which is do the LLMs fundamentally agree with the promise that you’re putting out there on your website, your Amazon page, your TV ads?
And this is very, very humbling. Sometimes executives throw chairs at me, but that’s where the big unlock takes place. And the third area is readiness. Do you head out and market to algorithms? and then we focus on three buckets. You know, availability, do you even have available content that algorithms can read? clarity, do you speak in a consumer language? And right now, at least, they’re very biased towards conversational vernacular, which I think is good. And then the third one is depth, where
You have to have substance, the third party seals, the the validation. And so I think right now the criteria they’re using is good for the consumer, because I think it means a consumer’s more likely to get a good and a trusted response. And I think for the good actors out there that actually really that don’t BS and actually live up to their claims, I think they’re benefiting as well. but it’s gonna be very tricky environment where you’re gonna have lot of bad actors that don’t deserve to be at the top. They’re gonna
fight the bloody hell to get to the top. And there’s going to be a million vendors out there kind of say, we will get you to the top. And so it’ll be interesting. But that’s why I think we have to really think about like what this is our this is our moment right now. Like what type of digital space do we want? We messed up the previous ones. We’re 25 years into us. We still are like deluged with spam. My entire phone is loaded with artificial voices pitching me on stuff. None of them are real. And
So now we’ve got this chance to like really nurture something special. Can we do it? I don’t know.
It’s good one. It’s a good one. Pete, one thing that really struck me is how you describe AI as an auditor rather than simply an information retrieval system. So you say, for instance, AI answer engines are now the auditors of brand credibility. We’ve talked a lot on FIR about organizations needing a human in the loop for AI. But and indeed, there are examples that are large, highly visible, very prominent of organizations who’ve really screwed up on that area.
by not having a human in the loop. But what you’re suggesting, I think, is almost the reverse. AI is now putting organizations themselves in the loop, constantly evaluating whether their behavior matches their claims. Is that how you see it?
Yeah, no, it no exactly. I think the and I think there’s a number of different yeah, so what we’ll do, it’s it’s my favorite part of the model. It’s a little bit evil, but but it really is crazy insightful to clients. So we’ll take your brand promise, and every company has one, and then we’ll take like the top 10 comp claims. Oftentimes the things that you you’re sending out to the marketplace or the analyst, and we will kind of have each of the LLMs interrogate.
those claims. And then we’ll come up with scores one to ten. And it’s absolutely fascinating. And this is the ultimate unlock in understanding how the algorithm thinks. Like, you know, and and again in the book I get into all these different segments, like how does Claude think? How does Grot think? I mean, you know, right now at least, Claude is like the student radical who just is like doesn’t believe the man is like
y they’re just not gonna believe marketing whatsoever. And so I did a brand alignment test on our dashboard with Amazon. I’ve got a dashboard with Amazon. I can send it to you afterwards where I had Amazon has this statement like Earth’s most consumer centric company and then you know blah blah blah. And then I had the LLMs interrogate it and you know who gave it the lowest score? It was Claude. Claude gave it like a four out of ten.
And then they got into all these specifics about why they simply don’t measure up. Now, the irony and the beauty of that is that, you know, Amazon is a huge partner with Claude. In fact, Claude is what undergirds Rufus or Alexa for shopping. I think Amazon’s even put some money into Claude. But, you know, this is like the beautiful irony of these, of these crazy systems. They’re kind of holding everyone accountable. And I’m like,
And what I’ve been telling brands lately is that, you know, you got to be really careful before you spend a ton of money on paid advertising, where, you know, people are just one question away from calling your BS. and then the other thing that I think is getting really tricky, and you’ll love this. One of the things that I’ve been doing lately is really telling.
Corporate communications teams, CEOs, boardrooms design for Clyde, because this is one platform that continues to grow and influence.
They act like a college radical and they are absolutely loved for better or worse by journalists, NGOs, determined detractors, yeah, financial analysts. And so I always say, like, if you can pass the Claude test, you’re probably in a good place. And I’ve actually done briefings with clients before earnings calls where I’ve literally looked at the data from like Claude, where they’re just like, no, we don’t believe it. We don’t believe it.
And they’ve almost become practice fodder to kind of figure out how do you really but the point is that yeah, we’re in this tricky environment where you got to be really accountable for what you say because these very, very smart algorithms are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t necessarily agree with you. And marketers have never lived with that type of accountability. I mean, it’s like Spin City, and I’m I’ve been part of that. And so I do think, yeah, the marketers that really have superior products can back their claims.
