In my recent POVs, I’ve explored how the buyer’s journey is rapidly shifting as LLMs become the first — and often most influential — point of interpretation for B2B brands. This perspective builds on that foundation.
Because while the buying process is changing, one fact remains: The ultimate decision maker is still the C-suite. CEOs, CFOs, COOs — they sign the contract, carry the risk, and must trust that your brand can deliver outcomes.
And that’s the tension every modern brand now has to navigate.
Because before those leaders ever see your website, your pitch, or your vision, the LLM has already seen you. It has already interpreted your positioning. It has already decided whether you are relevant enough to present to the humans who make the final call.
This is the new brand reality: You must win the machine long before you have the chance to win the human.
The Shift: From Being Seen to Being Interpreted
For years we focused on visibility — reach, impressions, SEO, share of voice. But today, visibility without interpretability is meaningless.
If the LLM can’t understand what you stand for, it will not elevate you. If it can’t distinguish you from the noise, it will replace you with someone who is easier to explain. If your brand story is ambiguous, the model will fill in the blanks — often with your competitor’s narrative.
I’ve come to believe that this is the new frontier of thought leadership. Not writing more. Not shouting louder. But designing your brand so that a reasoning engine can reconstruct who you are — and do so accurately.
The Dual Responsibility of a Modern Brand
What makes this moment so fascinating is that brands now have two audiences that matter equally.
The future of brand leadership comes down to a simple dual mandate:be interpretable to the machine and trustworthy to the human
The first is the machine. It must understand your value, your category, your relevance. It must be able to articulate you — because it will be asked to.
The second is the C-suite. They must trust you. Not just trust your product, but trust your intentions, your integrity, your long-term direction. These are emotional, relational, human truths — and they still sit at the heart of every transformational decision.
If you fail with the first audience, you never reach the second. If you succeed with the first but fail with the second, you lose in the room.
A New Kind of Brand Craft
This moment requires a different kind of craftsmanship.
Brands must communicate with the precision of an engineer and the empathy of a storyteller. We need narratives that are strong enough for a model to interpret — and human enough for an executive to believe in.
And we must accept something new: the LLM is now part of the buying committee. Not officially, not visibly — but undeniably. It is the uninvited participant that shapes perception before we ever get the chance.
We are entering an era where the strongest brands will be those that can do two things simultaneously:
Teach the machine how to understand them.
Give the human a reason to trust them.
Lose either one and you are invisible. Master both and you shape the future.
This is where B2B brand leadership will be decided.
