It’s no secret that many unofficial channels shape a brand’s reputation, such as threads on Reddit or customers posting on TikTok. Marketers are now adding AI to their list of influencers.
“Discovery for brands and products is starting to happen through prompts and agents,” Savour Oshitani, CMO of Elf Brands, told Business Insider’s “New Rules of Reputation” roundtable held during the 2026 Cannes Lions Festival and presented by Omnicom Public Relations.
The roundtable included communications and marketing leaders from Commonwealth Fusion Systems, FedEx, Genius, HubSpot, Johnson & Johnson, NBA, Pacsun, Pearson, SharkNinja, Stanley 1913, Target, Understood, and Wikimedia Foundation.
Several leaders gathered in close rows of chairs said AI is forcing them to rethink how their brands are represented digitally.
HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar said the increased traction of AI platforms means brands need to have a broader presence online.
“These AI engines are looking for consensus across the web, not traditional page rank or authority,” he said. “So the number of media hits you get and how you appear on rating and review sites and other affiliate sites becomes much more important.”
He added that just posting articles on your web page is no longer useful.
Backend is also important
Companies are also realizing that they can’t just create this content and assume that AI will find it. We need to think carefully about how we build online.
“We need to structure the information so that robots can read it,” Saveur said.
Anusha Alihan, Wikimedia Foundation’s chief communications officer, agreed.
“Structured data means something right now,” Arikan said. “So the fact that Wikipedia’s content is built so transparently automatically makes it trustworthy and why so many AI companies actually want to use Wikipedia because they can actually see how that content is generated and where it comes from.”
Fighting misinformation
Another topic executives said needed attention was misinformation.
Nathan Friedman is co-president and CMO of Understood, a nonprofit organization that supports people with learning differences. The organization has created its own news division to combat misinformation about the causes of neurological differences such as ADHD and autism.
“Many parents, especially younger generations, are getting their information online,” Friedman said. “When the news reaches them, it’s often misinformation.”
He said misinformation often comes from sources that parents trust. I understand the hope that flooding the zone with reliable information might be helpful.
As more people get their news online and algorithms limit what appears in their social media feeds, there is a risk of becoming stuck in an echo chamber, said Vanessa Broadhurst, vice president of global corporate affairs at Johnson & Johnson.
“They think there’s a crisis because they’re seeing this on their feed, and they’re like, oh, I’ve seen this 20 times, it’s all over the internet,” Broadhurst said.
A look at broader data shows that’s not true, she added.
All of this makes real, authentic experiential moments more important than ever, says Sara Khan, vice president of marketing and creative strategy at Genius.
“You can hardly compete with the speed of what’s happening through technology,” she says.