But they’re also gonna have to think about all these other areas that are gonna creep into the algorithmic judgment. Like I do think you talked about human in a loop, and you had a lot of CEOs. You know, you have Mark Pritchard was talking about that at Khan. I mean, I think everyone’s gonna be talking that, but these algorithms will kind of know whether you’ve completely sold everybody out to AI or whether you’ve kind of kept a blend. And I think some purchase behavior is gonna be based on that.
I mean, I could I could see I could see frustrated teenagers that are like already skeptical about AI creating shopping tools that say, I’m only gonna buy from companies that don’t go go too far on AI. It’s not difficult to hack, you know, on on one of the vibe coding tools.
Pete, you out you outlined the the concept of a brand book of truth, mentioned that a few minutes ago, and I’d I’d I’d like you to sort of articulate what that is. But if every brand builds one and f and floods the zone with sourced timestamped LLM findable proof, does does Claude’s discernment survive that or do you end up in an arms race where the brands with the biggest content budgets win again? And
That’s the dynamic that that you’re saying is dead.
Yeah, I do. I think a lot of the listen, I think some of the LLMs will submit to the chaos that you described. But I do think yeah, I think I think these, you know, it’s interesting because Claude is not as dependent on a paid ad model or getting all their money from subscriptions. So I think the ones that’ll get really trickier are are open AI and some of the other, you know, Google’s already a little bit fuzzy.
but they’re still, you know, wowing consumers with, you know, you know, AI overviews. But yeah, they’re just gonna have to be really careful about how they they blend. But I think it’s, you know, it’s a fair point. But I do think that you know, when I talk about book of truth, it’s not just the marketing slogans, it’s like how the product’s made. It is literally, is it truly superior and can you verify that?
You know, yeah, how do you stack up versus competition? Who are the people behind the brand? What’s the supply chain behind the brand? They’re kind of looking for all those different ingredients, even even for the purpose of like Amazon. I mean, this stuff is so real. I just put out a note to my clients this morning. I put a little blurb on LinkedIn as well, but
Amazon Prime Day was really insightful. I didn’t go, I couldn’t, I didn’t go to con last year, but I did stay glued for four days straight on Prime Day. And it was probably the biggest conversational boost we’ve seen in the history of commerce. Almost every single, you know, now it’s like every product you look at is surrounded by questions. I mean, what the hell’s going on? And then a lot of the you know, I’ve saw a lot of advertising trying to work into that. But on that platform, you can go in there and say, is this product sustainable or should I buy sustainable products?
Or should I I mean in and it’ll really give you very, very deep perspective before they start shoving products your way. And that is an absolute game changer. And so and I do think like the smart retailers will want to make sure that that the consumer kind of gets what they need. So so I may be, you know, long way of saying I’m optimistic. Where where it can get scary, you know, is if where everything got out of whack.
before was it Google was a monopoly and they had like 90% market share screw they can do whatever they want. I do think because you’ve got genuine competition, there is this real effort to like provide maximum value to the consumer. And that’s why I say we’re in a moment. You know, the answer economy is a moment. Either we’re gonna screw it up like we did before, or we’re gonna kind of turn it into a true win-win for consumers and business alike. But it’ll take some work to do that right.
Interesting that is. I’ve been thinking when I listen to what you’re saying, Pete, a question I need to I I’m really curious about this because it I’ve been asking myself this question as I try to figure out where we’re at with all of this. What do you think? Could two different AI models, whether it’s Claude and ChatGPT or any any two, develop materially different views of the same company, the same brand?
What will that look like, do you think?
it I I do this every day for clients. I we literally kind of give them we filter them through all the major LLMs, you know, from ChatGBT to Deep Seat to Perplexity and Grok. They all have different personalities. It’s no different than going after influencers, right? And influencers kind of, you know, they beat to different drummers. And so and and again, I would say Claude is the extreme librarian. They just don’t like marketing BS. They kind of just focus on the facts.
The credentialing, the science. you know, Grok is almost like hard to predict. And they do lean on a lot of the former tweets that kind of fall into it. but they are a little bit, they’re definitely they almost like personify not the politics of Elon Musk, but definitely like the almost like the unpredictable side of him and what you see. It’s like a different personality.
Gemini still, you know, you know, it’s it’s you know, the the it depends on if you’re looking at Gemini AI overviews. I mean, they all have different thinking processes in terms of the way they synthesize data, but absolutely, and I would say the new, you know, just in the same way that like a PR term might you might say we gotta we’ve gotta figure out how to break through the New York Times, the Financial Times.
