650- What CEOs Already Know About You Before The Meeting Starts
Jens Heitland explains how AI models are quietly shaping B2B meetings before they start, and why every executive should check how they are represented across different AI engines.
In this episode, Jens unpacks what CEOs find when they search their own name and what it reveals about their digital visibility.
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What CEOs Already Know About You Before The Meeting Starts
A CEO is preparing for a meeting. Before the meeting starts, something else has already happened. They opened an AI model, typed in your name, and asked it to tell them who you are.
This happens constantly in B2B conversations at every level. Most people walking into these meetings have no idea it occurred. The other side has already formed an impression before a single word was exchanged in the room. They know what your company does, what you stand for, and how you show up in the world, at least according to whichever model they used.
You never find out that this happened. There is no notification, no record, nothing that tells you the meeting actually started an hour earlier inside someone else's screen. You walk in, assuming this is the first impression. It is the second one. You had no input into the first.
Inside this pattern sits a quieter problem. Different models produce different answers about the same person. Ask one engine about a company and it surfaces years of thought leadership, case studies, interviews, a clear sense of who is behind the name. Ask a different one, and it returns almost nothing, or something outdated, or a version of the company that no longer matches what it actually does. The CEO on the other side of your meeting has no idea they are looking at an incomplete picture. They simply trust what the model gave them because it arrived instantly and sounded confident.
This is already shaping strategic conversations today, quietly, without anyone announcing it. A CEO walking into your meeting may have already decided how interesting, credible, or relevant you are, based on an answer generated in seconds, from a source neither of you chose deliberately.
The only way to know what is actually out there is to look directly. Open a few different models. Type in your own name. Read what comes back as if you were the stranger about to walk into that meeting with yourself. Parts of it will be accurate. Other parts will not resemble who you actually are. And the things you would most want someone to know about you, the work that matters most, may not appear there at all, simply because no model has been given a reason to surface it.
That gap between who you are and who an algorithm says you are is no longer a future concern. It is already sitting inside every meeting you walk into, whether you can see it or not.
Highlights:
00:00 AI Informed Buyers
00:20 Hidden AI Research
00:47 What They Find
00:50 Audit Your AI Profile
01:03 Visibility Wake Up Call
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Transcript :
The thing these days is that a person that wants to buy something from you, let's say B2B big CEO level, the CEO on the other side is informed by AI models that you have never used today. And obviously, a lot of people use ChatGPT or any of the other models. But if you consider that they check you out, I'm going into the meeting with you and put your name in, and then they say, "Okay, give me input about that person. I have this strategic conversation today, and I am interested in buying something from that company." Then they figure out what the company is, what you are, and what you stand for, and how do you show up and the tricky thing is you have no idea that they did that. So what are the things that they find about you? I just think every listener that is listening to this or watching it somewhere, they should go into ChatGPT or any of the others, and best is use different ones because they have all different outcomes. Put your name in and figure out who you are in the way that the engine is representing you, and that will give you an 'aha' moment because there's a lot of stuff that you would love to be visible for, but it's not there