Event Replay: AI as the Ultimate Influencer
At a Financial Narrative breakfast in New York hosted by Scrunch, Ashley Jones, Head of Financial Narrative, moderated AI as the Ultimate Influencer: How Prospects Now Vet Banks, Insurers, and Funds Through AI. The panel examined how AI agents research and compare financial firms before a prospect reaches their websites, how models read trust signals, and how brands can show up accurately for B2B and B2C buyers. Panelists were Anthony Vitalone, Managing Director, Global Head of Digital at First Eagle Investments; Jazmin Beltran, VP, External Communications at J.P. Morgan Payments; and Chris Andrew, CEO and co-founder of Scrunch.
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Half your audience are machines
More than half of website visitors across industries, including financial services, are now bots, according to Andrew. Many of those bots are working on behalf of a human. He identified four types: indexing agents that catalog the open web, training agents that scrape content to update foundation models, live retrieval agents that pull pages at the moment a question is asked, and a newer class of agents that complete tasks such as purchases. The first three appear in web logs and can be identified. That is creating a new working relationship between CIOs, who have spent years blocking bots, and CMOs, who now need some of them let in.
How models decide what to trust
Models look for three signals: whether they have indexed a brand's pages, trained on its content and can retrieve it live. Prompts have also grown more detailed. A search for a high-yield checking account has become a request covering mobile access, linked brokerage and spousal access, and the model looks for content confirming a brand meets each need.
When an answer about a brand is wrong, the fix starts with the cited sources. Andrew recommended responding directly in forums where complaints surface and cleaning up a brand's own site, where conflicting rates or outdated product descriptions can push models toward third-party sources. Vitalone's team uses Screaming Frog to scan First Eagle's site for inconsistencies. Andrew cautioned against vendors promising fast gains, saying models tend to penalize short-term spikes.
The first conversation happens without you
Financial advisors research with AI like everyone else, Vitalone said, and they reach sales teams further down the funnel with comparisons already in hand. First Eagle is building "bookend reports" that pull top advisor questions and keywords from Google Search Console and ad platforms, answer them on the website and pass them to sales.
Vitalone stressed consistent taxonomy. If one team writes treasuries and another writes bonds, models struggle to connect the content. He also urged teams to publish HTML instead of PDFs and to cross-tag and cross-link.
Beltran said J.P. Morgan Payments launched its newsroom two years ago to tell fuller stories behind press releases and awards. The team now publishes explainers, including one on its blockchain products after reporters repeatedly got terminology wrong following a rebrand. Journalists, human and automated, use those pages as sources and send inbound requests.
Ownership and differentiation
Panelists agreed AI search is a shared responsibility. At First Eagle, digital leads the strategy. At J.P. Morgan Payments, comms content runs through SEO, marketing, editorial, compliance and legal. Andrew called it a board-level topic that should sit with the CMO at minimum.
On differentiation, he advised ceding generic ground, since models will answer what a bond is without citing anyone. Vitalone said brand messaging should be written in-house by people, with AI limited to outlining and editing, because AI-written positioning produces the same language across firms.
Where to start
Andrew recommended defining a brand's non-negotiable truths and checking whether the models reflect them.
Beltran suggested asking each model about your brand against competitors and reviewing the sources behind favorable competitor answers.
Vitalone offered an exercise that takes about an hour: pull the top 10 questions and keywords from Search Console, run them through each major AI platform in an incognito window and note where the brand is cited. Incognito matters, Andrew added, because models tailor answers to the person asking.
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