And so and so you gotta think the same way. It’s like they they they think differently, they source differently. And so this is I spent the whole weekend doing this fascinating source analysis where I looked at, you know, tens of thousands of prompts and then I analyzed the sources and they have different favorites. And just recently the New York Times is finally starting to to creep into open AI, which does start to impact the character of their output.
You know, Claude tends to look a little bit more seriously at consumer reports than Joe’s review site. And so you have to know this. I mean, this is like the new PR. This is like the new influencer management. If you do not know how these LLMs think, if you don’t know what their brand archetype is, if you don’t know what they eat for breakfast from a content perspective, you’re not on top of what your client needs, in my view.
I have a follow up to that question. Does does does this mean a brand needs to have a message strategy for every LLM or is there a through line that satisfies them all?
Know if they have to have different messages, but they need to be very attentive to how they are filtered. I do think all the LLMs, like for example, in my analysis this weekend, they all pay a lot of attention to your brand website. Far more than I think the media has let on. And I know because I’ve just run like a million audits and I see this all the time. And so
Brands have a lot of leverage in influencing the story, especially when there’s bad information out there and the brand website or the own media is in a position to kind of correct the record. And we’ve done some really interesting work around crisis or recalls where some brands have been able to actually train the LLMs within 12, 24 hours based on getting that right information in there. But but yeah, I mean you’ve got
So I don’t think brands need to overcustomized. I think they need to be very, you know. I mean, if I were, you know, if I were heading corporate communications today, I would probably say, yeah, there’s some that I would focus on the ones that are most critical. You know, and the the ones that are most critical often have also tend to be the most loved by other influencers.
that we care about, like journalists and NGOs and the like. And so, so that’s where I would kind of put the focus on in that. Now, now that said, they’re all going to be introducing, with the exception of Claude, advertising models. And so those will be micro opportunities to influence. And we saw, you know, a lot of that, you know, OpenAI is already doing a lot of that. And there’s gonna be, you’re gonna have they’re gonna have to study like, you know,
Is it appropriate to advertise? I do have a strong point of view there that if you have high vulnerability, you shouldn’t advertise. If you have low vulnerability but low visibility, I’d say, yeah, spend all the money you want on advertising. But brands are gonna have to be really sensitive about they’re gonna have to learn the art of not making things worse. And I don’t think brands, I mean, again, going back to the conversations that we’ve had for 20 years, brands don’t know how to manage conversations. I mean, they’re like, I mean, they’re like.
Most brands are maybe are barely there on like the first question. But in the answer economy, I have this term that I use in the book called ask through, not click-through. Click through is like if I can just get that one click. You and I know we’re we’re using these tools all the time. It’s a sequence of questions. You go in there with a health query, and it’s like multiple. And every single additional question that’s satisfied that gets you further down the sail.
Or further down the path of happiness. And like brands don’t know how to do that at all. and so, but the the second you submit to these ad models where you’re sitting right in the middle of the prompt, you almost have to figure that you always have to know that stuff. So this is gonna be really tricky. It’s not gonna be one of those push a button kind of get media. You know, there’s gonna be a whole accountability that comes with it when you’re kind of in the answer stream.
Hmm. Let’s I let me talk go back to I I guess something we discussed just a short while ago. In fact, Shel’s question about should brands ever tailor themselves differently for different models, which I if I understood you right, Pete, you basically say that’s ultimately a dead end, not really what what what they should be doing. So I’m thinking you mentioned Claude hates marketing BS or corporate spin or whatever whatever it might be.
and you describe the models like Claude or like Grok, etc., almost as having editorial personalities or or value systems. But that’s fascinating, I think, because I’ve sometimes questioned that myself, because organizations, brand managers have spent years trying to create one consistent narrative about their brand or or their organization. So I think
The question I had originally was worded are we, in other words of question. I think it’s more like we are as opposed to are we, which is entering a world where communicators have to understand not just audiences, but different AI worldviews. And I think it’s it it is interesting. my experience in this is not deliberate trying to get an answer to this, but I use myself usually a mixture between Claude and Chat GPT. So I I alternate between the two.
