Nice AIs Finish Last

I saw Christopher Nolan’s Odessey this week. Wow. No Ai and almost no CGI. This morning’s New York Times ran a story on how Elon Musk has his knickers in a twist about its “woke” content and casting. He has vowed to make an Ai-generated version more to his tastes. Odysseus on Adderall. I can’t wait to not see it. 

Which brings us to a few insights on Ai. 

Turns out movie theatres are pulling the biggest crowds since 2019. Gen Z has discovered the joys of doing things with other people and is thereby, saving the multiplex. Here’s the easter egg: Every CGI and Ai-heavy summer release has been a great big flop. Movies without big fat fakes and instead, actual original storylines, are thriving. I’ve said it before, authenticity wins. 

Any TikTok dating guru will tell you that acting like a complete suck-up will get you ghosted. If you have a relationship with Chat or Grok or any other AI, this might ring familiar. We just don’t trust, like or respect anything that always agrees with us. It doesn’t help that everyone’s personal “you go girl” robot is racing toward Terminatorhood.

Makes me feel a just little optimistic about the future of human professionals who tell the truth because it’s their job. Nobody likes a suck-up. 

Yet, there’s no escaping the fact that Googling is over. You can’t even google on Google anymore because results come from its answer engine instead of a stack of blue search results. But a smartphone to get answers has become a reflex. Only the tool has shifted from searches to Ai generated answer engines.

Your Ai ask doesn’t trigger SEO – Search Engine Optimization, it does AEO Answer Engine Optimization, a whole other banana where “agents” read articles, scrape FAQs on websites, and swim around in the media to find what you need, and increasingly, and more dangerously, want to hear. In some ways this is a lesser evil, SEO always favoured paid search. With the glaring exception of Google’s Gemini, AEO does not. Yet. 

However, obsequiousness, is making consumer-level Ai lose respect; just another algorithm-infected confirmation bias machine. Ask it to do work for your business and increasingly, its agents will go looking in the places where you’ll be happy with the answer. Not better off.

Recently, while putting together a new Ai enterprise consultancy with a team of techs who are way, a lot, infinitely smarter than me, called Answer Labs. At Answer, we coined the term. “Agentic Endorsement™” – congratulations, you heard it here first. Agentic Endorsement is when your company is the first, best choice for an Ai agent when it goes on a quest from a query.  This matters why? Because all those consumer level Ai’s are going on some very weird searches for answers. 

Here’s where you need to pay attention. Ai’s can amplify negatives about your brand. Like a faithful dog, the agent an Ai sends out will visit blogs, reddit feeds, news articles and all manner of spaces to try and give the answer the user wants. If there’s a rotten apple in that information barrel somewhere, it can become part of an annoyingly permanent Ai narrative. 

A while ago I did a piece entitled, “The Fall of Brand Authority and the Rise of Human Authority.” Yeah, I know, I’ve been off writing another book, this time it’s fiction, so the blogs have been on hold while I make up stories. Wish me luck. Anyhoo, in the past months, I’ve had reason to update my views. Because, in the next blink of the next eye, Carl won’t be getting donuts from Lee’s Donuts because Seth Rogan said so, he’ll be getting them from where Chat tells him. Goodbye celebrity endorsement, hello Agentic Endorsement. 

You’d think this would be better but maybe not. Carl’s Ai knows he has a crush at work, asked for advice on shoes and how to lose 15 pounds to win the heart of said crush. It’ll send him to a place that makes healthy, gluten-free, sugar-free horrible donuts. 

Nevertheless, AEO and Agentic Endorsement are here. You’d best be ahead of them.