Lead With AI
From Invisible to Unmissable: How This AI Tool Helps Brands Get Found Before the Search Begins
17 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Lead with AI, the show where we uncover how technology and human insight come together to shape what's next. Today, I'm joined by Seth Besmertek, CEO and founder of Conductor, a platform that helps brands understand what the world is searching for before anyone else. From data-driven storytelling to AI-powered content strategy,
Seth and his team are turning search intelligence into a superpower for marketeers everywhere. Let's get into it. Welcome to Lead with AI. I'm Dr. Tamara Nall. Each episode brings you behind-the-scenes conversations with brilliant minds advancing AI across the federal government.
Together, we're exploring the projects and innovations modernizing public service and creating meaningful change for the American people. Let's get started. Hey, everyone. How are you? It is your host of Lead with AI, Dr. T. And thank you every week for tuning in and hearing from our great founders who are telling us about their AI products.
Because of you, again, this year, we hit number one in technology on Apple Podcasts, and we are a gold winner for W3 Awards. And it's all because of you and our great guests, such as the one we have today. So welcome, Seth Besbernick, who is the CEO and founder of Conductor. How are you?
Doing well. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And where are you, by the way?
I'm in Manhattan. You can hear the sirens. I'm on 36th and Broadway.
Yes, very active. I thought so, but just wanted to check just to make sure. So tell us a little bit about you. Who are you at your core?
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Chapter 2: How is AI transforming brand visibility and search strategies?
What is your passion? And what gave you the idea that Conductor was needed?
Okay, thanks. I'm excited to be here. Who am I about? So I think I was a person that was told no a lot as a child. You can't do this. You shouldn't be doing that. You shouldn't be in this school. You can't get in here. I got in trouble a lot. I was told I was a bad kid. I was told that I wouldn't be successful. I was told that I was always put in the corner.
When I think of recess, I think of sitting in the corner facing the wall while all the kids played behind me. I spent a lot of my life trying to prove them wrong. and do something useful. And I'm someone who really believes that living a life purpose and mission really matters.
And as it relates to business, I really thought that finding the intersection between doing something that makes the world better, but making it a really good business at the same time, finding that overlap is a really great place to spend time. So I started the company conductor literally right out of college.
and have been working really for almost the last 20 years in reinventing and iterating. We've had a wild journey trying to, and Conductor is a company that goes to companies and says, hey, you know a lot of stuff. Companies have loads of wisdom. How do you take all that wisdom and bring it to the world and lead with value? How do you sell without selling stuff, but actually by helping people
And now in the world of AI, that's really the most important thing because AI is doesn't have any wisdom. It relies on. So it's really exciting time for us.
Got it. And when you so you're obviously B2B, correct?
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Chapter 3: What role does data-driven storytelling play in marketing?
Yes. Our customers are other businesses that provide. Yes.
Okay. And then what function are you normally going into? Is it marketing? Is it sales? Is it IT? Where are you normally going? Because we have guests that hold all different types of titles.
Digital, marketing. Our customers tend to be big companies, but they don't have to be. And it's companies that want to figure out how to how to get in front of their customers where they are in a way that leads would value. We're not the ads guys. We're not the crack you on the head and try to sell you something or make you feel bad about yourself. We're the people are looking for help.
How do you help them first to build trust so then they can become your customers?
And it is true. Like so many companies out there are just sitting on lows and lows and gold mines of data, most of whom don't know what to do with it. And then here shows up Conductor with your AI tools. So tell us about a holy smokes moment. What is a jaw dropping moment where one of your customers used, you know, Conductor AI and were wowed by the results?
I feel like every day is a holy smokes moment. Okay. I mean, we work with so many of the best companies in the world and, and, and, and I'd say companies, but they're really organizations. So that's someone like an organization, like a St. Jude's children's hospital.
Yes.
I donate to, so it's a phenomenal organization, but they also have marketing problems.
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Chapter 4: How can brands lead with value instead of ads?
So when, when people are in these incredibly life challenging, kind of crossing moments where they have problems, they go to look for help. And it's not just obvious that you know where to go and who to go for what. So moments where we find out where someone's looking for help and we're able to help activate the knowledge and the wisdom of an organization like St.