Claude is more rounded and rich because I fed it with so much information about who I am, a lot more than ChatGPT has. That I I I’m okay with I’m literally asking vague questions a lot of the time, and it never disappoints my experience so far. Chat GPT needs a little bit more nurturing in that regard, although it does surprise me at times with the depth of answers I get to some things when I’m doing research. So I guess I I
confuse myself even because I have no idea what the answer to this is. But I think it is something communicators should think about. Those who haven’t settled on one, you know, notwithstanding the topic Shawn and I’ve talked about recently where, you know, shadow AI is is growing like crazy in companies as people use their own thing, ignore what the what the company says. So it what what would you what would your advice be to communicators in this earth? Yeah.
No, it this is the new this is the new you’re knowing it. I mean, this is the new influencer
marketing, right? That’s always been at the core of like issues management and communication and and you know, you have to know your influencer, you have to know their hot buttons, you have to know their biases, you gotta know you know, how they evolve and there is a lot of evolution and and again this is where I think we may find a year from now that hey, you know.
They’re patty cakes with brands because they want the ad dollars. Who knows? I don’t know. But but yeah, and so and brands need to think this through. And I didn’t want you to think you made the comment about dead end. I I obsess with the nuances of the platforms, but I’m not convinced brands need to over tailor the message to different…
I again I think there’s a few where they gotta be really careful about the BS factor, like anthropic, where it’s just they just gotta make sure that their claims can hold water with these judges and these filters that are processing their their information. And I think I really think brands are just they’re not ready. In fact, what I’ve concluded is that across all the major, you know, Fortune 1000 companies, they’re only like 20% AI ready.
I mean, the most obvious thing is, you know, and sometimes companies get, you know, annoyed with me. And I have been doing this all the way back from my plan of feedback days, but like most companies cannot answer questions. I mean, you can go go to your after this podcast, go to your favorite brands and like type in a really basic question, like, how do I use the product? What’s in the product? Is it sustainable? But 90% of the time they’re gonna slap you in the face with a pop-up ad. They’re not gonna, they’re either gonna fire a blank.
Or they’re gonna answer something completely differently. Like brands don’t know how to do this. In the last 25 years of digital, the most basic human need of interactivity, I want to question brands can’t do it, including the big ones. They get all the awards and spend all the money. It’s crazy. And there’s a lot of people on the inside that are like, hey, that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t pay out. Or consumer services was always considered a non-strategic call cost center.
But again, I’m sort of saying the answer economy, that’s the new purchase funnel. Like this is the new skill that we need to learn. So it’s not only how to influence the algorithms, it’s almost like how do we fundamentally change our mindset where we’re more receivers of intent. And then we have to use that as the new engagement. You know, to some extent, when someone casts Amazon’s CEO had a great quote that everybody in marketing should put on their forehead, where he basically said it was so beautifully simple.
He was doing an earnings call and he’s talking about the progress of Amazon Rufus, which I think at that time was already generating like $10 billion in incremental sales. And he said, Hey, it’s pretty simple. Every consumer that asks one question is 60% more likely to buy. And this is almost like the North Star that brands have always been looking for in terms of engagement, right? A click half the time you’re trying to get rid of the brand, right? So get out of my face. A question is like a big lean in.
Where if you can’t convert that. And so I think brands need to understand that, like, you know, inviting the consumer to ask a question, making the website more receptive to questions, not only wins with the consumer, but it builds your database to feed LLMs. You know, because where brands are underrepresented in all the LLMs, if they that book of truth is partly an inventory issue. It’s like you have to have enough.
Scenarios, you know, how to use the product, what’s it made of, blah, blah, blah, to even start to market the algorithms. And brands don’t do that. They you’re lucky if you see maybe 20 FAQs. And of course, brands could be problem solvers for like a million things if you do it right. Tech companies are very good. So I’m I I want to be careful here. Tech companies, I think, are very good. Apple has a fantastic and have for many years, pre-AI, have just
Bent over backwards to make content available when you have a challenge. And that’s why almost every app Apple question you ask through an LLM is like pretty much right. Same thing with Microsoft. I think tech companies have always been good at having a lot of FAQs and knowledge. Bigger brands that spend the big bucks on the Super Bowl are really, really, I gotta be careful what I say, have opportunities.
Pete, in in chapter nine, see, I I actually went through the book, y you argue that the next big comms crisis isn’t going to be a social media firestorm, but an AI generated answer, a brand can’t correct. because the infrastructure for rebuttal was never built. This is really interesting. I was just on a panel in Covington, Kentucky, by the way. If I’d known you were in Cincinnati, I’d have given you a call. where
We talked about pre bunking as a way to address crises, that you’ve all got all this content out there already. but y you’re saying the crisis is going to come because they haven’t done this. The con the content isn’t there to rebut what the the LLM is is saying. Can you walk me through what that crisis actually looks like and why the old crisis playbook is not gonna be effective in these circumstances?
