AI Is a Consumer Uprising, and Brands Don’t Get It Yet!

The fall season of CMO-anchored marketing conferences and events are upon us— Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing, MMA Global Transformation Summit, Advertising Week New York —and AI will undoubtedly overwhelm the agenda: generative content creation, programmatic optimization, customer data platforms, predictive analytics, and campaign automation.

But the critical story I urge all to think about is the one happening outside conference halls: consumers have already embraced AI as their primary discovery tool, developing radically higher expectations for responsiveness and authentic help that most brands can't meet. This gap is widening every day.

Brand leaders — this is not a tech revolution. It's a consumer uprising. And most of you don't see it coming.

Consumers no longer browse—they prompt. ChatGPT and its answer-engine siblings aren't just clever tools; they've become the most responsive "concierges" ever created: empathetic, lightning-fast, ad-free, multilingual, and constantly learning.

They outperform most brand experiences. And as Shelly Palmer once said: "If you can envision it, you can create it." That's not just a tech capability—it's the new baseline for customer expectations.

P&G once declared, "The consumer is boss." I believed that when I was there, and I've spent my career proving it—through PlanetFeedback, writing a book on customer complaints, serving as National Chair of the Better Business Bureau , and now building an AI trust platform, BrandRank.AI The mission has always been the same: treat consumers right, make them feel important, and they will reward you with loyalty.

But this time, it's different. Consumers now have allies—answer engines—that deliver on promises brands have made for decades. They cut through slogans and spin to get to the substance. Last week while presenting to Category CEOs at Nestlé I underscored how consumers empowered by AI are one prompt away from knowing if you are truly sustainable, or truly delivering on privacy promises.

While brand leaders have been talking about customer-centricity, these systems have been delivering it.

And the scale is staggering: answer engines are already hosting more than 7 billion visits a month, a number rising fast—and that's before you add Google AI summaries and "AI Mode" to the mushrooming mix. This isn't a niche consumer behavior—it's the new consumer front door.

The Answer Divide

There's a widening chasm between what consumers experience through answer engines and what brands provide. On one side: 24/7 responsiveness, personalization, empathy, and constant learning. On the other: slow, scripted, self-promotional experiences. Every day the gap grows—and with it, brand vulnerability.

Most Fortune 500 brands can't answer basic questions. Their FAQs are thin, their search functions clumsy, their e-commerce littered with irrelevant pop-ups. It erodes trust in seconds. Meanwhile, more agile players are optimizing for answer engines and quietly taking share.

And yet—there are bright spots. I admire brands and platforms that set the bar high:

• Tesla 's digital owner manuals: intuitive, searchable, always-on guidance.

• Wild Earth 's pet food site: tough doubts answered with science.

• Amazon 's Rufus AI: a glimpse of conversational discovery done right.

• Reddit, Inc. Answers: a one-click gateway to a wealth of authentic knowledge.

• Apple support ecosystem: quick fixes elegantly layered with deeper guidance.

These models prove the winners of the Answer Economy will be those who empower consumers with transparent, useful, trusted responses. 

Three Non-Negotiables for the Answer Era

If you want to close the Answer Divide, you must master three things:

1. Visibility. If you're invisible in answer engines, you've already lost. Know where you rank, how you compare, and which sources shape your answers. Earn shelf space through credibility, not manipulation.

2. Narrative Alignment. If the story the engines tell doesn't match your promise, you have a credibility problem. Discrepancies from outdated content, weak trust signals, or silos will surface instantly.

3. Content Readiness. Answer engines cut through fluff. Your content must be credible, structured, consistent, and easy to parse. Rich FAQs, authoritative voices, and AI-friendly hygiene aren't glamorous—but they are table stakes.

Going on Offense

Closing the gap isn't just defense. Brands must also play offense: training engines with structured data, creating experiences too rich to be flattened, and showcasing human authority. This requires balancing serving (answers that build trust) with selling ("click to buy" moments that drive growth). Don't force both into every interaction—integrate selling only where it naturally fits, without compromising helpfulness.

And let's be clear: what I'm saying here matters even more because advertising is coming to LLMs. That's a big opportunity with upside for everyone in this room. But consumers have delighted in interruption-free answers for nearly three years. Integrating ads into that experience must be done with hyper-attentive sensitivity. If we get it wrong, the very engines consumers trust most could lose their credibility overnight.

Closing the Divide

This is about more than serving customers directly. It's about serving the algorithms that increasingly mediate your story. Answer readiness means building content that is accurate, complete, and genuinely helpful everywhere consumers or engines might look.

The double payoff: people get responsive, trust-building answers; engines surface and amplify that same content at scale. You're not just winning the moment—you're training the system to tell your story well.

But readiness also requires cultural change. Too many legal departments still strip empathy out of brand language. Ironically, the bots are often more human—measured by empathy, patience, and responsiveness—than the brands they describe. If your lawyers block "That's a great idea" in an FAQ or brand bot response, the risk isn't legal; it's irrelevance.

And don't forget what can't be automated: feelings. I recently heard Unilever's Esi Eggleston Bracey discuss in a podcast the importance of "desirability" for brands. Well, isn't that exactly what answer engines deliver? Is there anyone who doesn't find "ask me anything" systems insanely desirable? The strongest brands will combine structured, credible content with emotional resonance—the trust and meaning no algorithm can replicate.

The Final Word

The consumer uprising is here. The standards have changed. Your competitors now include AI agents that are faster, kinder, and more helpful than you.

Out-help them. Out-empathize them. Or get out of the way.

Your customers just got an upgrade. Time to catch up.