AI is already forming an opinion about your organisation. The question is whether that opinion reflects the one you have worked to build.
When was the last time you searched for your own company using an AI tool? Not a Google search – an AI search. The answer may surprise you, and not always in a flattering way.
In a recent Disruptive Business Leadership session, Lynnaire Johnston brought together a panel of specialists to explore a question that is becoming increasingly urgent for leaders and organisations: how is your brand being interpreted on LinkedIn and by AI, and what happens when that interpretation does not match the reality?
The conversation featured Brenda Meller, a LinkedIn strategist and company page specialist; Felipe Cofiño, a human resources and organisational development leader; and Melanie Richards, a trust and events specialist. Together, they examined the signals AI reads, where brands are getting it wrong, and what leaders can do to take back control of their digital narrative.
AI Is Already Interpreting Your Brand
The starting point of the discussion was a simple exercise that revealed something significant. Search for your name and your company on Google. Then do the same search in an AI tool. The two results are often quite different – and what is missing from the AI result matters just as much as what is there.
When Felipe Cofiño did this test he discovered that AI had formed a reasonably accurate picture of his professional brand, drawing on content across multiple platforms. Brenda Meller noted that AI tends to scan the web for reputable sources and LinkedIn ranks highly among them, particularly company pages, which are publicly visible in a way that many personal profiles are not.
The implications for brands are significant. If your organisation has no LinkedIn company page, or if that page contains only generic content about your services, that is the signal AI is reading. Absence does not mean neutrality. It means your brand is being interpreted by whatever fragments happen to exist online.
“LinkedIn is a highly reputable website – and company pages are wide open. I think there is an opportunity there from an AI perspective.” — Brenda Meller, LinkedIn strategist
The Rise of GEO: Beyond SEO
Most organisations have, at this point, some awareness of search engine optimisation. What many have not yet grasped is GEO – generative engine optimisation. The concept is straightforward: are you findable in AI-generated responses in the same way you have worked to be findable in traditional search?
The answer for most organisations is: not yet. And the gap is likely to grow. LinkedIn has been identified as the second most cited source of answers to business questions asked of AI tools. This is not a marginal consideration. It means that the content your organisation publishes on LinkedIn – or fails to publish – is actively shaping how AI represents you to people searching for solutions in your space.
The practical implication is that company pages, profiles, articles, and comments on LinkedIn are no longer just social media content. They are source material for AI.
Every piece of content is a signal. Every gap in that content is also a signal.
Company Pages: From Afterthought to Authority
One of the most consistent themes across the discussion was the undervalued role of the LinkedIn company page. Brenda Meller made a point that reframed the conversation: the low reach of company page posts is not a failure. It is a feature.
When someone visits your company page and scrolls through your posts, they are seeing only your content. No competitors. No distractions. That is a concentrated audience, and one that is already interested enough to be there. The question is whether what they find when they arrive reflects the authority and expertise your organisation actually holds.
Roy Kowarski offered a vivid analogy: navigating LinkedIn is like walking around an exhibition floor. People are looking at various stands, having conversations, being introduced. When someone mentions your company and that person then visits your company page, that page is your stand. What they find there determines whether they stay, learn something, and return.
“Show up with value and show people how you can help them overcome obstacles. If they can believe and trust you, you have got their vote.” — Roy Kowarski, Out There Branding
AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement for Brand Voice
A recurring concern across the panel was the tendency of organisations to hand content creation entirely to AI and accept the output without interrogating it against their brand voice, values, or strategic goals.
Brenda Meller said, ‘Your AI tool is like an unpaid intern with limitless hours. It needs to be coached. It will make mistakes. It needs to be corrected. And if you correct it consistently, it will improve.’ The analogy is useful precisely because it reframes the relationship. An intern does not replace a strategist. They assist one.
The organisations that are using AI well, the panel agreed, are not the ones producing the most content. They are the ones that have started with a clear strategy, defined their target audiences and goals, uploaded their brand and messaging guidelines, and then used AI to accelerate idea generation while continuing to review and refine every output before it is published.
Roy Kowarski described his own process of working with an AI specialist to build agents that learn from his business over time, becoming progressively better calibrated to his voice, his values, and the problems he solves for clients.
The point is instructive: AI gets better the more you train it, and training it takes intentional, consistent input.
Trust Is Built by Humans, Not Generated by Algorithms
Melanie Richards brought a trust lens to the conversation. Her position: trust cannot be built by AI. It can be established, invited, and cultivated. But it requires human presence and genuine connection.
The risk she identified is a brand that is technically visible – well-written, algorithm-aware, regularly published – but feels hollow. People can sense it. A rocket emoji. A certain cadence of phrasing. A suspiciously balanced structure. These are signals too, and they work against trust.
She illustrated this with an example of a company whose posts were appearing repeatedly across LinkedIn groups, clearly templated, clearly automated, and clearly not performing the function intended. Rather than building brand credibility, the repetition was eroding it. People were asking why they kept seeing the same thing. The brand had prioritised presence over authenticity, and it showed.
“Tell us how you help, and stop telling us who you want to help. The power dynamics of AI that come through – they help us not trust the brand.” — Melanie Richards, trust and events specialist
Who Owns the LinkedIn Company Page?
One of the more practical threads in the discussion concerned who, within an organisation, should own the LinkedIn company page. The traditional answer is marketing and communications. Felipe Cofiño made a compelling case that this is too narrow.
LinkedIn began as a recruitment platform. Significant numbers of people are still using it for that purpose. If HR and business development are not contributing to company page content, the organisation is missing an opportunity to position itself as an employer of choice – and to have that positioning read and surfaced by AI in talent-related searches.
Employee advocacy was also raised as a significant multiplier. The organisations doing this well are not just publishing content on their company pages. They are empowering their people to engage with that content, respond to comments, and bring their own professional audiences into contact with the company’s ideas and values.
What to Do Next: Practical Starting Points
The session closed with a set of practical directions for leaders and their organisations:
- Search for your organisation using an AI tool. Do it now, before someone else does. Note what comes up, what is accurate, what is missing, and what you would want to see that is not there. That gap is your starting point.
- Audit your company page. Visit it as a stranger would. Scroll through the posts and ask whether they answer the questions your ideal clients or candidates are actually asking. If the content is primarily about your organisation rather than the problems it solves, that needs to change.
- Start with strategy, not content. Before generating a single post, define who you are talking to, what you want them to do, and what you want to be known for. Only then does it make sense to use AI to accelerate content creation.
- Train your AI tools properly. Upload your brand guidelines, your messaging framework, and examples of content that reflects your voice. The more context you give, the better the output.
- Keep the human element visible. AI can generate content. It cannot generate trust. The warmth, the specificity, the sense of a real person behind the words – that is still your competitive advantage, and it is what AI cannot replicate.
- Check your LinkedIn privacy settings. Specifically, check whether LinkedIn has opted you in to using your data for AI training purposes. In some regions this is on by default. Decide for yourself whether that is a setting you want to leave in place.
The Conversation Is Already Happening
One of the clearest takeaways from this session is that the conversation about your brand is already happening in AI tools, whether or not you are participating in it. AI is scanning, indexing, and forming impressions. The organisations that shape what it finds will be seen, surfaced, and recommended. The ones that do not will be represented by whatever fragments happen to exist.
This is not a technology problem. It is a visibility problem.
And like all visibility problems, it is best addressed deliberately, with a strategy, rather than reactively, once the gap has already formed.