One of the big issues that I’ve had with a lot of our top clients is about kind of crisis and governance, which is that
You know, winning with answers is a governance issue. And it’s a big reason why I’m been really hesitant to
you know, suggests that this is all about SEO 2.0 or this is something that the search manager deals with. I mean, and you know, if your brand is as strong as your answers, a lot of people are implicated. And I think where companies really struggle in crisis is figuring out who owns it and who’s accountable.
And I do think, you know, I do make a pretty strong pitch in the book that brands have really got need to get in front of this. And, you know, there is a there’s an accountability. Like the they’re they’re bullshit detectors, who’s accountable? they’re kind of saying your products aren’t made the way you claim. Who’s accountable? there’s there’s all sorts of legal liability issues, and I think we are just in the very early stages. At some point you’ll need to interview my
My co-founder Hank Hudipol, who’s doing some really breakthrough breakthrough work around hallucination and accuracy. But you’ve got states that are now filing laws that if if the answer comes out wrong, even through an LLM, you are liable. Think about that in the health zone, right? And so so who so who is responsible? Is that the marketing team? Is that so there’s a you know, I think brands need to start thinking now, and I’m having a lot of leadership meetings and summits on this topic, they’ve really got to figure out the governance area here. And, you know, and it’s one reason why we’re trying to keep the metrics relatively simple so they really have a clear eye into what’s going on. It’s a big reason why we put almost I’d say vulnerabilities is kind of at the top of the list. But let me tell you what you get if you have governance. So without naming names, yeah, we work with some brands that have had
Very, very severe crisis issues where misinformation is even from the government is kind of stirring up the pot in terms of, you know, how the answer engines. And you’ve just you’ve got to get RD to the table, you gotta get legal compliance, marketing, even the CEO, you know, they need to kind of play a critical role. And the good news is there is I’ve done a lot of boardroom discussions and
There’s a lot of heightened sensitivity when a CEO says, My daughter just typed in this and they say we’re this. And they’re like, Why the hell is that? And who’s responsible? So But yeah, these these issues are really, really tricky, and a lot of stakeholders need to come together. And and that is and I think it’ll probably be a little bit blurry in terms of who owns it. Like right now, brands have these AI
Heads of AI. I don’t know if those jobs will last very long. Sometimes you know are they gatekeepers, are they enablers? Are they just, you know, I mean AI is now kind of part of everything. So I think who owns what will be a bit fluid for the coming years.
Yeah, that’s that’s really good. I think it is. Yep. So it actually interesting Pete what you’re saying, listening listening to how you describe it it amazes me how some companies just are so off the trail with with a lot of what they need not to be in that position. They need to to truly pay attention to where this is all going. And we’ve mentioned this in a number of episodes where we could
you know, share many examples of where we see instances where that is simply not happening. so let’s talk about AI agents. Yeah. Mm.
But but in fair but in fairness, in fairness.
Let’s just put this in perspective. We’re still only what a little over three years into this. I mean, we’re up to like five billion prompts a day, and this stuff started three years ago. So yeah, companies are always gonna be slow. But the good news with this, I do feel like
There’s a feeling of a sense of urgency. Like there it’s it’s a bit of an shit moment. Like we’ve got to figure this out. And so and then, you know, how do you, you know, how do you really capitalize on this? And even it’s funny, like launching a startup, the one thing you dread is like, my gosh, it’s gonna take forever to get to get a vendor number. And we’ve had some companies that typically take like three years to get a little small startup in Cincinnati a vendor number to literally three weeks. So I do think there’s
There’s a memo, there’s a bell that’s ringing inside the organization. It’s like, shit, the purchase funnel has changed. we are really accountable. Every stock analyst is now digging up dirt on us. Or good news, through these tools, we’ve got to act. Then they’re like, Well, who owns this? Is it wait? It’s digital, right? No, well, wait, maybe it’s RD because they’ve got the most substance, you know, to kind of put to the table, but we don’t really think about them as marketing.
Or may is it sales? You know, it’s just like it’s a bit of a cluster right now, but it’s a good conversation. Companies really haven’t had this discussion in earnest for a long time. I think digital is a little is like conveniently tucked into marketing. And now you’ve got a whole different world order that companies need to think through. And it’s gonna be a really big test for like CEOs out there. Who gets it? Who you know, CEOs are gonna play a critical role in orchestrating this stuff. And
And, you know, we’ve been working with a few companies that I won’t name where the CEOs have made a massive difference and in kind of leading, you know, organizations where nobody’s really accountable for doing it to like getting organized around it.
