AI That Saves Hours, or AI That Wins the Sale?
Someone asks ChatGPT for the best weekend bag for a short trip to Paris. It names three brands. Every other brand, in that moment, doesn't exist.
That customer didn't search. They didn't visit a website or see an ad. They asked a question and got a shortlist. Whether your brand is on it is now one of the biggest growth questions in marketing. Very few people are measuring it.
Agencies have been busy with AI for a couple of years. Most of that work falls into two kinds.
The first kind saves time. Faster reports. More versions of an ad. Fewer manual tasks. It's useful, and nobody wants to go back. But clients tend to see it as a line on the invoice, not a reason to stay.
The second kind grows the client. Better results. New customers. More sales. That's the kind clients remember, because it shows up in their numbers, not just in yours.
Efficiency is the entry fee. Growth is what clients pay for.
The good news is that the industry is already moving. Some agencies use AI to buy media and adjust spend as a campaign runs, putting money where it's working. Others use it to predict which version of an ad will work before it goes live. Some are taking it beyond advertising altogether, helping companies get more from their own teams and their own data.
The work is becoming more outcome-driven. The question is shifting from "how much faster?" to "how much better?" That's the right direction. The real test of AI for growth is client outcomes, not hours saved.
But there's a gap, and it sits right where customers now start.
More and more people ask an AI assistant before they search, before they visit a site, sometimes before they've thought of a brand at all. These tools have become a new shop window. They decide who gets seen, how they're described and who gets recommended.
Most brands don't know what these tools say about them. They don't know whether it's right. And most media plans don't measure it at all. Brands work hard to be seen in every other window, then leave this one to chance.
In my last post on the L.E.N. journal, I wrote about how buyers start with a situation, not a brand. The same shift changes what success looks like. It's no longer "do we rank?" It's "are we in the answer, and does it get us right?"
Building L.E.N. has shown me how little of that answer a brand controls. For our homepage, we used Gucci as an independent example. We saved four answers from ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode to questions people ask about the house. Between them, those answers cited 11 different sources. Only one was Gucci's own website. The rest included a textile trade site, a handbag care shop, a YouTube video, academic papers and the Financial Times.
That isn't a criticism of anyone. It's how these tools work. They build answers from whatever they can find. If the clearest account of your brand lives somewhere else, that's the account customers hear.
So what should brands and their agencies do? Three things.
First, find out what AI assistants say about you today. Ask the questions your customers ask, not the ones you'd like them to ask. Note who gets named, how you're described and where the answer came from.
Second, treat it as part of the media plan, not a side project. If AI is where buying starts, it belongs next to search, social and retail. That's what treating media as a growth engine looks like: end-to-end, from the first question to the sale.
Third, measure it like any other channel. Three questions are enough to start. Are you named? Are you right? Are you chosen?
None of this means handing the job to a machine. Data and technology can show you the gaps. People still decide what matters, what to fix and what the brand should stand for. The human stays in charge.
This is also where agencies have a real opening. The ones that act as a growth partner, not a supplier, will help clients see and shape this new window. It's a growth problem. And growth is what clients pay for.
Which leaves one question worth asking on Monday morning.
Who on your team owns the answer AI gives about your brand?
PS: L.E.N. shows brands what AI says about them, where it gets that from, and what to change. See how it works.