Your next client already asked AI about you.
Did you like what it said?
In Canadian financial services, the buying decision has often started long before your sales team picks up the phone. If your firm is not showing up in AI answers — or worse, showing up poorly — you risk being eliminated from deals you never knew existed.
By Nancy Campbell, Founder, 10Marketing Consulting
Start Here
Run this five-minute test before you read on.
Open ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Ask each one — separately — these two questions about your own firm. Your reaction to the answers is your signal for how urgently this needs to move up in your priorities.
- Who is [Your Company] and, what do they do? Prepare a SWOT analysis and a pro/con analysis to help my consideration of working with them.
- Who are the top three [your industry] providers in [your region]?
01 · The Scenario Playing Out Right Now
A VP of HR types one prompt. Three insurers come back. Yours isn't one of them.
Picture a VP of HR at a mid-sized manufacturer opening ChatGPT: “Who are the best group benefit insurers in Canada?” Three names come back with confidence. Yours is not among them.
She does not dig deeper. She does not search your name. She shares the shortlist with her team, and they start from there.
This is happening right now, in your market, for your category of service, with the clients you most want to win — long before any RFP lands. By the time a formal request is issued, the consideration set is already heavily influenced by AI. Your firm either made the AI-assisted shortlist weeks earlier, or it did not make the cut at all.
02 · The Numbers
This is not on the horizon. It is already the dominant reality.
73%
of Canadian employees use generative AI at work.
KPMG Canada, 2025
95%
of B2B deals are won by a vendor already on the shortlist.
2025 B2B buyer study, n≈4,000
89%
of B2B buyers have adopted generative AI at every stage of the buying journey.
Forrester
Finance and insurance ranks in the top three Canadian sectors for AI adoption. Forty-five percent of Canadian businesses now use generative AI to complete tasks. The shortlist is being assembled before first contact with any vendor.
03 · Not a Search Engine Problem
If SEO was about being found, AEO is about being surfaced and understood correctly.
For two decades, being findable meant ranking on Google. Prospects scanned a list of links, clicked to visit your website, and formed their own impression. That model is rapidly unwinding.
Search Engine
A librarian
Retrieves what exists and points you toward it. You form your own view from links.
Answer Engine
A tutor
Synthesizes everything available and prepares a confident lesson. The lesson is only as good as the source material your tutor can find.
The discipline emerging to address this is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): the practice of ensuring your organization is accurately, favourably, and consistently represented when AI platforms are queried.
A note on naming: you'll hear AEO, GEO, SXO, XEO, AIO and more. The space is moving fast enough that even the people building it haven't settled on labels. But directionally, the discipline is the same.
04 · How AI Forms an Opinion of Your Firm
What the tutor reads about you.
Large language models are trained on vast public information and updated periodically. What AI “knows” about your firm is a composite drawn from:
Sources the tutor has access to
- —Your public website and its content
- —News articles and media coverage
- —Industry analyst reports and directories
- —Regulatory filings and public records
- —Glassdoor, LinkedIn, employee reviews
- —Client testimonials and review sites
- —Social media including forums like Reddit
If your firm has a thin digital footprint, limited media presence, or content that has not been updated in years, the tutor is working with an incomplete and potentially misleading picture — and it will still answer with confidence.
05 · What This Looks Like in Your Pipeline
The deals lost to this are real, and largely invisible.
Logistics Firm · Alberta
A growing logistics company has shortlisted three group retirement insurers. After presentations the buying group is undecided. They ask AI to compare the three firms. AI describes your offering using information from before you launched your member app or won your latest investment award. Your competitor's profile is current, specific, credible. You hear they are going in another direction. No one can say exactly why.
Professional Services Organization · Vancouver
A family-owned firm is looking for a group benefit insurer who understands small business. They ask AI which firms specialize in serving owner-operators. You do — it is your core market. But your website speaks in generalities, your executives have not published in two years, and no third-party source clearly describes your specialization. AI does not mention you. A competitor with a more visible content footprint is mentioned.
06 · Your Pulse Check
Five questions to ask AI about your firm.
You don't need software for this yet. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot and ask:
Who is [Your Company], and what do they do? Conduct a SWOT analysis and identify pros and cons of working with them.
Is [Your Company] a reputable and reliable provider?
How does [Your Company] compare to [Competitor A] and [Competitor B]?
What do current and former clients and employees say about [Your Company]?
Who are the top three group retirement providers in [your region], with rationale?
These questions take five minutes to run. What comes back will either reassure you or unsettle you and both reactions are useful.
But here is where most firms stop, and where the real work begins.
Knowing AI said something unflattering about your firm is not the same as knowing why it said it, which sources shaped that view, whether it is consistent across platforms, or what specifically needs to change. A raw AI answer tells you there is a problem. It does not tell you where the gap is in your content, your third-party footprint, or your competitive positioning and it certainly does not tell you how to close it.
That is what a structured audit does.
If AI were asked about your organization right now, would you be proud of the answer — and would you know what to do about it?
Want a structured AI reputation audit for your firm?
10Marketing Consulting helps Canadian financial services and HR practitioners — group benefits, group retirement, institutional investment, and workplace health and wellness — understand and improve how they show up across major AI platforms, before the next RFP is sent or shortlist is assembled.
© 2026 10Marketing Consulting Inc. Specialized B2B marketing for the Canadian group benefit and retirement industry