Jude's and bring that to the surface so people can find them and get best care. That's just another day on the job for us. And we work across almost all industries where We're helping these great companies with great products and services get seen and get found and get visible from our customers. And when you work at Conductor, you get these NPS results that come in on a daily basis.
And these are our customers telling us about some kind of success or something that they've had. And we see them coming in and I'm like, wow, that's happening. Wow, that's happening. So it's really exciting.
Yeah, you know, I just got chills hearing you talking. The reason is because a lot of times you'll interview someone and you'll say, you know, so tell me about the company, tell me about your AI tool. And then they'll say that adds value. And a lot of times they're talking about value in terms of revenue or how they can get more revenue.
And in this example, you're saying, no, when I say value or impact, I'm talking about the people who need them, who don't even like contribute to their revenue, but can use the services of St. Jude's or the resources or the connections or the links to actually get the care that they need or the cancer care that they need. Like I got chills hearing that. I mean, that really is impact.
And it's not even from a revenue. I mean, eventually, I guess it will come because you have success stories, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it really is trying to let people find them that might not know that they offer certain services.
Don't get me wrong. St. Jude's is, I'd say, all of our customers are noble in their own right, but they all are serving different products and services and industries. Marketing comes from a place of advertising. It comes from a place where you have to buy your customers' attention through commercials and ads and then hit them with something.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of unified data in an AI-first world?
We've been in the business since we started of saying... Give them something useful. Give them something knowledgeable. Help people. And if you help people first through marketing, then actually you will build trust. You will build respect. And it's actually more profitable to do that. So for us, when someone works with us,
We get them in the spirit and in the motivation and in the operations of saying, how do I take all this stuff that we have? I call it wisdom. And how do I bring it to the surface? How do I share it out? White papers and knowledges and transcripts of a podcast like this. And how do I bring that stuff out there so I can help people as the foundation for marketing? I think that's exciting.
Wow, that is amazing. Wow, wow, wow. So talk to us about how it works. My listeners are very, very curious, nosy people. If we were to open up the brain, you said you've been in business now for over two decades and you have AI that drives a lot of your work. How does it work? We're opening up the hood. We're looking at the brain.
How does it all work so that you can provide this value or this impact?
Sure. Well, it's a big brain. We got a lot of people working on it for quite some time. The simple surface level of the brain is that we go out and we get a lot of information. If you think about a search engine like Google or an answer engine like ChatGPT, it goes out and gets information.
And what it does is it gets that information and then you ask it a question and it gives you some kind of link or some kind of answer.
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Chapter 6: How does Conductor help brands leverage their internal knowledge?
We do the same thing. We go out and get a lot of information, except instead of giving a consumer an answer, we give you knowledge about your business. We help you understand, well, when people are looking for things, products and services that you sell or problems that you solve, do they find you? Do they find the competitors? What do they say about you? What do they say about your competitors?
What content do you have that they like? What content don't they like? What kind of content do they like? What are the elements of that that can help you with your content? When you make a piece of content or when you make your website or you share some kind of information online, does that have any impact?
And we get all this information and we use it for the benefit of helping you manage your digital presence, helping you manage your visibility and AI systems like ChatGPT and it's like Google. And for brands, it's really exciting because for them, they can see the reality. Just because you're the market leader in something doesn't mean that you're the one being discovered first.
And a lot of times companies find themselves scratching their head and say, well, we're the best at this, but we don't show up. And we help bring that reality to you, whether it's good or bad, it's the truth about what the consumer sees. And we all, companies who really care about not what they think of themselves, but how other, their customers experience them.
That's what we help our customers accomplish. And then ultimately they can take action and change the outcome.
Right, right. No, yeah, that's amazing. Now talk to us about the real world magic. So you said you hear stories every day of how Conductor is helping and making impact. Take us to a time where you saw the impact and you got chills. And if you have a happy dance, you can do that, whatever your cheer is, whatever it is. But take us to that moment where you were like, wow, at what you've done.
