How AI is rewriting the rules of brand discovery

Navigating the AI Frontier: How Brands Can Master Discovery in a Conversational World

The Web Summit Vancouver 2026 session, moderated by Paul Briggs of eMarketer, explored AI’s impact on brand discovery. He introduced James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound, a company assisting Fortune 500 brands in managing their presence within AI responses. Cadwallader asserted that how AI discusses a brand is becoming marketing’s most critical function.

Mr. Briggs presented eMarketer’s recent forecasts, highlighting significant consumer AI adoption. In the US, 125 million users engage with generative AI tools weekly, primarily for search, work-related tasks, and AI shopping. Mr. Cadwallader argued that traditional “search” is evolving, with brand discovery now occurring through conversations with AI agents like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude. He suggested that relying on a list of blue links for information retrieval will soon seem strange, as AI conversations become the new norm.

Profound’s platform addresses the probabilistic nature of AI models, yielding varied responses to identical queries. It continuously sends prompts across major AI engines, analyzing response differences and source information. This enables marketers to understand not only if their brand appears, but precisely *how* it is being represented. Mr. Cadwallader highlighted the “parrot problem,” where AI models might disseminate outdated or incorrect information, citing Southwest Airlines’ former unassigned seating policy. He stressed that brands must proactively control their narrative by ensuring content is fresh, granular, and original, making it easily digestible for AI.

He critiqued “generative engine optimization” (GEO) as “stupid,” advocating for an integrated marketing approach. Mr. Cadwallader introduced the “marketing engineer” role: a technical marketer capable of deploying and customizing AI agents across the entire marketing stack, including SEO, product marketing, and public relations. This new paradigm involves creating marketing content specifically for AI agents, which might never be directly seen by humans. These agents crawl, remix, and integrate content into AI answers. Profound’s platform empowers marketers to build and deploy these agents, enabling them to produce significantly more effective marketing content at scale.

Mr. Cadwallader noted the fragmented AI marketplace, with diverse platforms like Grok, Meta, Perplexity, and Claude, each utilizing distinct browsing methods and data sources. He believes this fragmentation fosters healthy competition, driving continuous innovation and improvement in AI models, ultimately benefiting consumers. Profound’s key distinction is its technology-first approach, offering bleeding-edge tools rather than agency services. The platform allows marketers to actively perform the work, building vast amounts of marketing content using AI agents. This moves beyond mere data dashboards to provide actionable insights and direct content creation capabilities.