While businesses figure out how to use AI, customers are figuring out how to use it, too.
I’ve had a soft spot in the floor of my house for many years. I’ve hired—and paid—one person after another to fix it. I finally decided to hire a structural engineer. I thought it was a good idea to engage someone who wasn’t trying to sell me something and someone who would tell me what was actually wrong and how to repair it properly this time.
Once I had the engineer’s drawings, I asked friends for reputable, reliable and quality contractors. The three estimates I got were all over the place and thousands of dollars apart. One was labor only and another was itemized with materials included. The third one overwhelmed me. It was one long description of everything the contractor intended to do, dumped into a QuickBooks form with a single price at the top. I couldn’t make sense of the scope or why his estimate was so much higher than the others. The thing is, I liked this contractor immensely. He was confident, personable, and seemed to know exactly what he was doing. I had a good feeling about him from the moment we met.
I had a deer-in-the-headlights moment. With my past experience, I wasn’t about to move forward without understanding exactly what I was paying for. So, like many of you, I turned to AI.
I uploaded the estimates and the engineer’s drawings and started feeding AI a lot of questions. What was included in one proposal that wasn’t in another? Were they describing the same work using different terminology? What was missing? What should I be asking before signing anything? Every time AI responded, I had more questions. It was all very informative, and it illuminated my utter lack of understanding of the construction and repair world.
I looked into their online reputations, too. One had hundreds of positive reviews and a substantial history of work in the area. Another had almost no online presence and the other had some troubling reviews.
I was now armed with information and solid questions to ask the contractors. All I had to do was meet with them, ask the questions and use my own judgment. It was a very different conversation than I would have had a few years ago, before I was conversing with AI.
I ultimately chose the contractor whose estimate was in the middle because they identified something the others hadn’t, had already accounted for it in their proposal, and had a strong, positive online reputation.
The experience made me wonder how many businesses are thinking about what AI is doing to their customers?
Companies are spending an enormous amount of time figuring out how AI can help them work faster, produce more, operate more efficiently and so forth. Their customers are also using the same technology to become more capable buyers. I’m one case in point.
In technical and professional services, the seller has traditionally held a considerable advantage in knowledge. The buyer often had to depend on the seller to explain what was needed and why it’s important. AI is beginning to narrow that gap.
Think about what this means for a business. A prospective customer may have already used AI to compare your proposal with others before you ever get to have a conversation about it.
What does this mean for the sales experience? Are your proposals written to help customers understand what they’re buying, or are they simply records of what you intend to sell? Are you using language that’s easy to understand? Does someone follow up on the proposal to see whether the customer has questions?
I wonder how many small and midsize businesses are giving as much thought to how their customers are using AI as they are to how they can use it themselves. A more informed customer may expect more from you.
Gartner reported in 2026 that 45% of surveyed B2B buyers had used generative AI during a recent purchase. Yet 69% preferred to validate AI-generated insights with sales representatives.
Customers are doing more homework, but they’re still looking for someone who knows what they’re talking about.
This raises another question, particularly for those of us who sell professional services. If AI makes specialized information so much easier to access, does that diminish the value of our expertise? I think it depends on what we’ve been selling.
Consider a financial advisor. I can ask AI to explain investment options, compare strategies and help me understand the terminology. But I still want someone who understands my circumstances and knows what questions I haven’t thought to ask. I want someone who helps me make decisions around my unique circumstances when the answer isn’t clear cut.
The same is true of an attorney or a CPA. AI can help with research and analysis. But an experienced professional has worked through situations that don’t fit neatly into a textbook. They’ve seen what happens when an apparently good decision turns out badly. And they can draw on those experiences when deciding what to recommend.
There’s also something to be said for having another person to talk things through with and challenge assumptions, someone who is an experienced professional that will see what you’re overlooking or tell you that the question you’re asking may not be the question you need answered.
I see this in my own work as a brand strategist. You can ask AI to write a positioning statement. It might even produce something that sounds snazzy. But it may not be right for your specific business.
The deeper work begins long before anyone writes a statement. It requires understanding the business, its history, its people and what makes it genuinely different. Sometimes the work uncovers things that may have been overlooked or diluted over the years. And the distinction you’re claiming must be something the organization is capable of delivering.
Then what follows is aligning the business around the distinction, so the promise isn’t just something customers read on the website. It’s something they experience when they call, when they buy, when something goes wrong and long after the sale.
AI can be enormously helpful in that process. But the questions an experienced professional asks, the connections they make and their ability to recognize when something doesn’t fit can change the quality of what comes out of the work.
I suspect the most capable professionals will become even more valuable when they learn to use AI well. They can take the technology further because they know what to look for and what to challenge. They also recognize when the answer doesn’t fit or needs more work.
I think that’s an opportunity for businesses that have spent years developing genuine expertise, because better-informed customers will be better equipped to recognize it.
