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Picture this: a customer is planning a purchase right now, and you don't know it. They haven't Googled your business name. They haven't picked up the phone. They've opened an AI assistant, described exactly what they want, and the AI is quietly comparing you to the business down the road, reading your reviews, checking whether you look safe and credible, weighing you against two or three other options. Then it hands the customer a shortlist. Yours might not be on it.
That's not a hypothetical. It's something host Scott Wilson described happening to him personally, in a recent conversation with business consultant Darren Pratley on the Marketing 4 Business podcast, and it's worth unpacking properly, because most businesses aren't thinking about it yet.
The new buying journey, in one real example
On the episode, Scott walked through planning a family trip using an AI assistant, the kind of trip that used to start with a Google search and a lot of tab-switching. Instead, he described what he wanted, and the AI asked him a clarifying question most human salespeople skip: what actually matters most here, price, or safety and experience? He said safety and experience, since he'd be travelling with his family.
From there, by his account, the AI read through reviews of the relevant businesses, weighed them against what he'd said mattered, and came back with two recommendations. It even offered to draft the outreach email for him.
Then something telling happened: those two businesses were slow to reply. Scott and Darren both picked up on why that lag felt so jarring: the AI had just delivered a personalized, researched, sorted-by-priority shortlist in seconds, and the humans on the other end couldn't match that pace.
That gap is the whole story. Customers have been getting faster and more impatient for years; Darren made the point that this isn't new, it's just accelerating. AI just moved the goalposts again. Once someone has had a need understood and solved in seconds by a machine, a slow or generic human response feels like a step backward, even if it's a perfectly normal response time by yesterday's standards.
The old advantage: "I know more than you" is gone
For a long time, the person behind the counter or on the sales call had an edge: they knew things the customer didn't. Specs, comparisons, what's actually reliable. Darren pointed to something he's seeing a lot in his own client work in retail specifically: that edge is disappearing fast, and not gently.
Think about the last time you asked a question in a retail store and watched the staff member turn the box over to read the answer off the back, a scenario Scott brought up directly from his own recent experience. That's not a staffing problem, it's a positioning problem. The customer asking the question has often already done more research than the person meant to help them, because the "research" step now happens instantly, before they ever walk in.
That's the hard truth Darren kept returning to on the episode: the content and information part of the sale is basically done before the conversation starts. If your value pitch is "let me tell you about this product," you're now competing with an assistant that already told them, already compared it to two alternatives, and already summarized what other buyers said about it.
So what's actually left to compete on? Two things.
This is where Darren's advice on the podcast gets genuinely practical: he broke it down into two separate battles most businesses don't realize they're fighting at once.
1. Whether AI can even find and recommend you
If an AI is going to weigh you against a competitor, it needs something to weigh. Darren was specific about this on the episode: it needs to be able to see:
- Reviews: Google reviews, TripAdvisor, industry-specific review sites. This is one of the clearest signals AI tools lean on to judge trust and quality.
- Proof points that build confidence: safety records, credentials, evidence you've dealt with people like the customer before.
- A consistent presence across channels: your website, your social accounts, your YouTube channel, LinkedIn, even places like Reddit, where people discuss real experiences.
If none of that exists in a place AI can actually read, you're not in the running, not because you're worse, but because you're invisible at the exact moment the decision is being made. A business that's genuinely great but has no visible reviews or public track record simply won't get surfaced next to a mediocre competitor who's documented everything.
Quick self-audit: if a customer asked an AI assistant to compare you to your two closest competitors right now, could it find enough about you to make a fair case? If you're not sure, that's your starting point.
2. What happens once a human actually shows up
Here's the flip side Scott and Darren landed on, and it's good news. Once the research is done and a customer is standing in front of a real person, information isn't what wins them over anymore. Experience is.
A useful way to think about it: don't re-explain what the customer already knows, they've done the research. Confirm it, then add something a screen can't. Let them feel it, smell it, try it, hear the story behind it. The businesses winning right now aren't the ones with the most information to hand over; they're the ones creating a moment the AI conversation couldn't replicate.
That reframes the job of anyone facing a customer today. You're not there to inform anymore. You're there to deliver the one part of the transaction that still requires a human, and that has to be good enough to beat the convenience of just buying it online after the AI already told them what they needed to know.
The takeaway
The competitive fight has split into two separate battles, and most businesses are only half-aware they're in either one:
- Get found by AI: reviews, credentials, and a visible, consistent presence across the platforms AI tools actually pull from.
- Earn the moment in person: because the facts are already known, so your only lever left is the experience.
Miss the first battle and you never get considered. Miss the second and you get considered, then lose anyway.
As Darren put it plainly on the show: if you don't have your safety record, your reviews, or your story visible across your website and socials, AI simply has no way of knowing you exist. You're invisible to the exact system that's now doing a lot of your prospect's shopping for them.
Next step: Pull up your own business right now: Google reviews, TripAdvisor if relevant, your socials, your YouTube presence, and look at it the way an AI assistant would. Is there enough there to make you the recommended choice, or are you quietly leaving that decision to whoever documented themselves better?
Want the full conversation? Listen to "Why a Tough Economy Is the Best Time to Grow Your Business" with Darren Pratley on the Marketing 4 Business podcast, available on your favourite podcast streaming service, or watch it now on YouTube.
