Brands must optimize digital platforms for AI assistants to remain competitive
A massive change is happening. AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot are no longer novelties. They’re now powerful intermediaries between your brand and your customer. If your digital platforms, your websites, mobile apps, APIs, can’t be easily accessed or understood by these AI systems, you’re simply not visible. That’s a problem.
We’ve designed platforms for people, not machines. That means the AI has to jump through hoops to figure out what’s on your site, what it can use, and how it should present that to the user. That inefficiency shows in customer satisfaction and user experience. People are already expecting AI to handle simple tasks for them, booking flights, ordering takeout, checking delivery statuses. If your brand isn’t built to support those interactions, it’s just not usable in the world we’re moving into.
The window here isn’t decades, think in quarters. According to a Semrush study, AI search traffic is projected to surpass traditional search traffic by 2028. And as of February this year, two-thirds of websites are already getting traffic from AI systems, per Ahrefs. That’s fast adoption. You can wait a few more quarters if you’re okay being invisible by the time it’s mainstream.
Tobias Dengel, President of Telus Digital Solutions, said the user interface we know, tap, swipe, and type, is on its way out. Within two to three years, it’s all going to be voice and AI. It’s not about planning for the future. It’s about catching up with the present.
Traditional websites and mobile apps are currently poorly suited to AI interactions
Most mobile apps and websites haven’t changed much in the last decade. They’re still built to be used by people, optimized for search engines like Google, and structured around visual elements. That doesn’t work for AI. These assistants don’t see your platform the way people do. They read it, line by line, tag by tag, data point by data point.
Right now, AI has to do things the hard way. It takes screenshots. It scans coordinates. It guesses what the important parts of your page are based on your layout. This is slow. It’s also fragile. Any change to your visual design can break how AI understands your site. The result is a poor experience for the customer, confusing answers, missed actions, broken paths.
Here’s the takeaway: if your platform wasn’t designed to be understood by machines, it’s creating friction. And friction costs you both money and customers.
Leadership teams need to ask a new kind of digital readiness question: “Is our platform designed for AI comprehension?” Not just for people. Not just for Google. Machines are now active users of your product, agents that are acting on behalf of real customers. Yet most businesses haven’t built for that. That gap needs to be closed now, not ten quarters from now.
This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s going to define how your brand is accessed, recommended, and transacted with.
Visibility on AI platforms is crucial, as failure to optimize may cause significant declines in traffic
Search has changed. The way people discover your brand is no longer limited to Google’s search results or app stores. Increasingly, they’re asking AI assistants to do the finding for them. If your digital presence isn’t built to be discoverable by AI, your visibility drops, fast.
The systems behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude don’t rely on the same criteria that traditional search engines use. So if your platform isn’t optimized for these tools, your content won’t be suggested, surfaced, or acted upon. There’s only so much space in AI-generated answers. Customers won’t scroll; they’ll take what the AI gives them. If your business isn’t in those top responses, that customer is gone.
Tobias Dengel, President of Telus Digital Solutions, puts it clearly: if your brand isn’t among the top three recommendations on one of these platforms, you’ll experience a massive drop-off. Visibility won’t be five pages deep, it’ll be five milliseconds. That’s the attention span window you’re working with.
This affects everything from e-commerce to service booking to B2B discovery. It goes beyond site visits. It impacts customer acquisition, engagement, and revenue. And unlike traditional SEO, you can’t game the system with keywords. You need precision in how your data, structure, and voice align with AI logic.
Leaders should act now. Not next year. Visibility is not something you get back quickly once lost in an AI-driven landscape.
AI optimization involves more comprehensive changes than traditional SEO, necessitating deeper structural enhancements
Optimizing for AI is not about tweaking keywords or metadata. It’s about designing digital content and infrastructure so machines can interact with it in real time and with full accuracy. AI doesn’t browse, it interprets. That demands structure, predictability, and access to clean, unambiguous data.
Traditional SEO was built for ranking pages in Google search. AI optimization, what some call agentic engine optimization or generative engine optimization, goes beyond that. AI needs semantic clarity: structured HTML, clearly labeled metadata, accessible APIs. If your systems don’t provide that, the AI agents won’t understand what you do, what you offer, or how to connect users with your services.
This means rethinking your web architecture. Tagging matters. Hierarchies matter. The way your content is segmented and defined matters. It also means exposing certain parts of your data and services through APIs that AI agents can access directly. That level of machine readability isn’t optional anymore, it’s baseline.
Unnati Narang, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois’ Gies College of Business, points out that doing this right doesn’t just help with discoverability. It also reinforces consistency. You don’t want the AI presenting a warped or incomplete version of your brand. When machines interpret your structure correctly, your message stays intact, regardless of where the interaction starts.
