In an AI Search World, Information Is Abundant. Understanding Is Scarce.

By Dana Drissel, Chief Marketing Officer, Kaon Interactive

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what AI means for companies like Kaon, and, more importantly, for the enterprise companies we work with.

As a CMO, I see a tremendous amount of attention right now being placed on ChatGPT and other AI platforms as the next big source of inbound leads. Marketing teams are asking: How do we make sure our company shows up in AI search? How do we get ChatGPT to recommend our products? What happens to SEO when buyers start their research with AI instead of Google? Those are important questions, and every CMO should be thinking about them. But that’s only part of the AI equation.

Getting your company discovered by a buyer has always been the first step. What happens after they find you still matters, and arguably matters even more when AI can give them information about dozens of potential solutions in seconds.

AI is getting incredibly good at giving buyers that information. Ask it how a product works. Ask it to compare two solutions. Ask it to summarize specifications, explain benefits or recommend an approach. In seconds, you can get a pretty good answer. And it’s only going to get better.

So, if buyers can get information about almost anything, almost instantly, where does that leave companies trying to differentiate complex products and solutions?

I think the answer is pretty simple: Buyers don’t need more information. They need to understand.

More content isn’t necessarily the answer

B2B companies already create a tremendous amount of content—presentations, videos, product pages, brochures, technical documents, sales collateral, social content, and more. AI will make it even easier to create more of it. But I’m not convinced that’s what buyers need.

If you’re evaluating a complex laboratory instrument, medical device, industrial system or enterprise technology, reading another product description probably isn’t going to be the thing that moves you forward.

You want to understand how it works, why it’s different, how it fits into your environment and, ultimately, why it matters to you. That’s a very different challenge.

There’s a difference between explaining something and experiencing it

AI can tell me how a complex product works. But that’s very different from letting me explore the actual product, rotate it, open it, see what’s happening inside, walk through a workflow, compare configurations or visualize it in my own environment.

And sometimes understanding isn’t visual at all. A buyer may need to determine what the solution could save them, how quickly they’ll see a return, what configuration makes sense, or what changing a particular variable means for their business.

That’s why calculators and interactive decision tools are another important part of this equation. Instead of giving every buyer the same ROI claim, let them put in their own assumptions and understand the value for themselves. To me, that’s fundamentally different from simply giving someone more information.

AI can provide an answer. An interactive experience helps a buyer arrive at their own answer.

And then there’s the buying committee

This is the part I think gets overlooked. Complex B2B decisions aren’t typically made by one person.

An engineer may care about technical capabilities. Operations cares about workflow. Finance wants to understand the economics. An executive wants to understand the business impact. They can all ask AI their individual questions.

But eventually, those people need to come together and agree that they understand the solution, see its value and are confident enough to move forward. That’s not just an information problem. It’s an understanding and alignment problem.

A 3D product experience may help a technical buyer understand how something works. A workflow experience may help operations understand how it fits. An ROI calculator may help finance understand the economic impact. Different questions. Different experiences. One consistent value story.

AI actually makes this more important

We’re heading toward a world where creating (and finding) content is incredibly easy. More emails. More presentations. More videos. More personalized messages. More AI-generated answers. But more isn’t necessarily better.

I think the companies that stand out will be the ones that make their complex products easier to understand, not the ones that simply create more content about them. And that’s where I think there’s a particularly interesting opportunity for companies selling complex, high-value products and solutions.

If your product is difficult to bring into a meeting, expensive to demonstrate, highly configurable, requires multiple stakeholders to understand its value, or needs a business case to justify the investment, an AI-generated explanation isn’t enough. Those are exactly the buying experiences we should be thinking differently about.

For CMOs, I think this means expanding the AI conversation. Yes, we need to think about how our brands get discovered through ChatGPT and other AI platforms. We need to understand how AI is changing search, content and inbound demand. But being found isn’t the finish line.

The next question is: Once AI brings a buyer to us, are we giving them an experience that actually helps them understand why they should choose us?

Let AI help buyers find information. Let it answer questions. Let it personalize and guide the experience. But then give buyers the tools to see it, explore it, calculate the value and understand it for themselves. Because as AI makes information easier and easier to access, I believe something else becomes much more valuable: Understanding.

And ultimately, I think that’s what moves buyers forward.