Well, I would say that the St. Jude's example is certainly one. I'd say some other places where I get chills just as an entrepreneur is, for us, I look at the judge of whether we're doing a good job based on the feedback our customers give us. You can always get people to pay you for something, but paying you and being happy with the service and the software is not the same thing.
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Chapter 7: What are some real-world examples of AI impact on businesses?
And that takes some time to figure out. But I mean, we've gone through a tremendous amount of evolution and rapid development here over the last few years. And for example, we historically were the enterprise leader in SEO software. We've changed and evolved to now become the leader in AEO and GEO, which is the practice of how do you show up in AI engines in addition to software engines.
Yeah, that's big.
And I'm seeing our customers now give us feedback like in our MPS and in our conversations talking about how we've helped them establish and build an AI visibility practice. We've gave them the tools to start doing AEO, GEO at scale.
We've helped their executive team decide to make investments and move dollars from the old way of marketing into a customer-centric value way of doing marketing by showing up in search engines and AI systems. That kind of stuff gives me the chills because you can see that what we're doing is starting to work and it's driving change in our customer base.
Got it. And question, when you say AI visibility practice, is the practice like they're forming teams or does it mean like policy? What does that mean?
Everything. It's forming teams. It's refocusing their energy. It's like, well, if my customers are here and I'm over there, I got to go be where they are. And I need a team of people to do that. You can't just say, I'm going to have a one person army go and say, I'm going to go and manage my presence in ChatGPT. It's much more complicated. It takes a much broader brand effort to be successful.
Got it. OK, awesome. That's really, really helpful. Now, let's talk about the ethics of it all. I mean, obviously, like you said, y'all sit on rings and rings and just all of these all this data for all of your customers. How do you think about ethics? How do you think about guardrails as you're working for your customers?
I mean, I love the ethics of our business because we don't have to think about ethics too much in the sense that we're generally doing the right things. The simple part of our business is that we try to help you take your company's and organization's knowledge, the facts.
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Chapter 8: What does the future of marketing look like with AI advancements?
your expertise and turn it into digital assets. That's generally some form of content. And we use AI and we use technology and data to help you do that and help you do that at scale. Now, we always have some element of human in the loop and human involvement. And we really want to work as a partner, as a co-pilot with our units. Right.
But but generally, you know, I love the ethics of our business in the sense that coming back to the same theme, I've had this whole sort of talk so far. It's just like we're in the business of helping you take your wisdom and help people with it, share it out there. And and generally speaking, that results in good outcomes.
And the kinds of companies that we tend to work with are all companies that are looking to. not take advantage of the system, but they just actually have so much. They don't have to spam or make stuff up. They just have to do a better job of unlocking all their organizational knowledge.
Got it. Yeah. And I love it. I love when I talk to founders and you can just tell that ethics was there at the very beginning. It's not just like an afterthought. It's not, oops, we better do this. But you kind of started the company with ethics in mind.
I mean, I mean, it just I don't again, I don't even really think about it because everything we do here is about integrity and respect and honesty and transparency. It's the way we operate with our staff. It's the way we operate with our customers. It's the nature of the business we're in. So fortunately, I don't have to deal with that conversation all the time. Right.
Right, right. And that's good to hear. It is common, but there are situations where people don't. So kudos to you.
Yeah, I mean, there could be, it's possible that in the future, someone could maybe try to take advantage of what we do and use it in a bad way. But that doesn't happen. We have a lot of oversight and security, access to information. And again, I think the kinds of companies that we tend to work with tend to preclude that kind of activity.
Yeah, that's true. That's true, too. Awesome. So what is the big future power by conductor look like? You know, and the future with AI is just so changing so rapidly. Right. So it could be five years from now in 2030. It could be next month. It could be tomorrow. But what is the future and how will the world be changed by what conductor is doing?
Sure. Well, trying to stay focused on our little corner of the world. The digital marketing and optimization cycle is going to be much faster. We come from a world where you make a piece of content and you put it up on your website, usually. People look at it. They find it helps. Maybe every six or every 12 or every 18 months, you come back to it and try to make it a little better.
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