Why AI Recommends Some Brands and Ignores Others: The New Rules of AEO and GEO

Search is no longer limited to blue links and rankings. AI assistants, answer engines, and generative search platforms are now deciding which brands are visible, trusted, cited, and recommended. In this session, Jarred Smith, author of Explainable: Why AI Recommends Some Brands and Ignores Others, explains how Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization are changing digital marketing strategy. Attendees will learn what makes brands machine-recommendable, how AI systems interpret authority and relevance, and what marketers can do now to improve visibility across AI-powered discovery channels.

Using AI to Automate Lead Gen, Content, and Follow-Up

Most small and midsized businesses are already using AI somewhere. Somebody on the team is drafting emails in ChatGPT, somebody else tried a tool that promised to write a month of social posts in an afternoon. What almost nobody has is a system that is a connected set of workflows where AI does the repetitive work and a human stays in the seats that need real judgment.

This session is about building that system for the two functions where SMBs feel the squeeze most, sales and marketing. We'll walk through three workflows you can put to work as soon as you get home.

• Generating and qualifying leads
• Producing content that sounds like you instead of a robot
• Running follow-up that doesn't depend on someone remembering to send the email

The focus is practical with real tools, real prompts, real numbers on what to expect, and a direct accounting of where AI still falls down and a person has to step in. You'll leave with a one-page workflow map for your own business, a starter prompt library you can adapt, and a clear sense of which workflow to build first.

Who This Session Is For
This session is built for the people running small and midsized businesses, regardless of how technical they are or how much AI they've touched. It's especially useful for:
• Owners and founders who are wearing the sales and marketing hat at the same time and need to buy back hours without hiring
• Operations and office managers who'd inherit these workflows and have to keep them running
• Sales leads and small sales teams who are losing deals in the gaps between touches, not in the pitch
• Marketing managers and marketing-of-one's who are expected to produce agency-level output on a oneperson budget
• Anyone who has tried an AI tool, gotten a mediocre result, and decided the whole thing was overhyped

What You'll Leave With:
This session is organized around three outcomes’ attendees can act on immediately.

Generate and qualify leads without adding headcount
• How to use AI to research and prioritize a prospect list so reps spend time on the 20% of leads worth a call
• How to build a simple lead-scoring prompt that reads inbound inquiries and flags the ones that are real
• Where AI-assisted prospecting crosses a line, on accuracy, on privacy, and on sounding like a person instead of a bot

Produce content that sounds like the business, not like AI
• How to capture a brand's actual voice in a reusable prompt so the output doesn't always need a full rewrite
• A repeatable workflow for turning one piece of source material into a week of channel-appropriate content
• How AI search has changed what content even gets seen, and why “write a blog post” is now the wrong instruction

Run follow-up that happens whether or not someone remembers
• How to set up AI-drafted follow-up sequences that stay personal past the first email
• How to use AI to summarize a call or a thread and surface the next action before it slips
• Which parts of follow-up should never be automated, and why the close still belongs to a human