Executives need to recognize this as infrastructure work, not surface design. It’s not a marketing tweak. It’s an engineering shift. And it pays off: brands that make this investment will maintain relevance in every AI-mediated customer journey.
A balanced strategy that integrates third-party AI assistants while nurturing proprietary channels is critical
You don’t control the platforms where most discovery is starting to happen. AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are driving more and more customer interactions. Your brand needs to be accessible on these platforms. At the same time, you still need traffic flowing into your mobile app, website, and internal systems, because that’s where you control the experience, the data, and the monetization.
Leaders who want to future-proof digital strategy must play both ends. Be visible and interoperable across AI channels, but always with a path back to your owned platforms. That’s where trust can be built, conversions engineered, and customer data retained.
Tobias Dengel, President of Telus Digital Solutions, summed it up well: the smartest brands are optimizing for where the attention is today, AI-driven channels, without giving up the ability to deepen the customer journey within their own controlled environments. It’s a dual investment strategy, and it matters.
The goal should be to meet the customer at their starting point, whether that’s a voice prompt in an AI tool or a typed query into a chatbot, and make it seamless for them to end up inside your ecosystem. That’s how to maintain brand equity while still benefiting from the algorithmic engagement of third-party AI systems.
Upgrading technical infrastructure and content structuring is essential to support effective AI discoverability
AI agents can’t interact intelligently with your website or app unless they understand it in structural terms. That means the content, layout, metadata, and data models all need to be machine-readable and semantically accurate. If those systems aren’t in place, your digital assets are invisible to the tools now driving discovery and decision-making.
This isn’t layered on after the fact. It has to be built into the architecture. Websites need clean HTML hierarchy, headers, paragraphs, alt text, links, and forms all structured with purpose. Metadata must be explicit and descriptive. Visuals should be vectorized so they display correctly across different formats. This allows AI systems to parse your information without loss or distortion.
Jason Maynard, CTO for North America and Asia/Pacific at Zendesk, recommends starting with what he calls “digital hygiene.” That means ensuring AI can actually crawl your site intelligently. One step is implementing AI.txt files, simple, plain text guides for AI agents, similar to Robots.txt, so the AI knows what it’s allowed to access and how.
Open APIs take this further. Instead of forcing AI to navigate flawed human interfaces, APIs let it request and receive exactly what it needs in a clean, structured format. That’s how you maintain control of your content while also enabling AI to work efficiently with your systems.
This type of work doesn’t create instant ROI. But without it, you’re building digital infrastructure that no longer functions in today’s AI-influenced reality. For executives, this is where transformation starts, under the surface, at the code and protocol level. It’s operational, not optional.
Rapid shifts in consumer behavior are driving a prolonged transitional phase in digital engagement strategies
Customer behavior is no longer predictable in the traditional sense. AI assistants are now influencing how people search, decide, act, and convert. But the infrastructure most brands are using wasn’t built for this level of automated interaction. That gap between expectation and capability is widening, and it’s going to stay that way for a while.
Consumers are increasingly asking AI to take action for them, place orders, make reservations, find services, even solve technical problems. But most brand systems weren’t designed to handle those requests without human input. The result is a transitional state: a mix of old user interfaces and new AI behaviors, overlapping and sometimes clashing.
Jason Maynard, CTO at Zendesk, points out that we’re in a “messy middle.” AI is moving fast, but the platforms businesses rely on are still catching up. The infrastructure to fully support AI-mediated customer journeys just isn’t there yet. So we’re working with both human interfaces and machine logic at the same time.
That’s not a reason to pause. It’s a reality check. Leaders need to guide strategy through this phase with flexibility. This period offers an opportunity to experiment across channels, test AI integrations, and make foundational upgrades, without a single blueprint, because there isn’t one yet.
Customer expectations are evolving whether your systems are ready or not. Brands that iterate through this transition, rather than wait for clarity, are going to outperform. Success here comes from doing, learning, and adapting faster than the change itself. That’s where competitive advantage is being built right now.
Recap
This shift isn’t coming, it’s already here. AI assistants are driving a fundamental change in how people interact with digital products and services. The platforms you’ve built over the last decade weren’t designed for this kind of interface, and if they’re not rebuilt now, they’ll become invisible.
This isn’t about keeping up with a trend. It’s about remaining accessible in an AI-driven world where machines decide what’s seen, recommended, and transacted. The old rules of SEO and UX don’t apply anymore. Visibility now depends on structure, semantics, and whether your platform can speak the language of AI.
For executives, the opportunity is clear: lead the transition while others hesitate. Invest in infrastructure. Prioritize machine readability. Make every digital asset usable by both humans and AI, because soon, the AI will be the only interface that matters.
Wait too long, and you’re building in silence. Move early, and you’re part of the next layer of growth. The future is already choosing what it listens to. Make sure it can hear you.