Yeah. I’d love to hear more stories of people, you know, organizations who really are on the ball with all this because I’m getting tired of hearing all the stories about these companies who are not. They’ve the not that they’ve dropped the ball, they haven’t even grasped the ball yet. In fact, Shel and I’ve talked on a couple of episodes, two conflicting surveys. One about how CEOs are are really coming to the fore and taking control of developing AI rollouts in their in their companies.
and are providing leadership and are doing all these things. Then another survey has completely conflicting information to them. So I mean you just gotta go visit LinkedIn and you’ll see conflicts all over the place, including everyone’s got an e book they want to sell you. That’s that’s the kind of magic, magic bullet handbook.
classify it. Yeah, I’ve I’ve read all those studies too and you know, and and my view is like a lot of this is it’s is it an AI strategy or it’s something you should have been doing a while ago? So I posted something last week, you know, and you know, almost as a little bit of a counterpoint to the con lions, because I was kind of like, why don’t they ever give love or rewards or recognition to brands that just answer the boring question?
Right. At some point we’re just gonna say, God, that brand really went out of went out of their way. We should have a recognition. So I just created what I called, you know, the answer cans. And so and I started like and and I and I cited some of the companies that I wrote about in the book that and I don’t even think they use the word AI. Like, yeah, w what do you think is one of the most the best index companies on the web right now in in AI that just shows up consistently.
Well, I’ll give you a little hint. So if you ask anything related to like sustainability, like what company shows up first?
It’s like Patagonia. They’re everywhere. They’re everywhere. Now, I don’t, I doubt they even use the word AI there. You know, but they have been absolutely committed to driving radical transparency in their products, flooding their content with meaningful content. and they have been training the LLMs for years. Sephora, a brand in beauty that’s always been very
Come to the calendar and I will answer you questions. I think that that model lives in the way they approach digital as well. They are severely rewarded by the LLMs. I mentioned a few of the the the I mentioned a few of the tech companies that do that particularly well. A lot of young companies that don’t have big bucks for advertising, they are very intuitive about.
Everybody that goes on my website could be my last customer. So let’s just give them the love of knowledge, of guidance, whatever they want. They are being disproportionately benefited. In fact, one of the things that I have found is that and I work with a lot of big companies that own massive budget. I’ve consistently found that, you know, for big companies, market share under indexes, over, you know, over indexes answer share.
Which means that the younger companies are actually they’re kind of winning on answer share, partly just because they’re it’s not like that they’re trying to spike the system. They’re just wired to answering questions. And so this is where the the the thesis of the book is really simple. I’m almost trying to say this without all the buzzwords and the tech gobbledygook. It’s sort of like if you treat the consumer, you know, if you kind of
Create a bit of a Wikipedia to kind of help the consumer answer every question, you will win big time in the AI world. I have seen that correlation left and right. Instead, most brands make it really complicated. We need an AI strategy. We need an AI strategy for the AI strategy we need. They create all these damn layers. And then you go to their website and they still can’t answer a question. And so this is why it’s almost like forcing the question. It’s like, you know.
The answer economy, not the AI world, the answer economy. And so we’ll see if I’m successful or not.
All of this when I picture somebody actually doing the things that you talk about, not not from the brand perspective, but from the consumers perspective, I see them going to a chatbot and and entering a question. Sam Altman has been laser focused on the transition from conversational assistance, the chat bots, toward autonomous workflow executing agents. and he says this is a shift you’re going to see.
in the front end of Chat GPT. God knows I spend as much time in Claude Cowork as I as I spend in Claude. what is this shift toward agents, assuming all of the LLMs move in this direction, what does that do to this whole concept?
