Bruno Gavino built a 30-person global digital agency from Lisbon. Then he started asking whether AI was quietly making everything his agency did irrelevant. His answer wasn't to panic. It was to build.

What Happens When an Introvert Becomes the Face of an AI Company?

Bruno Gavino is the CEO and founder of CoDesign, a digital agency based in Lisbon, Portugal, with offices in Boston, Singapore, and Los Angeles. He's also the creator of LLM Search Console, a tool that tracks how brands are showing up (or not showing up) across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. He joined Jim all the way from Portugal for a wide-ranging conversation about building globally while staying rooted, leading teams through constant change, and why curiosity isn't just a nice-to-have. It's the only filter that matters in hiring.

This episode covers a lot of ground fast. Bruno and Jim talk through what it actually feels like to run a service business at the exact moment AI is automating the services you've built your company around. They get into the regulatory patchwork both in Europe and the U.S., why the biggest AI models are trending toward generic, and why Bruno thinks smaller, more specific models may ultimately win for real-world business use cases.

How Do You Build a Team That Thrives on Uncertainty?

Some of the best material in this conversation is about hiring and culture. Bruno uses curiosity as a literal metric in every interview. His team members from unrelated departments conduct screening conversations specifically designed to surface how candidates think, not what they know. His rule of thumb: don't hire anyone you couldn't sit with in a car for three hours. He learned that one the hard way, after a run of great resumes that went nowhere.

Bruno is also candid about the harder personal stuff. He talks about growing up with a grandmother whose philosophy of radical kindness still anchors him, a voice in his head that sounds very different from the corporate achievement pressure most founders carry. He discusses the challenge of always trying to fix everyone's problems, the discipline of learning to say no, and why, after 10 years of building, he still doesn't feel like he's winning.

Jim shares his own parallel journey: leaving corporate at Disney and DreamWorks, learning Canva from YouTube videos, breaking his website the day of this recording, and discovering that being on your own forces a kind of nimbleness that nobody in a big organization ever needs. The conversation closes on agriculture, pomegranates, Portugal, and why both of them think the best leaders have more in common with good farmers than they do with most people in Silicon Valley.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Why measuring brand visibility across AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini is the new version of SEO, and why most companies aren't doing it yet.
2. How to use curiosity as a quantifiable hiring metric, including what kinds of interview questions actually surface it.
3. Why the broader and more general AI models become, the more opportunity opens up for niche, domain-specific alternatives.
4. How building your team around where the talent lives, rather than where your office is, creates stronger culture than proximity ever did.
5. Why the most dangerous hire isn't someone underqualified. It's someone with a beautiful resume and no chemistry.
6. How European regulatory experience with GDPR is giving companies like CoDesign a faster adaptation cycle than their American counterparts as AI regulations ramp up.
7. Why curiosity looks easy in younger workers not because they're smarter, but because they have fewer hard-won habits to unlearn.
8. What it costs emotionally to build a company with a close friend, and the practices that keep the relationship intact over a decade.
9. How radical kindness, modeled by a grandmother, became the anchor for a tech founder navigating an industry obsessed with speed and scale.
10. Why founders who learn to say no to problems they can't control become measurably more effective than those who keep trying to fix everything.

Bruno Gavino is the founder of CoDesign, a global digital agency headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, and the creator of LLM Search Console, an AI intelligence platform that tracks brand performance across large language models. He also hosts the Voice of Experts podcast, where he interviews leading thinkers in AI and digital strategy.

✨ Connect with Bruno:

• 💼 LinkedIn: Bruno Gavino
• 🌐Website: codedesign.org
• 🔗Podcast: Voice of Experts

✨ Follow Jim Fielding & Ask For An Answer:

• 🌐Website: hijimfielding.com
• ♥️ Instagram:@hijimfielding
• 💼 LinkedIn: James (Jim) Fielding
• 🔗 Podcast: Ask For An Answer, available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Did this conversation make you think differently about curiosity, hiring, or what it means to lead through change?

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