By Erfan Djazmi, Chief Digital Officer, Mediahubww
For decades, BT stitched itself into the fabric of British life. This is the company that literally built the pipes powering the nation’s telephone and broadband network, the one that gave us Maureen Lipman in the 80s, charming the country with her reminder that anyone with an ’ology’ (one of those clever-sounding degrees) was proper smart, in that wonderfully British way that still sums up the era. As UK ad lands consistent YoY top five ad spender, BT is a brand that has long occupied the heart as much as the wallet.
Like anyone staring down the barrel of another tedious broadband renewal, I outsourced the task to AI and asked AI brains – GPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, Gemini – for the top three UK broadband providers for value, service and performance (reliability and speed). The verdict? No BT. Not even a mention, unless you count EE sneaking in once via Gemini.
And that’s the real disruption happening. It’s invisible to the machines that are increasingly shaping those conversations in the first place.
The ‘messy middle’ gets a makeover
Brands have long treated the mid-funnel as a comfy battleground – brand consideration, intent, all the usual suspects. Drive salience and mental availability with consumers, keep SOV above category norms, and you should be in a good spot.
While it is comfy, it is also a tad messy. The ‘paradox of choice’ is a major contributor to the Google dubbed ‘messy middle’ – when consumers face hundreds or thousands of options across a web of touchpoints, they experience decision fatigue, take longer to decide, or abandon purchases altogether.
AI agents address this by autonomously researching products, comparing prices, reading reviews, and curating personalised shortlists based on individual preferences, purchase history, and real-time context. If brands don’t make ‘the list’, they don’t even make it into the conversation. Yes, price aggregators have been doing this for years, but this feels different.
Salience, but make it machine-friendly
So, what does this mean for brands?
It’s not enough to be salient with people anymore, you have to be salient with the machines, as well as people. That means feeding the ecosystem with the right signals: brand mentions, verified reviews, trusted creator content, consistent value based messaging and oh the machines love an FAQ. In other words, all the breadcrumbs that AI uses to decide if your brand deserves to show up. That means brands needing to drive salience with consumers and machine visibility alike.
Being louder is futile when machines will filter the noise. The future belongs to brands that master the mid-funnel by working with the machines. The question isn’t how to outshout competitors, but how to outsmart the algorithms shaping the customer journey.
Getting your brand into the AI’s shortlist is as important as landing that prime slot on Saturday night telly.
Still rooted in that human touch
Behavioural economics tells us that many people enjoy browsing and place higher value on products they’ve personally selected, akin to the ‘IKEA effect’. Prospect theory and loss aversion may cause consumers to irrationally overweight the risk of ‘hallucinogenic’ AI outcomes and prefer the certainty of their own decisions.
So, it’s not all machine, and in the short term, machine salience is only part of the answer. The most probable scenario is a hybrid model where AI agents handle routine, low-stakes purchases – which is certainly the case for broadband choices -whilst humans remain in control for complex, high-value, or emotionally significant decisions.
P&G, Unilever and Samsung are leading the charge to get ‘answer engine’ ready, cleaning up their product data so machines can actually read it, beefing up FAQs so AI has something sensible to latch onto, and fuelling a steady stream of authentic reviews through creators and real users. It’s as close to a full-stack answer engine optimisation play that keeps them visible, trusted and machine-friendly across search, voice and AI platforms.
McKinsey’s October ‘Winning in the age of AI search’ report claims that $750 billion of US consumer spend will flow through AI-powered search and answer engines by 2028.
It’s time to get ready.
As my newly created synthetic Maureen Lipman AI agent quipped: “Ah, this is a juicy one, pet.”
