Brian Snyder, Chief Innovation Officer at Axicom, offered some suggestions on what to measure when it comes to reputation and AI answers. He also discusses accuracy and reputation—do the AI responses reflect the correct info about the brand?
This session was part of during the PRNEWS Pro workshop "AI for PR."
Watch the segment here, or watch the full session, "AI, Agents & Brand Reputation," by following the link.
Full transcript:
[BRIAN SNYDER]:
So the AI future of corporate and brand reputation isn't just coming, it's actually already here. And the change is only going to accelerate as more AI agents come online. You've probably seen the headlines from Sam Altman talking about how AI agents join the workforce this year. You've seen probably some of the quotes from Mark Zuckerberg talking about how soon there will be more AI agents than there are people in the world.
This is the place where It's all coming together. And so the question is, how are we as marketers, communicators, and really stewards of reputation, how are we going to rise to the occasion and meet this critical moment?
So, I go back to Peter Drucker of all people. Anyone who's gone to business school probably knows Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant who unfortunately didn't live long enough to see the AI revolution, but I think he'd really get a kick out of it because he always said, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So the question to us then is what to measure? And this is where I would love to share with you some thoughts. The first thing is accuracy. Accuracy means does the AI answer engine do the responses about our brand reflect our brand truth? Note that I didn't say, is it accurate to the truth? Because let's be honest, it's 2025 and truth is in the eye of the beholder. So really the question isn't so much is the AI answer engines responses about our brand accurate to the truth, but more is it accurate to our version of the truth?
The next one is sentiment. Does AI describe our brand positively or negatively? Of course, we are stewards of brand reputation. We want to make sure that there is positive information out there about our brands. So if anybody is looking for our brand or looking for a category, they see good things about us within the AI responses. And that brings us to the last thing that I suggest everybody start measuring, which is visibility. Does AI pull our brand into category level answers?
So if I'm talking about coffee, does Starbucks get mentioned? If I'm talking about hamburgers, does McDonald's get mentioned? Are we going to be mentioned in the visibility of the category that we're talking about? So when we're tracking these things, I think it's important to think about what we track. So it's not just our company name, but it's also the names of our individual products. If we operate in a house of brands, it's about each one of those different brands in the house.
It's about our executives names, our subject matter experts, all the people that we want to have out there publicly associated with our company. What do the AI answer engines say about them? And finally, those category level topics. And on that, I want to give you an example. If you go to Microsoft Copilot and you ask, what is cloud storage? You'll get this great answer back that really explains what cloud storage is.
And if you notice at the bottom, it actually references in the response, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services as authoritative sources for information about cloud marketing. Now, let's say that I own a cloud storage company or I work with a cloud storage company, which I do, and this is where the slide came from. Wouldn't I want to have my company and my brand show up in here?
So maybe there is a Q&A that I want to put on my website. Maybe there is an interview I want to land with a journalist or an influencer talking about what is cloud storage and having it come from my brand so that when Copilot looks at the internet and comes up with what is the answer to cloud storage, they hear from our brand and bring that into their results. So if we're going to do this, we need some tools to do this, right?
So I see this as the third leg of the media monitoring stool. Today we have earned media monitoring. Everybody in this call I know is monitoring our media. And we're also doing social media monitoring. But what we don't have yet is a platform for AI media monitoring. And that's something I would love for everybody to take away from this call is we've got to start thinking about these AI answer engines and AI agents, not just as SEO, in the next generation of SEO.
I know there's a lot of talk out there about a GEO and things like that. This is much bigger than that. This is the new media landscape. This is the new forefront in the war for corporate and brand reputation. So we need an AI media monitoring tool to do something.
Produced by: PRNEWS