Editorial
Research Report
Business Leaders CX Report: What’s Working and What’s Not in AI-Driven CX
The Gist
- AI discovery changes the buying journey. Prospects can now discover, evaluate and reject brands through ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity before sales teams ever know they existed.
- GEO is bigger than marketing. Your AI-generated reputation is shaped by reviews, support quality, product issues, employee sentiment and real customer experiences — not just SEO or content strategy.
- Leaders need cross-functional ownership now. Brands that actively monitor AI narratives and close gaps quickly can build a compounding trust and discovery advantage.
Picture this. A VP of customer success at a mid-size SaaS company is evaluating vendors for a new onboarding platform. She doesn't start with Google. She opens ChatGPT and types a question. Within seconds, she has a shortlist. Three brands she recognizes. Two she doesn't. One of those unknowns sounds compelling — the AI describes it as responsive, well-regarded for implementation support and strong on integration flexibility. She clicks through.
The website is fine. The demo request form works. But then things start to unravel. The onboarding sequence is generic. The support chat takes 48 hours to respond. The integration documentation is incomplete. A quick search on G2 turns up a cluster of reviews saying exactly what she's now experiencing. She closes the tab and goes back to the shortlist.
That brand was discovered, evaluated and rejected before the sales team knew she existed. And the AI that recommended them will keep recommending them — until enough people have the same experience and say so loudly enough for the model to notice.
This is the GEO gap. And it represents one of the most significant — and most overlooked — opportunities in business right now.
Table of Contents
Discovery Has Moved. Readiness Hasn't.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — the practice of ensuring your brand surfaces favorably in AI-generated answers — has been framed almost entirely as a marketing discipline. Get your content structured correctly. Build authority in the right publications. Manage your reviews. Earn citations. The playbook reads like AI SEO with a new coat of paint.
That framing misses the deeper opportunity.
Gartner predicts traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 as users shift to AI chatbots. B2B buyers are already leading that migration — 45% of B2B buyers used AI during a recent purchase. And Semrush found in September 2025 that 93% of Google AI Mode sessions end without a click to an external website. The journey is being decided before the visit happens.
GEO doesn't just change how brands get discovered. It changes what gets discovered about them. AI models — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and others — aren't pulling your approved marketing copy. They're synthesizing the full record: review platforms, support forums, community threads, analyst commentary, social media, employee feedback sites. They're doing it at scale and in seconds, what a diligent buyer would do if they had three weeks and no deadline.
The result is that AI has become a continuous, real-time operational audit. One that your prospects see before you've had a chance to shape the narrative.
When the gap between what AI says about you and what a customer experience delivers is wide, the consequences compound fast. A poor experience generates a new signal. That signal enters the ecosystem. The AI updates its synthesis. The next prospect arrives with lower expectations or doesn't arrive at all. The feedback loop runs whether you're watching it or not.
But here's the flip side: organizations that close that gap — that align what AI surfaces with what customers genuinely experience — gain a compounding discovery advantage their competitors won't easily replicate. McKinsey research found that just 16% of brands systematically track their AI search performance. The window is open, but it won't stay that way.
Related Article: AEO, GEO, SEO: What's the Best Search Playbook?
This Is Not a CX Problem
Here is where the conversation needs to change.
Most organizations, when they eventually notice that their AI-generated brand narrative is unflattering, reach for the CX team. Improve the scores. Fix the cusotmer journey. Respond to the reviews. And yes — those things matter. But treating this as a CX fix is the wrong diagnosis. This touches every function. And that's precisely where the opportunity lives.
Consider what the AI is synthesizing when it forms a view of your brand.
It's reading product reviews that reference missing features, confusing interfaces and broken promises made at the point of sale. That's a product problem. It's aggregating support interactions — response times, resolution rates and the tone of automated replies. That's an operations problem. It's picking up the gap between the brand story marketing has constructed and the lived experience customers are describing in their own words. That's a messaging problem. It's surfacing Glassdoor entries about a high-pressure culture, poor management and constant churn. That's an employee experience problem that has just become a customer trust problem.
No CX leader, however skilled, can fix any of that alone.
What AI has done is remove the buffer. There used to be a lag — between a customer having a bad experience, leaving a review, that review accumulating enough weight to affect perception, and a prospect encountering it. That lag gave organizations time to course-correct before the damage spread too far.
That buffer is gone. AI compresses the timeline dramatically. The warts and blemishes that organizations have been managing slowly, or quietly, or not at all, are now visible at the moment of highest purchase intent — to prospects who have never heard of them before. The opportunity is to be the brand that got there first.
Cross-Functional GEO Action Plan
Generative Engine Optimization requires coordinated leadership across marketing, CX, product, operations and communications. These five moves can help organizations respond faster and compete more effectively.
| Leadership Move | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Run an AI Narrative Audit | The first move is diagnostic, and it's simpler than most expect. Ask the AI tools what they say about you. Not your marketing team — you, personally, in a fresh session. Open ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Type the questions your ideal prospect would type. See what surfaces. See what the model emphasizes. See what it gets wrong, and where that wrongness originates. This is now a leadership intelligence task, not a marketing task, and it needs to happen regularly. |
| Turn Insight Into Fast Action | The second move is to close the loop between insight and action with real urgency. Voice of the Customer programs that produce monthly dashboards reviewed in quarterly business reviews are not fit for purpose in a GEO environment. If AI is continuously synthesizing customer feedback, the window between identifying a problem and fixing it must shrink considerably. That means giving operational teams the mandate — and the resource — to act on insight in near-real time. |
| Map the Pre-Visit Journey | Third, organizations need to map the pre-visit journey. Most customer journey mapping starts at the website. That's now too late. The AI-mediated touchpoint — the moment a prospect forms a first impression inside ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity — needs to be understood, even though you don't own it. What is the prospect encountering there? What expectation does it create? What happens when they arrive, and reality diverges from the AI's description? Designing for that gap is a new and urgent capability. |
| Treat Complaints as Training Data | Fourth, treat every unresolved complaint as a strategic liability. This is the mindset shift that matters most. A negative review that gets no response, or a known product issue that gets a workaround rather than a fix, is not just a customer relations problem. It is training data. It will be surfaced to prospects at the moment they're closest to a purchasing decision. Every organization has a list of things it knows are broken and has deprioritized. GEO makes that list expensive in a way it wasn't before. |
| Assign Ownership | Finally — and this is the structural question — someone needs to own the AI-generated brand narrative. Right now, in most organizations, nobody does. Marketing thinks it's a content problem. CX thinks it's a feedback problem. Product thinks it's a roadmap problem. Comms thinks it's a crisis management problem. It is all those things simultaneously. Without cross-functional ownership and executive sponsorship, the efforts remain fragmented — and the opportunity passes to whoever moves first. |
The GEO Cycle Is Already Running
The instinct for many organizations will be to wait. To see how this develops. To treat GEO as something to address in the next planning cycle.
That instinct is costly.
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AI discovery is not a future state. It is already the primary research channel for a significant and growing share of B2B buyers. The feedback loop between customer experience and AI-generated brand reputation is already running. For some organizations, it is already working against them — and they don't know it yet.
The cycle is already running. The only question is whether it's running for you or against you.
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