Who Is Telling Your Story Before You Do?

Marketers have spent decades learning how customers make decisions. We’ve studied buying behavior, mapped customer journeys, refined messaging and invested heavily in creating experiences that build trust over time. The assumption behind all of that work was simple: understand the customer, and you’ll influence the outcome.

AI doesn’t eliminate that principle, but it does fundamentally change one of marketing’s oldest assumptions.

I was reminded of that while reading a recent Harvard Business Review article, AI Is Changing How Customers Choose Your Business. Dr Graham Kenny and Ganna Pogrebna describe AI as “a new intermediary in the customer relationship.” That framing captures what I believe is one of the most significant shifts our profession has seen in years.

We’ve long known that buyers complete the vast majority of their decision-making process before they ever engage with sales. But today, buying journeys begin with a conversation that happens before a customer ever visits your website or reads your content. They’re asking AI to compare providers, explain differences, summarize capabilities and recommend solutions. By the time they arrive at your digital front door, an impression may have already been formed.

For years, marketing has been about shaping those first impressions. We’ve built brands, crafted messages and created experiences designed to influence how people perceive our organizations. Increasingly, however, the first interpretation of our brand may come from an AI model that has synthesized thousands of publicly available signals into a concise recommendation.

That doesn’t mean we should start creating content for AI. It means we should become more intentional about the signals we’re sending into the digital ecosystem that AI uses to understand our businesses. Unlike people, AI isn’t persuaded by a memorable tagline or a clever campaign. It draws conclusions by recognizing patterns across a company’s digital footprint. Thought leadership, customer stories, analyst research, executive interviews, earned media, industry recognition, reviews and independent validation all contribute to the picture AI forms of an organization. Those signals become the foundation for the answers it provides when someone asks, “Who should I consider?” or “What’s the difference between these companies?”

I’ve come to believe that the strongest brands are bolstered through the steady accumulation of evidence. Organizations earn trust by consistently demonstrating expertise, delivering meaningful outcomes and contributing valuable perspectives to their industries. Those investments have always mattered because they influenced customers. Now they also influence the systems customers increasingly rely on to make sense of an increasingly complex marketplace.

What I find most encouraging is that this shift doesn’t diminish the importance of marketing. Quite the opposite, it elevates it. The organizations that will stand out won’t necessarily be the ones producing the most content or experimenting with every new AI tool. They’ll be the ones building reputations grounded in expertise, consistency and credibility. Those qualities have always mattered. AI simply makes them more visible.

This is also why I don’t see this as a marketing issue alone. Every customer-facing function contributes to the digital footprint AI uses to understand an organization. Communications, product, sales, customer success, research and executive leadership all shape the body of knowledge that increasingly influences how a business is discovered and evaluated. And perhaps most important, your employees, because brands are truly built from the inside out.

The question for leaders is no longer whether AI will change the customer journey. It already has. The more important question is whether your organization is creating the kind of expertise, reputation and consistency that both people and AI recognize as trustworthy.

Perhaps that’s the real opportunity AI presents. Not to become louder, faster or more automated, but to become clearer about who we are, what we stand for and the value we consistently deliver. In the years ahead, your story may already be written before you’ve had the opportunity to tell it.