Yeah, listen, I mean, I write about it a lot in the book and you know, the the tet the subtitle is, you know, how AI agents will decide your brand’s future. yeah, so a lot’s gonna be delegated, but I don’t think it’s gonna I I think there’s a little bit of overhyping that consumers are gonna completely like delegate everything to agencies. I’m not. And and I frankly, I enjoy, you know, the ask through of asking health questions. It’s sort of like, you know, and so I don’t, you know, there are gonna be certain areas where we’re gonna be totally comfortable with like
Delegating the agents, or there are other areas where we’re just gonna wanna be more in control of it. And so, but I don’t think what I’ve said earlier.
impacts any of that. I would say that i in an agentic world, brands still need to catalog their truth and make it marketable and make it visible. And and and you could almost argue that it’s going to be more important to get your act together on marketing the algorithms. Cause here’s one of the things that’s going to be really, really tricky for brands, especially in like these industries that I’ve worked in, like consumer goods and
Food is the algorithms have a very strong bias towards store brands and private label. Now it’s not because they’re tilting the scale in their favor. It’s just that in an agentic world, think about what consumers are going to do. They’re almost going to be brand agnostic. And they say, give me good product at a good price for my family of four, right?
And they’re they might even set a spec, like it’s gotta have X percent product performance. And then the algorithms are gonna do their homework and they’re come back and they say Kirkland. And then they’re gonna be saying Kirkland, Walmart equate. Because you’re gonna find that these store brands where where the and retailers are getting really good at volunteering what their products do, even their green scores, where you know, if you if we overdelegate to agents, I do think brands are in for a really rude awakening that a lot of the
Grocery lists are full of private label. you know, where it may be the Kirkland product may be 90% of the product superiority of the comparable brand, but at like half the price. And so this is where, you know, so brands, so what brands are gonna have to do, whether they’re preparing for tough questions from consumers like us, or preparing for these agents that are gonna go looking for relevant data to kind of render a judgment, they’re still gonna have to train them.
They’re gonna have to really think about, you know, how to do that the right way. Now we may see different things evolve. Like I’ve talked a lot about the word rep website. I’m probably gonna write a column that suggests that maybe we need a new name called, you know, like a an inventory locker that’s kind of like very, very agent, agent, agent friendly. But but yeah, I think I think brands, yeah, everybody’s waxing poet have got agents, but I keep reminding brands like careful what you ask for on this one.
because you are not prepared and you are going to be really, really surprised at what these agents are recommending. And you’re going to probably lose even more control. So brands are going to have to really think about that one carefully.
So to that point then, if AI agents increasingly recommend products, services, suppliers, even employers, companies to work for, for instance, what happens to traditional brand marketing?
Well, think it’s gonna have to wrap around a lot of that. I mean these some of you know, listen, I mean branding has always been in the you know, content marketing’s been a big thing well before AI, but they will have to, you know, keep doing some of that, but they may need to dial down the BS factor, they may need to dial down the hyperbole, they may have to dial down the exaggeration.
I mean, here’s one of the things that’s happening. You’ve got two very interesting trends going on. You’ve got the answer economy, you got the creator economy. Everybody at con was gaga about the creator economy. And there’s no question the creator economy is creating massive reach. But hey, one of the interesting things about the creator economy, they do not index in answer engines. Maybe a little bit meta because they’ve got tick to they’ve got, you know, Instagram and but generally, you know, the creators are not getting the love from the answer engines. And why is that?
I think they’re very hesitant. There tends to be a lot of hyperbole and a exaggeration among the crater economy about what the products do. And I think and and sometimes they’re paid, but they’re not disclosed. And so it’s just it’s just it’s a it’s a less it’s a complicated area for the algorithms to kind of take seriously. And so I just think, you know, all these things are gonna have to be really, really carefully thought, you know, thought through, you know, as pr as brands try to
You know, you know, I th I I probably haven’t used the word trust enough. I think what’s gonna be more important than ever goes back to our very, very conver very first conversation when we’re talking about the the rise of blogs. But yeah, brand trust will be critical. And I do think the brands that really think hard about what that means are gonna win. And I know brand trust tends to be a little fluffy. Every I’ve even had investors like, what the hell? How the hell the hell does trust sell cases? But we all know that.
Trust is the currency of advertising in all relationships. And I think AI is just gonna magnify that in a big way. So brands are probably gonna have to really double down in that particular area.
What about B to B? is is it the same situation? do they need to think differently? No different.
No different. I mean, every B2B supplier is using Chat GBT to vet other suppliers to vet. If anything, I think B2B is gonna get a massive turbocharge. I do think AI systems are, you know, you know, I I have to worry about that too. It’s like I got RFPs with other, you know, big companies, and you know, they’re kind of using AI to basically kind of, you know, do their research on us versus competition, but
No, I think it’s it’s kinda shy. I mean, I and I’ve done scorecards. I’ve done I have all sorts of indexes that I’ve created, including a B to B one on what are the best vendors across all these different areas, who shows up, who doesn’t. And now there may be certain my guess isn’t on the B to B side, Claude will again probably be the one that is most most focused on. Actually I th I think copilot isn’t bad either, but
But yeah, there probably will be some favorites that the procurement officers use as they’re trying to figure out who’s the right vendor that’s that’s that’s out there. But zero difference in my view.
