TL; DR
- Your brand persona used to mean CIOs, consumers, or SMB owners. Now, you also need to include AI—ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.
- If ChatGPT doesn’t know you, your customers won’t either.
- AI doesn’t care about your clever campaigns—it only trusts receipts (citations, consistency, and fresh signals).
- Train the machines now, or watch your competitors write your story for you.
Meet Your New Buyer Persona
For years, personas have shaped how we connect with customers. We’ve built strategies around specific titles, demographics, hobbies and passions, lifestyle, and more—each with its own needs and journeys.
And now we have a new persona to consider: the AI platforms. Yes, that means that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, CoPilot, Claude, and all of the others now need their own ideal customer profile.
These tools are the gatekeepers. They’re the first stop for decision-makers asking, “What’s the best solution for my hybrid events strategy?” And the answers they give—often one or two at most—can determine whether your brand is part of the consideration set.
We’ve talked about this at length for the past several weeks because AI isn’t going away. The way people search online has been completely upended, and the way you need to engineer visibility for your organization has also changed.
In the old search model, you could buy your way into visibility with ads or climb the rankings with really smart content and SEO. But in an AI-driven world, there is no second page of results. No list of blue links. No room for nine competitors plus you. There’s one answer—or two if you’re lucky. And if you’re not in that answer? You’re effectively invisible.
The implications are enormous.
If AI platforms are the new gatekeepers, they’re also your latest audience. And unlike human buyers, they don’t respond to clever campaigns or glossy creative—they respond to authority, corroboration, and consistency.
That’s why it’s no longer optional to think of the AI tools as personas in their own right. They’re not just distributing your message—they’re defining it.
Why an AI Persona Matters
Every CMO I talk to is already wrestling with how to use AI and what it means for their teams, their creative workflows, and even their budgets. But the bigger shift isn’t any of those things. Sure, AI platforms are affecting everything we do, but it’s more than that. AI platforms are now defining categories.
When a business leader types into ChatGPT, “What’s the best platform for hybrid events?”, they’re not browsing a list of vendors. They’re getting one or two names. That’s it.
That’s a fundamental change in how awareness and consideration are built. In traditional search, visibility was expansive—you could buy your way in with paid, optimize your way in with SEO, or produce beautiful enough content to land on page one.
In AI-driven discovery, visibility is compressed. The machine curates a short list, and that short list is what the human sees.
And, as we’ve talked about ad nauseum, if your brand doesn’t appear in that answer, you don’t exist in that decision-maker’s world. It’s not a matter of brand preference—it’s a matter of brand absence.
That makes AI personas the most influential audience we’ve ever had. They’re not buyers in the traditional sense, but they shape the buying environment every single day. And unlike human customers, they can’t be swayed by creative campaigns, clever messaging, or glossy activations. They’re scanning for signals—authority, consistency, and corroboration.
This is why treating AI platforms as personas isn’t a gimmick. It’s a necessity. They’re the new gatekeepers to your category. And those who understand this first will define what the algorithms say—not just about their own brands, but about their entire industry.
How an AI Persona Thinks
As you well know, AI doesn’t think like people. It doesn’t care about your Super Bowl ad, your glossy brand film, or the clever tagline your agency fought over for six weeks.
What matters to AI is machine-readable credibility. It decides who you are based on the signals it can verify, and then weight and repeat across sources. In practice, that comes down to three things:
Structured authority
Is your story reinforced in places the AI already trusts—credible news outlets, analyst reports, trade publications, influencer newsletters, podcasts? The more structured and consistent those mentions are, the stronger your authority signal.
Corroboration
Do multiple reputable sources say the same thing about you? AI rewards consistency and penalizes contradiction. If your website, news coverage, and social feeds tell three slightly different stories, you’ve just created ambiguity—and ambiguity doesn’t get surfaced.
Recency
Freshness matters. An outdated article from three years ago may still rank in Google, but AI deprioritizes stale data. If you’re not generating a steady cadence of current signals, the algorithms assume your relevance has faded.
Repurposing content still works here, as long as you update it with new facts, figures, stats, and a new publish date. Don’t create new. Just update and move on.
At the same time, your work can’t be treated as episodic campaigns anymore. To AI, campaigns are just spikes in the data. These platforms favor continuity—an ecosystem of credible, corroborated, up-to-date signals.
