A whitepaper from Net Solutions: drawn from real data, real
experiments, and the sharpest minds at the intersection of AI and
commerce.
58% of your customers used AI to research a purchase in the last seven days. The question isn't whether AI is influencing your sales. It's whether you're influencing the AI.
The buyers most likely to convert aren't coming from Google anymore. AI-assisted shoppers convert at 86%, nearly 2.5x the baseline. That's the audience you're missing if you're not visible in the model.
Everything you've invested in SEO explains just 4–7% of whether AI recommends you. The other 93% is a different game, and most brands haven't started playing it.
It took 15 months for agentic commerce to go from a Perplexity experiment to AI autonomously completing purchases on your customers' behalf. The next 15 months will move faster.
Your Google ranking and your AI model ranking are almost entirely unrelated. A brand that ranks number one on Google can be completely invisible to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and therefore invisible to the fastest-growing segment of high-intent buyers.
This is not a future risk. It is happening now, at scale, across every brand category.
A shopper asks AI which running shoes to buy. Three seconds later, a recommendation appears. They click buy. Your brand either showed up or it didn’t, and if it didn’t, you weren’t rejected or outpriced. You were simply absent. The shopper will never know you existed.
Competing in the AI Era is a practical executive resource, drawn from original research, real-world case studies, and the unfiltered insights of the practitioners who spoke at the Net Solutions Executive Summit in London in February 2026.
It will not tell you that AI is changing everything. You already know that. It will tell you specifically what to change, in what order, with what evidence, and what is genuinely working for the organizations that are ahead of the curve right now.
The specific levers that determine whether your brand is cited or ignored
How a $2.4B fintech grew AI visibility from 3.2% to 22.2% with two pages, not two years
How a responsible ladieswear brand grew basket value from £36 to £124 by investing in trust infrastructure
Drawn from 13 years at Google and a decade at Microsoft, for building organizations that can actually move at AI speed
Covering AI Visibility, Trust Infrastructure, People & Culture, and Agentic Commerce Readiness, with specific first steps for each
Net Solutions’ rapid assessment that tells you exactly where you stand and what to prioritize
— Sartaj Rajpal, Global AI Strategist, Profound
This whitepaper is written for business leaders responsible for growth strategy who need a clear, evidence-based picture of how AI is reshaping their competitive landscape. It assumes intelligence rather than technical expertise.
No jargon. No hype. No ten-point transformation frameworks that dissolve on contact with reality.
The insights in this whitepaper were shaped by four experts who spoke at the Net Solutions Executive Summit, London:
Global AI Strategist, Profound Sartaj leads research at Profound, an AI-native platform founded in 2024 that helps brands measure and improve their visibility inside large language models. His work sits at the intersection of answer engine optimisation, content strategy, and machine-readable brand signals.
Former Head of Innovation, Google Alfred spent 13 years at Google and a decade at Microsoft before becoming an independent consultant and entrepreneur. He works with leadership teams on the people, process, and culture conditions that determine whether AI initiatives succeed or stall.
CEO, Trustpilot Adrian leads Trustpilot, the world's largest open customer feedback platform, with over 350 million reviews across businesses globally. Under his leadership, Trustpilot has become the 5th most-cited domain across all major LLMs — making it a critical infrastructure layer for brand trust in the AI era.
Founder & CEO, Fabacus & Nobody's Child Andrew founded Nobody's Child — a responsible ladieswear brand that grew from £1.8M to £180M in gross revenue in five years — alongside Fabocus, a structured product data and Digital Product Passport platform, and Suetto, a referral technology business. He is one of the most distinctive voices at the intersection of retail, sustainability, and the data economy.
Free. No paywall. Immediate access.
The research, case studies, and practitioner insights behind this whitepaper. Drawn from original data, real experiments, and the experts who are already ahead of this shift.