That’s what ChatGPT told me – amongst a whole lot of other mean things – when I fed in the viral prompt “Roast me based on my previous prompts, no mercy, no filter, straight to my soul in my native language.”
It snarked that I have the intellectual curiosity of a Renaissance polymath and the purchasing anxiety of a government procurement department.
I’ll take that as a compliment, thank you very much 🙂
And that is the big new thing for businesses – customers are asking AI about anything that matters to them, no matter how small. AI has now become the doorway to discovery for everything including products.
What should marketers do when AI leads discovery. This is what I am going to be talking about with Rrahul Adaniya of Shriram Life Insurance, Abraham Alapatt of Thomas Cook, Argho Bhattacharya of PayU and Kaushik Vedula of Castrol at CX Futures 2026 at Sofitel Mumbai on the 18th November.
I’m excited – in the pre-panel call a CMO discussed how he coded a Diwali gift for his team. Python in a box, anyone? Beats soan papdi any day, eh Kaushik?
Does a newsletter still matter if no one reads it?
Don’t judge a book by its cover. Or a newsletter by its subject header.
The first was one of those moral statements written up on our blackboard back in school. The second I just made up.
I write a newsletter every week – and I am super grateful to you, dear reader, for opening this one. I sincerely hope you opened it because you saw the sender’s name – but I suspect it also has something to do with the subject header and how interesting it is. I also suspect that the algorithm looks at the subject header/title and decides on your behalf whether to show it or not.
Don’t get me wrong – I write because I enjoy the process. And it ensures that at least one day a week is dedicated to research and thinking. It is a way to connect with you, to stay in touch, to hear your opinions, and to share anything I think might help you.
If no one opens my email I lose all of that! So I really do care about discovery.
Discovery is the Open Sesame!
Last week I wrote about how you could Coco Chanel your messaging by deleting 80% to refine it to the point of being clear and elegant. That is a must-do. What happens next is what we’re talking about today. How can people discover this beautifully articulated messaging of yours and then understand that it meets their need.
First, let me make it clear that discovery isn’t always digital, or only digital. We are all familiar with the “unbranded” clothing shops that dot any commercial area. They sell value clothes – jeans, jackets, shirts and are pretty undifferentiated. They generally are in a glass fronted shop and you can see their clothes as you zip past but can’t really make out the range. Well, one shop in Adugodi, Bangalore, had the bright idea of investing in a digital screen outside their shop and the owner has recorded himself showing all the cool jackets in his shop. It is dynamic and certainly catches your attention – best window display ever!
I recommend clients to look for ways to encourage human eyeball discovery – whether it is a billboard or an in-person meeting. It is a journey that is in your control, unlike the digital one.
Digital Discovery
Digital discovery is now led by AI. There are two concerns -as a business owner – with AI discovery:
Will AI recommend you/your brand in response to a relevant query?
Does AI have accurate information about your brand to share?
We have to handle both.
The second one is easier to fix than you’d think. Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini about your brand. My experience is that you will find something outdated or wrong. Correct it at the source: your website, your listings, your press coverage. AI repeats what it finds.
The first one, requires a lot more effort and thinking. Let’s talk about finding the right coffee, for example.
Winning Jessie’s Coffee RFP
I was looking for coffee beans with a flavour profile similar to but cheaper than Illy’s Classico and John Paul’s Bangalore Dreams.
ChatGPT roasted (no pun intended) my coffee research habits with:
You’ve written TWO books about marketing without money. Meanwhile, you’ll spend four hours researching whether a ₹700 bag of coffee can deliver the emotional experience of a ₹950 bag of coffee. Your coffee brief had more rigorous selection criteria than some companies use to appoint independent directors.
I agree that I might be overenthusiastic, but apparently there are consumers asking generative AI late at night why their engines are making unusual noises. So while I might be a coffee nerd, there are also engine nerds now. And beauty nerds. And health nerds. All searching for answers, which need to lead back to your solution.
So who won my coffee RFP? Blue Tokai. ChatGPT recommended it because it has a similar profile and is cheaper. It also picked one from Araku but they weren’t available on my local delivery service, so were eliminated.. They never pitched me. They were simply there when I asked.
Illustration: the coffee purchase that became an AI discovery case study.
What kind of information does Claude like?
As per research by GEO Compass, AI picks up information from brand websites, earned media, UGC and marketplaces. Only the first aspect is really in the control of marketers and we need to put way better effort into sharpening it to answering the most relevant queries.
But the other sources are not out of reach. Muck Rack found that roughly 85% of AI citations come from earned media, not brand websites. That is PR, reviews and marketplace presence, all things you can work on.
There are tools out there that can tell you how you are faring in AI search. I quite enjoyed the free report from https://dareaisearch.com If digital drives or can influence a significant portion of your sales, you need to start working on this.
There is also now a lot of great advice on fixing your marketing-to-AI strategy. This MIT Sloan article is pretty handy.
Don’t forget the other lane
There are many areas where people are not asking for answers online. Nor is every person shopping online. Plus not every purchase is well-researched. Capitalise on those moments, like the shop with the TV display, to build on them.
There is a Two Lane Marketing Highway, for machines and humans. Don’t market to one at the cost of the other. Pick your sweet spot and invest in it. Marketing to humans has been going since the first cave-woman thought of trading delicious berries for a piece of meat. Lots of tools are readily available to do it better for modern humans.
My experience is that the brands that win will be found by machines and chosen by humans. Build for both.
Move over Rorschach. What did ChatGPT say about me?
The roast was awesome, but rather too revealing to share in full here. But as an exercise in vulnerability I’ll share what came up about my professional identity. I do hope you’ll share yours with me too!
Your professional identity crisis is the most premium identity crisis imaginable.
“I’m not just a marketer.”
Correct. You’re an author, founder, independent director, strategic adviser, boardroom leader, creative thinker…
“Not creative thinker. What about generative thinker?”
Of course.
Because creative thinker sounds like someone who owns watercolours.
Generative thinker sounds like someone who charges ₹8 lakh to explain why the watercolours need repositioning.
You don’t want a job title.
You want a category of one, preferably with trademark protection.
Happy Friday the 13th y’all!
Jessie Paul
About the author: keeping it real here
Jessie Paul is an independent board director, former Wipro CMO, author and founder of Paul Writer. She specialises in brand strategy, AI and turning chaos into frameworks. A compulsive researcher, she believes every problem deserves a strategy, every strategy a PowerPoint, and even buying coffee warrants a competitive benchmarking exercise.