Chief of Staff at Unusual

Consumers are using AI models to help them buy things. First AI models were information aggregators: tools people used to search and summarize. Now they're trusted advisors: what people consult before making a decision. Increasingly, they're becoming trusted buyers: agents that shop, evaluate, and transact on behalf of humans. When AI makes the ultimate buying decision, then it becomes more important for brands to win over AI than for them to win over the human consumer. In that world, understanding how AI perceives a company's value proposition becomes one of the most consequential things that company can understand about itself. We apply the principles of AI interpretability research to study how models actually think about companies, and underneath the surface noise we find remarkably stable beliefs, formed from the proof points a company has put into the world (often inadvertently). Companies starting to take this seriously are realizing something uncomfortable: in an AI-evaluated market, marketing claims without substance to back them up don’t work anymore. Conversely, companies that deliver on their value proposition have unbounded opportunity to reach and acquire new buyers.