One of the big changes we’ve made in the updated PESO Model Certification© (coming soon!) is moving from a content map to a content ecosystem. This is in direct response to the continuity AI favors.
What This Means for You
This shift changes your job description. Running campaigns that move awareness and drive pipeline is no longer enough. Those campaigns are now just one piece of a larger responsibility, which is shaping the narrative AI tells about your brand.
That means:
- Campaigns can’t stand alone. A splashy brand activation might light up social for a week, but it’s a single blip to AI. The signal fades before it ever reaches the algorithmic layer if it isn’t reinforced across owned content, media coverage, analyst reports, and paid amplification. You know, a fully integrated PESO Model program.
- Integration isn’t optional. AI doesn’t see silos. It ingests your newsroom, customer reviews, executive LinkedIn posts, third-party citations, and more. If those aren’t aligned, the machine fills in the gaps for you. And it’s rarely in your favor.
- Measurement has to evolve. Click-through rates and impressions won’t tell you if ChatGPT is recommending your brand. You will need to track visibility in AI outputs, authority across ecosystems, and consistency of narrative across channels.
In short, your role is expanding. You’re not just influencing human decision-makers anymore. You’re training the algorithms that influence human decision-makers.
If you can operationalize this shift, you will set the baseline story for your category. Everyone else will be stuck trying to overwrite it later. I don’t know about you, but that’s definitely the position I want to be in.
What You Can Pilot in 90 Days
You don’t need a full reorg or a seven-figure budget to start showing up for AI personas. In fact, a few focused moves between now and the end of the year can shift how these platforms read your brand.
Here are four low-risk, high-return pilots every one of us can run:
Modernize your newsroom
Treat it less like a news release graveyard and more like an AI training hub. Build clear product positioning pages, FAQs, and executive bios with structured data that make it easy for AI to pull the right story about who you are and what you do.
Syndicate your authority
Don’t stop at publishing research, insights, or POVs on your own site. Partner with trade pubs, analyst blogs, and academic outlets to get those same ideas echoed in places the algorithms already trust. Consistency across multiple credible domains multiplies your discoverability.
Repurpose with intent
One announcement can become a news release, a blog post, a LinkedIn POV, a podcast clip, boosted content, and a contributed article. You know, a fully integrated PESO Model program.
The key is using consistent language, messaging, and facts across each touchpoint so AI recognizes it as corroboration, not noise.
Boost the strongest signals
Instead of paying to promote everything, double down on amplifying your best-performing earned, owned, and shared content. Use paid strategically to reinforce momentum where you’re already getting traction—this accelerates how quickly AI surfaces your story.
Run these four plays for 90 days and you’ll start to see a measurable difference—not just in traditional engagement metrics, but in whether your brand shows up when someone asks AI the questions that matter in your category.
The Future-Proof Play
Those of you who treat AI as a persona today will build more than visibility—you’ll build a moat.
Because once an algorithm “learns” who defines a category, that baseline is hard to dislodge.
Competitors can outspend you on ads. They can out-shout you on social. But they can’t easily overwrite years of consistent, corroborated authority signals that tell AI: this brand is the trusted answer.
The payoff is threefold:
- Category leadership. Your brand becomes the default response when buyers ask the questions that matter most.
- Efficiency. You stop pouring budget into campaigns that never make it past the algorithmic gatekeepers.
- Resilience. Even as platforms change and channels shift, your authority ecosystem keeps training the machines in your favor.
You’ve spent years marketing to people. Now it’s time to market to the algorithms that introduce you to those people.
Your AI Buyer Persona is Waiting for You
AI personas aren’t coming—they’re here. And they’re already reshaping the way decisions get made in every category, from event platforms to enterprise software to healthcare.
This isn’t about chasing the next shiny tool. It’s about recognizing that your most important audience no longer has a job title or a budget—it has an algorithm.
If you don’t treat that algorithm like a persona worth influencing, you’re effectively handing your category story to someone else.
The mandate for each and every one of us is clear: stop thinking in terms of isolated campaigns and start building systems of authority, corroboration, and recency.
That’s what AI ingests. That’s what it repeats. And that’s what ultimately shapes the short lists your customers see.
You’ve mastered marketing to people. Now it’s time to master marketing to the machines that decide if people ever hear from you.
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