Before a prospect ever visits your website or talks to your sales team, there’s a good chance they’ve already asked AI about you.

Half of consumers already use AI-powered search, and 51 percent of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot.

Today’s brands are competing for attention in places they can’t always see. But at the same time audiences are rebelling against the rise of AI slop. By optimizing for speed and scale, marketers run the risk of eroding their most important asset: human trust.

Two Chief Members who’ve studied this shift closely are Idil Cakim, Founder and CEO of Iris Flex, and Justyna Bak, Founder of TechSurprises LLC. Through their firms, they’re helping executives build AI-enabled go-to-market strategies, without sacrificing authenticity.

We asked the pair to share their advice for how leaders can maintain that balance in their own marketing. Here’s where they say marketers are getting it right — and wrong — and how they use it themselves as founders.

What's the biggest mistake marketers make as they integrate AI into their go-to-market strategy?

Cakim: The efficiencies AI bring to our work are undeniable, but when marketers focus only on numeric outcomes, they miss the emotional factors underlying consumer attitudes and behaviors (e.g., people’s sense of authenticity, agency, and need for control).

Consumers notice when a brand’s voice shifts or when interactions feel automated. Some interpret AI as innovation, others may interpret it as diminished care. If customers who seek authenticity and prefer human voice sense that brands are “using AI to talk to them,” trust can wobble. Marketers need to track these resonance factors as closely as they track KPIs.

Bak: The biggest mistake is using AI to do the old job faster instead of asking how AI has changed what buyers need and how they behave.

The old job automated means more content, more personalization, more outreach. Inboxes, feeds, and search results are now full of generated copy that all sounds the same. People have learned to tune it out. AI makes marketing incredibly cheap to produce, but it does not make it credible, and every piece of AI slop spends a little of the trust a brand has built.

The new job is to cultivate trust with humans and establish it with agents. We used to market Business-to-Consumer or Business-to-Business. Now there is an agent in the middle: Business-to-Agent-to-Consumer and Business-to-Agent-to-Business.

So the question I would ask every leadership team is "When our buyer asks an AI bot about our market, will it understand who we are and why we matter?”

Where are you seeing the most potential for marketers to leverage AI authentically?

Cakim: When we asked consumers about brands that use AI when creating products and services for Iris Flex’s AI Gap Study, 4 in 10 describe them as innovative (40%) and creative (36%).* If AI aligns with a brand’s natural voice, marketers can tap into that sentiment to create new, meaningful experiences.

For AI to blend naturally into an experience or routine, the perceived benefit has to outweigh the perceived risk. When AI helps someone get a faster customer service response, plan a vacation more thoughtfully, or generate a grocery list tailored to their family, that’s meaningful value. People don’t mind AI when it feels like help or improvement rather than replacement. Brands don’t need to avoid AI to appease those who are hesitant. They need to use it in ways that serve people and strengthen the experience.

*As cited in Cakim’s book AI for Marketing: The Consumer Perspective (CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, 2026)

Bak: Making sure it tells your story accurately, because buyers now ask AI first. Before a prospect engages with your website or your sales team, an AI assistant has already shaped how they see your brand and which vendors make their shortlist. Most leaders have never seen theirs. To make sure your company shows up on it accurately, your claims have to be clear, consistent, and verifiable somewhere other than your own marketing, because that is what a model can check and cite.

What's your North Star for maintaining consumer trust as AI changes the marketing landscape?

Bak: Trust takes time, and no single campaign creates it. It grows through many touchpoints, each one helpful and relevant to the problems your audience faces. It might start with a LinkedIn post that offers a fresh perspective on a timely problem. It grows when people join the discussion and feel part of a community. Chief is a good example. People join for the community, not the content or the Clubhouses.

So my North Star is to earn trust from two audiences at once, human and agentic, with the same truth for each, told in the form each one reads.

Cakim: Choice is the North Star. In a period of AI-driven change, people want agency over how much data they share and how much automation they experience.

Some consumers welcome hyper‑personalization, while others find it intrusive. Some want speed and turnkey simplicity, but others want the handcrafted and bespoke. Brands can’t be everything to everyone. They can, however, understand their audience’s tendencies and calibrate the balance of human and AI involvement accordingly.

How do you use AI as a founder, and what would you recommend to other entrepreneurs?

Bak: With virtually no budget beyond AI subscriptions, I wrote, produced, and launched Marketing Plan for Tech Startups. I also built my own e-reader for the book, using Vercel and ChatGPT. I could have paid someone to do it. I did it myself because I wanted to learn the tools, and I knew the hands-on experience would pay dividends later. It has. Every recommendation I give founders now comes from my own hands-on work.

If I had to pick three things worth doing now, they would be:

  • Build your own prototypes, because a working demo moves a conversation faster than any slide.
  • Track how AI describes you by running the same buyer questions through ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini every month, and note if you are mentioned, cited, and described accurately.
  • Connect your data early, because AI can run much of the work between setting a goal and measuring it, but only if you give it proper context, your marketing, sales, and product data in one shared layer.

Cakim: I’ve shifted a junior analyst and strategist role to my AI tools — primarily Copilot and Claude — which I use to pressure‑test scenarios, synthesize data quickly, and accelerate early‑stage thinking.

Most research platforms now have AI built in. My favorites are AddMaple for quantitative work and Flowres for qualitative.

I also struggled with cold outreach, but expanding my buyer universe was essential. I now use e9e.io, which identifies prospects and analyzes their initiatives so my outreach can be both authentic and targeted.

My advice to other builders: Don’t hold back. Use AI to bring your imagination to life. The latest models can do far more than people assume, if you can just describe what you want in detail. Remain the subject‑matter expert. AI is powerful, but it still needs our direction, judgment, and guardrails.