Has there ever been a worse misread of a room than the one we’re seeing right now, with AI brands predicting that 65% of marketers’ skills will be replaceable by AI and brands responding by laying off the very people they have never needed more than right now?
It’s like watching the “I have a bridge I can sell you” joke become the guiding light of this particular and peculiar era in marketing history.
Brand leadership just couldn’t be more wrong if they’re firing creatives right now and I’m going to show you why.
Your Brand Is Conspicuously Absent From Conversational AI
Believe conversational AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode and Ask Maps are shifting consumer behaviors? You’re right.
Believe your brand owns consumer journeys in these contexts? You are almost certainly wrong.
As I shared in a recent column, research conducted by Lastmile and its partners NearMedia and Relativo captures what is actually happening to your brand in conversational AI tools:
If your brand’s decision-makers think that appearing as an AI answer to a transactional-intent query is a victory, this is symptomatic of pre-AI thinking. Transactional queries are no longer at the bottom of the funnel because AI is bombarding today’s consumer with follow-up questions and answers. Brands vanish from these conversations, to the tune of:
- Best Buy being a visible result on 77.9% of relevant transactional-intent searches, but only 46.1% of the follow-up questions Gemini generates
- Marriott being present on 47.8% of relevant transaction-intent searches, but only 16.3% of follow-ups
- Thumbtack being there on 65.5% of these searches, but totally invisible on the follow-ups
- Hilton being visible on 25.5% of these searches, but only 7.9% of subsequent Q&A
Initial prominence for commercial-intent queries in AI results is misleading enterprises into thinking they’ve won. The reality is that the moment any prospective customer begins a chat with a conversational AI tool, they are being pulled away from your brand to whatever sources are being cited in the follow-up Q&A that then dominates the conversation. Brand visibility is a fraction of what it should be in these run-on exchanges.
In fact, Lastmile’s research indicates that 91% of consumers’ activity is tied to research, questions, and conversations—not sales. In sum, buyer journeys don’t end with commercial-intent searches anymore; instead, these queries now launch further research.
What does this look like? If you’re marketing a hotel, this is what AI is asking your prospective guests as it guides them off into the weeds:
What is filling the AI gaps?
As your brand vanishes from AI results following a commercial-oriented initial query, it is social media that rushes in like a tide of content from random individuals to fill the gap:
Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Quora, and other social platforms made up of highly-individualistic content dominate the follow-up conversations AI is having with your prospective customers. It isn’t that a tool like Google AI Mode doesn’t want to cite brands. In fact, it cites them at about the same rate, regardless of what they are:
It’s that brands have a massive coverage problem, as captured by this single illustration of just how heavily AI is relying on social media to generate questions and answers:
If Reddit is in charge of your marketing now, who is in charge of your Reddit presence?
The answer could be: no one.
The answer could be: it was that junior marketer your company fired last month because they were spending too much time on social media instead of demonstrating value.
The answer could be: that whole marketing team that got gutted because their indirect marketing activities couldn’t easily be directly tied to concrete outcomes.
The answer can’t be: AI. Because if subreddit mods and users think you are using AI to try to sell them something, they will remove your content and quite possibly ban your brand from participating in the increasing number of communities with rules like this:
It doesn't matter how big your brand was before the emergence of conversational AI tools. Nothing will protect it from this kind of social media backlash:
This is definitely not the kind of social media content any brand wants AI leaning on to create the follow-up questions and answers sparked by commercial-intent queries:
Reddit was already famous for roasting brands being overly self-promotional in communities. Adding AI-generated content of any kind to this mix is simply a no-go.
The opposite narrative is the one in which brands build a genuine following on platforms like Reddit by being helpful in very human ways. This is not something you can fake with automation and AI. The upshot: if your business has already pink-slipped your socially-minded creatives, then your gap in AI coverage will simply get worse over time.
Rebuilding your brand’s head count to meet the help demand
If I could teach enterprises just one thing about conversational AI, it would be this:
Conversational AI is only succeeding because brands failed to talk.
Brands failed to:
- Be helpful enough to customers so that they wouldn’t have to turn to robots for information
- Organize your information so that customers could find what they needed quickly
- Provide deep enough information to enable consumers to compare and contrast their options and choose you
- Answer its phones quickly enough
- Respond to forms submissions and emails promptly
- Staff their floors sufficiently
- Create and uphold consumer-centric policies
This is why ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Ask Maps, and other tools have snuck in to have the conversations your brand should have been having all along with its customers.
The wrong read of the room: People in the cities we serve want to talk to robots, so we can fire our humans.
The right read of the room: People in the cities we serve need much more help than we’ve provided in the past across all touchpoints; we’re going to need a lot more helpful people working for our brand.
I can’t speak to the exact numbers of assistive and socially adept creatives your specific enterprise needs, but you’ve got to staff up so that you have imaginative employees actively developing your coverage on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Quora, and whichever other sites conversational and generative AI are scraping to ask and answer questions related to your:
- Brand
- Geography
- Industry
Regardless of your vertical, these are the conversations human marketers are having on Reddit right now:
Your head count needs to be able to fulfill your new playbook:
Otherwise, you are leaving it up to random social media users to do your marketing for you in AI contexts. It’s probably a much better idea to put them on your payroll.
Need to consult with a white-glove marketing partner who can help with strategic decision-making at your enterprise? Talk to real people at Lastmile about what your customers need in the AI era.
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