How optimizing for AI answers is taking over marketing, and other takeaways from AirOps’s Next conference

It seems like just last week marketers were only using AI to brainstorm ad copy. But in 2026, despite rising AI costs, they’re using it for a lot more.

Marketers from Anthropic, financial ops platform Ramp, and other brands came together in New York in late May for content engineering platform AirOps’s Next conference to discuss how AI is transforming various aspects of marketing, including AI recommendations, martech, and hiring.

Regarding go-to-market strategy broadly, “what’s also interesting to me is maybe five, six years ago, the focus was on sustainable growth, and now it’s top-line growth at all costs,” Kexin Chen, VP of marketing at the startup Harvey, which is focused on the competitive legal AI field, said onstage.

Stay agile: While many marketers are well aware of SEO’s transformation amid the growing development of answer engine optimization (AEO), that practice, too, is rapidly changing. Some marketers have been focused on getting mentioned organically in Reddit conversations to boost brand visibility in search, but now, YouTube is also a growing factor, Kevin Indig, a growth advisor to brands, told attendees.

Another strategy is adding a “last updated” date to a webpage when new information is added; Indig said that one of his clients, the site Product Hunt, saw a “threefold increase in citations” after doing so.

While getting cited online is important to search ranking, brand trust still beats rank, he said.

“When people see an AI answer, the first filter that they will apply is trust. They will check if they trust the source or the citation, and only then will they ask themselves, ‘Does this actually answer my question?’” he said. “Trust is a scarce resource that is gaining more value in this new AI world.”

Antoine Sochat, business program operations lead at Airbnb, also touted the importance of AEO onstage. He’s been focused on building out Airbnb’s online resources that detail different activities to do in popular cities like Paris to drive more citations.

SEO “was a nerd thing,” he said. “Now I feel like it’s really a global marketing thing. I think marketers that don’t know anything about SEO need to check what is being said about them [and] about the company on AI.”

On the fence: Brands should look to be strategic about whether to buy or build AI tools for internal workflows, Austin Lau, a growth marketer at Anthropic, told attendees. If there’s a tool the brand needs that not many people use internally or that could solve a niche problem, it might make sense to build it internally, he said. For example, Lau said he constructed a plugin for marketing platform Figma using Claude Code that his design team uses to streamline the creation of variations of creative.

“We’re not going to build our own CRM,” he said. “We use Salesforce just like everyone else. We also use Gong just like everyone else.”

Some brands opting to build their own tools are using Claude Skills, a tool from Anthropic in Claude Code that automates repetitive tasks, Paul Jun, creative director, brand and internal tooling, at Ramp, said onstage. He noted that when doing so, brands may want to take a measured approach to building tools, taking care to connect them to brand strategy and vision, he said.

Graphic design is my passion: As AI transforms marketing, some brands are evolving what they’re looking for in marketing hires. For Harvey, that means hiring well-rounded candidates who have enough seniority to have some domain expertise but are okay discarding old workflows, Chen said.

Ashley Kemper, SVP of marketing at document management platform PandaDoc, echoed that sentiment. When talking about “red flags” in candidates, she mentioned onstage that she recently interviewed a candidate for a product marketing director role who complained about her CEO vibe-coding new features. Kemper said recent standout candidates are those who are comfortable building AI tools and eager for their coworkers to do the same.

James Pastan, head of growth at the site-building platform Framer who recently appeared at a Marketing Brew event, noted that a Fortune 500 brand could benefit from hiring an “AI-forward internal champion” with some experience, rather than someone who is eager to use AI but lacks experience.

“We hired someone who’s 21, fresh out of college,” he said onstage. “This is the most AI-pilled person I’ve ever met. This person has no concept of right and wrong and what to do and what not to do. They just have this first instinct of ‘every problem that I want to solve, I’m going to try to use AI to do it.’”