AI is changing how people discover and research companies. For CEOs and business leaders, this gives Executive Communications a new role in how a company is found, understood and trusted.
- AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are becoming part of how B2B buyers research companies — often before they ever visit your site.
- Buying groups are 20X more likely to choose a vendor everyone already knows and trusts. Reputation decides who gets considered.
- Executives are part of that reputation. Their public expertise is now a source AI systems read too.
- LinkedIn is the second most-cited source in AI answers — and individual voices drive most of that citation share.
- The goal isn't to write for AI. It's to make real expertise easier to find, wherever people — or AI — go looking.
For years, companies have invested in Executive Communications to build reputation, position their leaders as experts and create stronger relationships with customers, employees, investors and other important audiences. Those goals still matter. But the way people find information about companies is changing.
Potential clients can now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI tools to explain an industry, compare companies, recommend solutions or identify experts. Some of that research can happen before a potential client visits a company's website or speaks with its sales team.
This creates an important question for communications teams:
What does AI find when someone researches your company, your CEO or the topics your business wants to be known for?
The answer is becoming part of your digital reputation.
AI is changing how B2B buyers discover companies
Until recently, the digital buying journey was relatively easy to understand. Someone searched on Google, visited websites, read articles, clicked ads, downloaded reports or interacted with content.
AI is changing part of that journey because buyers can now ask questions instead of visiting multiple websites to find the answers themselves. A potential client could ask an AI tool which companies specialize in a particular problem, what solutions are available, who the experts are or what they should consider before choosing a provider. The AI system can then bring information from different sources together and provide an answer.
This matters because B2B buying decisions already depend heavily on familiarity and trust. Research from LinkedIn and Bain & Company found that vendors are 20 times more likely to be chosen when the entire buying group knows and trusts the brand at the beginning of the process, compared with situations where only the person recommending the solution knows it.
LinkedIn and Bain describe this idea as Buyability. In simple terms, buyers do not only need to believe that a company offers a good solution. They also need to feel confident choosing it and defending that decision internally. This becomes particularly important in B2B, where decisions often involve people from leadership, finance, legal, procurement and other areas of the organization.
We explored Buyability and the wider change in B2B discovery in our previous KINAI article, 94% of Buyers Use AI Before They Call. Are You Telling the Right Story? But there is another part of this shift worth exploring. If reputation influences whether a company is discovered and considered, what role do the people behind that company play?
Your executives are part of your company's digital reputation
Think about what happens when you research a company you may work with. You probably visit its website, but you may also search for its founder, CEO or leadership team. You look at what they have written, what topics they talk about, where they have worked, whether they have been interviewed and whether other credible people or organizations reference them. All of this contributes to how you understand the company.
AI systems can also access public information to understand connections between people, companies and topics. That means the public presence of an executive can become another source of information about the organization they represent. This is where Executive Communications becomes relevant to AI discovery.
An executive's digital presence can include LinkedIn content, original articles, interviews, podcasts, conference appearances, research, media coverage and expert commentary. Together, these activities create a public record of who that person is, what they know and what ideas they are associated with.
None of this should be created only for AI. It should build reputation with people first. But the same information can also make an executive's expertise easier for AI systems to find and understand.
Individual voices are becoming more important in AI discovery
Recent research gives us another reason to pay attention to this shift. In May 2026, LinkedIn published research from Meltwater analyzing approximately 9.5 million AI citations across six major AI experiences, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro.
The research found that LinkedIn was the second most cited source across the AI experiences analyzed, behind YouTube. More importantly for Executive Communications, individual member voices generated the largest share of LinkedIn citations. During the four-week study, LinkedIn's share of AI citations also increased by 26%.
This does not mean every CEO should suddenly start publishing more content on LinkedIn. It tells us something more useful: individual expertise is becoming part of the information ecosystem AI systems use to understand professional topics, companies and industries.
The research also reinforces why companies should not build their entire strategy around one AI platform. Sources and citation patterns can change quickly. The goal should be broader than appearing in one AI answer. It should be building authority that remains useful wherever discovery happens.
Executive Communications is more than personal branding
Executive Communications is sometimes treated as another name for managing a CEO's LinkedIn profile. That is too narrow. A strong Executive Communications strategy starts with the executive's real expertise and the goals of the organization.
What does this person genuinely know? What topics should they have a voice on? What ideas can they add to the conversation? Who needs to hear those ideas? And where should those ideas appear?
Sometimes the right channel is LinkedIn. Other times it may be an article, an interview, an industry event, a podcast or media commentary. Usually, the strongest presence is built across several of these places. We have discussed this before at KINAI in Why Thought Leadership on LinkedIn Is Now a Corporate Strategy.
Strong thought leadership is not about posting frequently for the sake of visibility. It is about building a clear and credible point of view that connects an executive's expertise with the conversations that matter to the business. AI discovery gives companies another reason to take that work seriously.
Should executives create content for AI?
No. Executives should create useful content for people.
There will be more advice over the next few years about how to make brands and executives appear in AI answers. Some of that advice will be valuable. Understanding how AI finds information, structuring content clearly and making expertise easy to identify are sensible practices. But chasing every change in AI citations is not a sustainable communications strategy.
A platform that receives significant citations today may become less important tomorrow. Different AI systems can also favor different types of sources. A better approach is to build authority that can travel across platforms.
When an executive consistently shares useful knowledge, participates in relevant industry conversations and develops a recognizable point of view, that work has value regardless of what an algorithm does next. People can discover it, journalists can reference it, industry peers can share it and potential clients can use it to evaluate the company. AI systems may also find, connect and use that information.
“The goal is not to manufacture authority for AI. It is to make real authority easier to discover.”
How to build an executive presence for the AI search era
Companies do not need to dramatically increase the amount of content their executives produce. A better starting point is deciding what those executives should be known for.
Identify a small number of topics that connect the leader's real experience with the expertise of the company. A CEO should not try to comment on everything happening in an industry. A stronger presence is usually built by consistently contributing useful ideas to a smaller number of relevant conversations.
Original thinking also matters. AI has made generic content incredibly easy to produce. Repeating the same ideas everyone else is publishing adds little value to a company's reputation. Experience, informed opinions, lessons from real work and a clear perspective are much harder to replace.
Companies should also think beyond one platform. LinkedIn can play an important role in B2B Executive Communications, but it should not be the entire strategy. Articles, podcasts, interviews, conferences, research, media coverage and credible third-party mentions create a much broader public presence.
Finally, the connection between the executive and the company should be clear. Someone researching a leader should easily understand what organization they represent, what expertise they bring to it and which topics connect that expertise to the company's work. This creates something more valuable than content volume. It creates a consistent digital reputation.
Executive Communications is becoming part of AI discovery
AI search does not change the basic purpose of Executive Communications. It adds another reason to invest in it.
Executives still need to communicate with customers, employees, investors, journalists, partners and industry peers. But the public information created through those conversations can now travel further. It can help someone discover a company, influence how they understand its expertise and help establish trust before a conversation begins. Increasingly, it can also become part of the information AI systems use when people ask questions about an industry, company or business problem.
That is why companies should think about Executive Communications as more than executive visibility or personal branding. It is becoming part of the digital reputation and discovery of the business itself.
The objective is not to make your CEO visible to an algorithm. It is to make real expertise visible wherever people are looking for it. And increasingly, that includes AI.
Build authority worth discovering
At KINAI, we help executives and organizations turn real expertise into a strategic digital presence through Executive Communications, thought leadership and digital strategy — combining human insight with technology to build authority that lasts.
