Carlos Eduardo Mendonça is a partner at Congruent, a technology consultancy where he leads delivery and client strategy for enterprise product and digital transformation programmes.

He founded destaque.ai, Portugal's first consultancy dedicated to generative engine optimization: the practice of understanding, measuring and improving how generative AI engines surface, cite and recommend brands. As buyers increasingly begin their research inside AI assistants rather than search engines, visibility inside those systems has become a commercial question rather than a marketing one, and one most companies still have no way to measure.

To put numbers behind that shift, he ran an empirical study measuring how seven AI engines recommend 251 Portuguese brands across 18 sectors, quantifying how sharply their answers diverge for the same query. The findings expose a discovery layer that behaves very differently from search, with material consequences for how companies are found and chosen.