Visibility gets you seen but reputation gets you in the room

MAD//Fest was themed on the human touch. I spent two days there this month, and nearly every session I sat in was about machines: how AI decides which brands it puts forward, and who gets left out of the answer. Underneath, they are the same story. Getting a machine to recommend you still comes down to human judgement.

A second audience

Your brand now has a second audience. Alongside the person you have always marketed to, there is the large language model that sits between that person and you, answering their questions and building their shortlist before they reach your website. A brand now has to earn attention from both.

The behaviour is moving fast. One figure presented at the festival suggested 60% of consumers now say AI summaries influence their final purchase decision. The same thing is starting to happen in wealth management. A prospective client asks an AI who the best wealth managers are for a business owner selling up, or for a family planning across generations, and whatever the model answers becomes the shortlist. A firm that is not in that answer is not being considered, and it will not know it was overlooked.

The next generation is asking AI

The generation now inheriting wealth researches differently from their parents. A large intergenerational wealth transfer is under way, and for many of the people receiving it, the first move is to ask an AI assistant where to put money they have just come into, long before they ask anyone they know. If your firm has spent thirty years building a reputation that lives in personal networks and word of mouth, none of that reaches the model unless it also exists in a form the model can read. The relationships that won you the parents do not automatically win you the children.

The problem with being one of many

Being visible is only the start. In one session I watched the presenter type a question into ChatGPT live on stage, and a single agency came back as the clear recommendation. Good job too, or their pitch would have fallen short…! Another speaker described a brand that was present in AI answers and accurate, and found it made no difference, because every competitor beside it was described in the same trustworthy terms. When the model puts one name forward, being one safe option among many does not help you.

There is a second risk alongside being ignored, which is being misrepresented. These models predict the most plausible answer from everything they have read, drawing on sources you do not control, including review sites and public forums. A firm can be described inaccurately, or blended with a competitor of a similar name, and have no idea it is happening. For a regulated business whose proposition rests on trust, how you are represented in these answers is something to manage deliberately.

What the technology cannot do

What I took from two days of it is that the technology cannot do the deciding part for you. Getting an AI to find you and describe you correctly is becoming the baseline. Being the name it recommends depends on whether you are distinctive, whether there is a reason to choose you over the equally competent firm beside you. That is a question of reputation, and it is human work.

The practical advice from the specialists was sound: understand how the models build their recommendations, know the questions your firm should be the answer to, and structure your content so the models can read it. Underneath all of it sits a decision no tool can make for you, which is what you want to be known for. Get that wrong and the models will find you and file you alongside everyone else.

What it means for wealth firms

In wealth management, clients choose on trust, and trust is built on specificity, the sense that a firm understands their particular situation. Generic content works against that, and a model reading a great deal of it will treat you as one more competent option. The firms that do well as the models take over discovery will be the ones distinctive enough that a person and a model both have a reason to name them.

None of this can be handed wholesale to a tool or an agency. What your firm stands for, and whether it comes through clearly enough for a person and a model to repeat it, is a leadership question.

The festival's theme was the right one. Visibility gets you seen by the model. Reputation, the reason a firm is worth recommending, is what gets you in the room.

If you are thinking about how your firm shows up when a client asks an AI who they should trust, let's talk.