There’s another side to this, of course. There always is. AI can sound remarkably confident while being completely wrong. It can misunderstand a situation, overlook something important or draw a conclusion that sounds reasonable until someone with experience examines it.
I could have uploaded those contractor estimates and accepted every comparison AI produced. But AI hadn’t crawled underneath my house. It hadn’t inspected the wood or evaluated the conditions that caused the damage. And it certainly wasn’t going to be responsible if the repair failed.
What AI did was help me understand what I was reading and what I needed to ask.
Now imagine being a professional dealing with a customer who arrives armed with incorrect information from AI and is absolutely convinced they’re right. This is a delicate moment.
I think there’s an enormous opportunity to build trust. Dismissing the customer or becoming defensive accomplishes very little. Being patient, asking questions and explaining why something may not apply to that customer’s circumstances, while drawing on an actual experience to demonstrate your reasoning, will earn your keep.
It’s a reminder that the experience of working with an expert matters just as much as the expertise itself. And helping someone understand something they didn’t know before is valuable.
For years, businesses have been able to make claims about themselves that were difficult for the average customer to evaluate. Experienced. Client-focused. Committed to quality.
We’ve all seen those words. They’re everywhere. But what do they actually tell us?
If you’re experienced, show me what that experience has produced. If you’re client-focused, let me feel it in the way you treat me. If you claim to deliver exceptional quality, give me something beyond your own assertion that demonstrates it.
Today, a customer can ask AI to compare your claims against your proposals, your reviews, your published work and what your competitors are offering.
That’s why your online reputation matters. It’s why detailed reviews, credible third-party recognition, and real examples of your work are so valuable. They’re evidence that someone other than you recognizes what you’re claiming.
A 2025 Edelman–LinkedIn study found that 64% of hidden B2B decision-makers trusted thought leadership more than traditional marketing materials and product sheets when evaluating a company’s capabilities.
People want to see how you think. They want evidence that you understand the problems they’re trying to solve.
I would take this further.
A beautifully designed website and a compelling sales presentation won’t compensate for a confusing proposal or an employee who can’t answer questions. It won’t make up for a frustrating experience after the sale.
Every one of those encounters communicates something about your brand.
I teach that brand is infrastructure within a business. It guides decisions, shapes behavior and influences how the organization operates. It isn’t something you bolt on after the business is built.
Imagine a prospective customer uploading your proposal alongside two competing proposals and asking AI to compare them.
Would what makes you different become immediately apparent? Or would your offering look essentially the same as everyone else’s, leaving price and personality to determine the decision?
That’s a question worth asking.
What happens after the sale? Does anyone check in to see how things are going? If there’s a problem, is it easy to get help? If you’ve outsourced your warranty service, does that experience reflect the same standards you promised when you were trying to win the customer?
It’s remarkable how much effort businesses put into attracting customers and how little attention some give to what happens once they’ve got them.
What customers experience is your brand, whether you intended it or not.
Companies have long used mystery shoppers to discover what customers were actually experiencing. There’s still tremendous value in that. Maybe I should start offering that service for businesses myself. I’d be very, very good at it.
I’ve been reading the latest Harvard Business Review, including an article by Felipe A. Csaszar. He compares this moment to the arrival of the internet in the 1990s, stating that companies that built lasting advantages weren’t the ones that simply adopted the technology. They were the ones that recognized what it made possible and built their businesses differently because of it.
If every business has access to similar AI tools, simply using those tools isn’t much of a competitive advantage. So where does the advantage come from?
I believe brand strategy has an important role to play in answering that question.
When I conduct a brand workshop, we don’t begin by studying competitors and figuring out how to be more like them. We begin inside the business, uncovering what makes it genuinely different and why customers should care.
We also spend time exploring what I call “wishes/granted.” What more could we do for our customers if the usual limitations weren’t in the way? What would make our distinction even more valuable to them?
Historically, some of those ideas have been impractical, too expensive or beyond the organization’s capabilities. AI may be changing that.
Rather than beginning with the question, “How can we use AI?” Consider asking, “Knowing what makes us worth choosing, what could AI help us do that we haven’t been able to do before?”
That’s a much more interesting conversation to me.
I didn’t become a contractor. I became a better-informed customer. And I still needed the expertise of someone who knew what he or she was doing.
In the end, AI helped me ask better questions and understand the differences among the proposals. It also made me consider what would have happened if I hadn’t had access to it.
Businesses are gaining extraordinary new capabilities through AI. And so are their customers.
While companies are busy figuring out how to use AI to improve their own operations, I wonder how many are preparing for customers who are becoming more capable of evaluating them.
If your customers showed up tomorrow better informed and ready to investigate your claims, would your value become clearer or harder to see?
Read more of Jennifer’s latest thinking on Substack.