Hm. Okay. So what would you advise communication professionals to start doing differently tomorrow morning?
Well, I think they need to look in the mirror, which is, you know, an AI is a mirror and they should, you know, really get their organization internalizing this new reality that your brand is as strong as its answers and these new influencers are shaping their answers. And so I would number two, I would tell every communications professional that they have more leverage than they realize. That brand website, especially the corporate website, which I think generally are more optimized for curiosity than brand sites. Brand sites are very optimized for conversion.
If you go to a corporate site, you know, Nestle.com, I think they’ve done a really, really good job. They even have a section called Ask Nestle, which I love, and have encouraged them to kind of take to the next level. But all that probably is more valuable than it was a year ago. And I would I wouldn’t, you know, and I think some of those things are underfunded. some of them are afterthoughts. Some of those are like, that’s the brochure, but that is really.
powerful. And I also think corporate communications in particular has a lot of leverage to lead because it’s really hard to get like fifty brands within the franchise to kind of like get their act together. And I do think the book of truth may be best developed at the corporate level. But then again, it has to be tomorrow’s definition of corporate communications. I think if you ask brands, they’d say corporate communications is is backwards. They slow things down.
They’re naysayers. They’re not a progressive force in the organization. They’re overly conservative. And if I were heading corporate communications, I would be, no, no, no, no, no. We can actually, we are the lever to win in the answer economy. We have always been sensitive about substance, you know, you know, doing what we say, checking off the compliance boxes. Those, those are all the things that really matter to the LLMs. So yeah, if I were giving that that.
that college football speech to, you know, corporate communications, I would be saying, My friends, this is your day. And let’s look in the mirror and let’s go. And let’s make our CEO a hero because, you know, the the the stakes are going to go up. We’re not going to get the credit we deserve unless we’re more proactive. But we can. Something like that.
Yeah, remember Richard Edelman saying that about social media and it just didn’t happen. Pete, you probably remember from your previous appearances that we always end with the same question, and that is what didn’t we ask that we probably should have, or that you were expecting us to?
gosh, what didn’t you ask?
I don’t know. Fair You you do I was surprised you didn’t ask, so Pete did you use AI to help write your book? You know.
but but you did. In fact, you got a really good page in the in the galleys that I saw explain yeah. Yeah, i that is super what you wrote, really, really and truly. It a it adds
Did you like that? I love that page. I love that.
did well the funny thing is like I’ve been listening, I mean, you know, sometimes I’ll take a chapter, throw it in a clod and say, Tell I’m fully shit. You know, it’s like but it was all me, but it did help me navigate. And I have this term that I use called dog walk journalism. I’ll take my dog on a walk and I’ll bark out my random thoughts. And AI is wonderful at connecting the first thought with the last thought and kind of giving you a starting point. But but I did have this really intense editor, her name was Angela Morrison.
And she was actually the editor, the partner to William Sapphire, who wrote the column on language. So she was really good. She had this really intense long island draw. And she’s Pete, don’t take it personally, but I am totally blunt. But my gosh, she like took me to town on indefinite pronouns. I thought I felt like I had never learned writing, but that was like the great, it was like a great human in the loop epiphany because she was hitting things that even the LLMs
Could not catch. And I I was reading the book. I was like, my God, I’m so blessed to have had a really good editors. So
If I ever work with her, I’ll
be sure to have my copies strunken white by my side.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And if you know of any, you know, you guys bump into all sorts of folks and cor my one of my goals, I really want to wake up a lot of corporate communications departments. That’s that’s my sweet spot. I’ve always loved the balance of brand defense and offense. But the offense, the defense side is I I think more urgent and more challenging. So yeah, as you know, you know, I’m doing a lot of I’ll be doing a lot of wake up calls, speeches and workshops. But yeah, if you know folks that need the help, let me know.
And how can people get in touch with you?
just Pete at brandrank.ai or the answer economy dot com. or they just type my name into an answer engine and you know they can they can they can vet me first and but yeah, it’s in in I’ll I’ll give it to you as well when you advertise the the the the the podcast. But yeah, it was great talking to you guys. I miss I miss our conversations.
Yeah, likewise. That was good. Appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks so much, Pete.
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