AI has revolutionized what’s possible for branding and marketing small and medium sized businesses. It’s become an administrative assistant and a content generator, a brainstorm partner and a research assistant. It can crawl millions of websites and provide business solutions to real-world problems in seconds. So, if you’ve started reading this expecting me to tell you not to use AI, I’m going to disappoint you. I think AI has enormous power, and I expect that learning how to incorporate its benefits while minimizing the unintended consequences will be the test of an entire population for decades to come.

Businesses trying to market themselves often think of AI as a tool to make writing and researching easier. It can help with idea generation and many of the more tedious tasks of mass communication. But many are not paying close enough attention to what AI means for exposure on a greater scale and how we need to change our tactics to make us visible in an AI-first environment. In this article we explore what’s changing, and what we can do about it.