As AI becomes part of the buying journey, many customers now encounter a brand through AI before interacting with the brand itself, meaning brands no longer control every first impression. According to Gartner's 2025 Consumer Community Survey, 53% of U.S. consumers don't trust AI-powered search results, yet AI still influences how people research companies and decide where to spend money. David Kessler, CEO of branding agency Starfish, notes that "customers aren't always experiencing the brand a company intended them to see, but meeting AI's version of it first," adding that "brands now have to be built to survive interpretation." Kessler explains that companies are "publishing source material, and AI is reconstructing a signal from it," a process Starfish calls "lossy reconstruction," where a brand's meaning is compressed, flattened, or conflated with competitors during AI-mediated translation. This compression often leaves behind the details that make a brand memorable. The relationship between brands and customers changes in two key ways: first, every website, product page, campaign, and article now serves a second audience, as AI draws on that information to answer questions and explain what a brand stands for; second, a brand may appear across multiple AI experiences, such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or an AI shopping assistant, with no guarantee that asking the same question in different places yields the same answer.