What can businesses do to stay relevant, visible and profitable in the age of AI?
Somewhere in Yorkshire this week, a customer who should have been yours will not search and scroll. They will ask an AI assistant a question.
Who is the best accountant for a small manufacturer in Leeds? Which café in Bradford is worth the detour? Which three suppliers should we shortlist?
Back will come a handful of names, each with a reason attached. If yours is not among them, you will never know the question was asked. There is no missed call and no lost tender. There is only a quiet month you cannot explain.
The shift is already here
This is not a forecast. Ofcom found that 54% of UK adults now use AI tools, up from 31% a year earlier. Three-quarters of online adults read AI-generated search summaries at least some of the time.
McKinsey reports that 38% of European consumers already use generative AI to research products and services and decide what to buy. It also warns that unprepared brands could lose 20% to 50% of their traffic from traditional search.
AI is changing how people discover brands, compare options, make decisions and buy. Faced with that, most owners ask: “How do we start using AI?”
It is a fair question. It is not the first one.
Your competitors can buy the same tools you can, at the same price. When any business can produce a tidy website, a competent proposal and a month of social posts in an afternoon, competence stops being an advantage.
The businesses that thrive will not simply be the ones using AI. They will be the ones building something worth choosing.
Here are four things every business should be thinking about.
- Build a distinctive brand
AI is very good at averages. It summarises, compares and shortlists. If your business looks, sounds and feels like everyone else in your sector, AI makes it easier than ever to become invisible.
Distinctiveness is the defence: a clear identity, a defined position in your market and a point of view that people recognise and remember.
Try a simple test. Take the logo off your website. Would a customer still know it was you?
- Become relentlessly customer-focused
Technology changes. What customers want from you does not change. Customers want to be understood, to be treated well and to get what they paid for, every time.
So listen to what customers actually want, not what you assume they want. Understand their frustrations, especially the ones they have stopped mentioning because they no longer expect you to fix them. Improve the experience. Deliver consistently high-quality products and services.
When an alternative is one question away, “good enough” is a risky place to stand. Your offer has to create enough value to make choosing you the obvious decision.
- Make innovation part of the business
Innovation is not reserved for firms with laboratories and research budgets.
It might be the next big new product. It is just as likely to be a new offer, a better customer experience, a redesigned process or a smarter way to solve a problem your customers have put up with for years.
What matters is that it happens on purpose. Treat innovation as an occasional project and the market will have moved by the time you finish. Build it into the routine and you move with it.
- Optimise for AI discovery
SEO still matters. But a place on the results page is no longer the whole game. People increasingly ask AI tools for recommendations, comparisons and answers, and those tools can only work with what they can find, understand and trust about you.
That means thinking about Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), sometimes called Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), alongside traditional SEO: authoritative, structured and genuinely useful information that AI systems can understand, reference and associate with your brand.
In practice:
- Clear answers to the questions your customers really ask
- Consistent facts about who you are and what you do, wherever you appear online
- Evidence that you know your field: case studies, reviews, credentials and informed opinion
Here is a two-minute test. Ask an AI assistant to recommend a business like yours in your area. Then ask what it knows about you by name. Whatever it says is what a growing share of your market is being told.
Discoverable and desirable
Look again at that list. Only one of the four is about technology. The other three are the fundamentals of a good business, and that is the point.
Be discoverable without being desirable and you will be compared, then passed over. Be desirable without being discoverable and you will remain the best-kept secret in Yorkshire.
The future belongs to businesses that are both. AI can help you move faster, but your brand, customer experience, innovation and value proposition are what give people a reason to choose you.
The cost of waiting
None of this arrives with a deadline, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. Nobody writes to tell you that your business has dropped off the shortlist.
Meanwhile, the businesses that show up clearly and credibly are the ones being recommended. Each customer they win brings another review, another mention and another reason to be recommended again. That advantage compounds, and ground lost quietly is hard to win back.
Is your business ready for the AI era?
Most business owners are not short of ambition. They are short of time, and of an honest outside view of where they stand.
That is what Marvis Mark provides. Our Growth Diagnostic takes a structured look at your brand, your offer, your customer experience and your visibility, including how you appear when AI does the searching. You come away knowing where you are strong, where you are exposed and what to fix first.
Start with the two-minute test above. If you do not like the answer, or you are not sure what to do about it, that is the conversation to have with us.
Book your Growth Diagnostic at marvismarkconsulting.com/book-online or email support@marvismarkconsulting.com.