The Second Audience Arrives

Roundtables are held under the Chatham House Rule. Quotes are attributed by sector only.

Your next customer may not be the first to hear about you. Before they visit your site, open your app or walk into a store, an AI assistant may already have done the research, compared the options and drawn up a shortlist. Your brand may have made it. It may not. Today, most marketing teams can’t tell which.

That was the thread running through every room. Leaders weren’t debating whether AI matters; that argument is over. Discussing around the growing impact and importance of AI in business evolves seemingly on a daily basis. Most recently its impact on the search market came into the spotlight with Google-owner Alphabet witnessing a decline in share value of $500bn having reported slower-than-expected trends in core search and advertising activity.

Meanwhile, we have entered a Golden quarter like no other as AI drives the decision-making process for consumers. DEPT’s new retail research, How AI Is Changing What People Buy, found that more than half of recent AI shoppers chose a different brand than the one they originally intended to buy because of AI recommendations. Among them, 55 per cent discovered a brand they had not previously considered, while 79 per cent expanded their shortlist through AI-powered search. These are truly changing times.

The harder questions being asked by marketers right now are practical. How do you build a brand that moves people and also makes sense to a machine? Where does the media budget go when people no longer search, click and visit? And who, inside the business, is actually responsible for fixing it?

What we heard

1. Marketing now has two audiences

The first audience is familiar. Brands know how to connect with people emotionally, and most do it well. The second is new: the AI tools and agents taking on more of the research, recommendation, and selection. They don’t respond to emotion. They need clear, credible information they can interpret and pass on.

The consensus was that serving both can’t be a side project for the search team. It has to shape the whole marketing strategy.

“We know how to appeal to our customers, but we have no idea whether AI recommends us or why,” Luxury Goods, VP of marketing.

2. You can rank first and still be missing

For years, visibility meant search rankings. Increasingly, it means whether an AI tool mentions or recommends you when someone asks about a category or a need, and how you appear next to competitors when it does. That answer often never leads to a website visit at all.

“We rank well on Google, but competitors appear in AI answers where we don’t. We don’t understand what we’re missing,” Technology CMO.

What’s missing is usually not on the website. AI builds its picture of a brand from the whole digital footprint: PR, and media coverage, reviews, creators, social conversation, third-party content, and product information. That makes brand building and discoverability the same job. A consistent, authoritative reputation is now what gets you recommended, and authority needs evidence: clear product information, useful expertise, and credible sources that back it up.

3. The plan and the dashboard are built for the old journey

As more discovery and comparison moves into AI, leaders are reassessing where they actually influence decisions. Few have the answer yet.

“Our media plan still assumes people search, click and visit our site. We don’t know where to move budget as that changes,” CPG CMO.

The emerging view is to do two things at once: prepare for the AI advertising opportunities now taking shape, while strengthening the channels that build human preference. Measurement has to move with it. Rankings and traffic still matter, but they say nothing about whether AI is recommending you or describing your products correctly.

“Our dashboard measures rankings and traffic. It doesn’t tell us whether AI is recommending us or getting our products wrong,” Technology CMO.

4. Social is where people now decide

Social is no longer just where people connect and are entertained. It’s where they discover, research, compare, and buy. Someone searching for advice needs something different from someone scrolling for fun or ready to purchase, and the brands doing this well give each of those moments a distinct role.

The tension is consistency. Leaders described being caught between two failures:

“Our content is either so tightly controlled it feels generic, or so different by market that it stops looking like one brand,” CPG CMO.

The answer on the table was shared editorial principles and distinctive brand assets rather than identical content everywhere. The same logic applies to creators, who bring credibility, cultural understanding, and an audience that already trusts them. Too often they’re bought post by post.

“We keep paying for one-off creator posts, but we’re not building lasting credibility or a clear reason to choose us,” Sport CMO.

Publishing more doesn’t make a brand more meaningful. Useful, entertaining content and real community engagement give people a reason to care, respond and come back.

5. Everyone agrees. Nobody owns it.

This was the most uncomfortable part of every session. The issue isn’t awareness; it’s structure. Product information sits in different systems and markets. Organic, paid, and influencer teams report separately. The pieces that shape how a brand is seen, by people and by machines, have no single owner.

“Our product information is scattered across systems and markets. Even our own teams struggle to find a reliable answer,” B2B CMO.

If a company’s own teams can’t find a reliable answer, an AI agent comparing options won’t either. Adobe’s 2026 research found that 78 per cent of CMOs cite data integration and quality as a barrier to agentic AI, which explains why buying the technology is often the easy part.

“Everyone agrees AI visibility matters, but SEO, PR, brand. and technology each think someone else owns the fix,” B2B CMO.

Where leaders are starting

Map the moments that matter

Not every step of the journey should be handed to AI. Map where customers want human reassurance and where they welcome AI help. Use that to decide where to invest in discoverability, agent readiness and experience pilots, with a clear path from test to wider rollout.

Audit how AI describes you

Ask the questions that matter in your category and see what comes back. Do you appear? How are you described? Is it correct? Compare that with what you want to be known for. Then add visibility, sentiment and accuracy to the dashboard alongside traffic and conversion.

Make the information agent-ready

Clear product specifications, reliable data and accessible information become far more valuable when agents do the comparing. Prepare commerce experiences for journeys that may start, and develop, well outside your own website.

Run social as one system

Bring organic social, creators, paid media, social search, and commerce into one strategy. Measure each against its purpose, from relevance and consideration through to conversion, and use what you learn to improve the whole experience.

“Organic, paid, and influencer teams report separately. We can see the activity, but we can’t explain how it adds up to growth,” CPG CMO.

Give the fix an owner

Identify missing or misleading information and assign ownership across marketing, technology, and data. GEO is a practical place to start: it’s concrete, measurable and builds the foundations for a world where agents play a bigger part in customer decisions.

What to take into your next leadership meeting

Make room for three questions:

• When someone asks an AI about our category, do we appear, and is what it says right?

• Where do our customers want human reassurance, and where would they welcome AI help?

• Who owns the fix across marketing, technology, and data, and what will we measure in the next 90 days?

None of this requires predicting exactly how fast habits will change. It requires deciding who is responsible, and starting.

The brands that pull ahead won’t be the ones with the most AI activity. They’ll be the ones that are easy to understand, easy to trust and easy to recommend, to people and to the machines now speaking on their behalf.

Growth Insider is written by Andrew Dimitriou, partner, Global chief client and growth officer for DEPT