Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

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Around the world, politicians are fixated on factories. President Donald Trump wants to bring home everything from steelmaking to drug production and is putting up tariff barriers to do so. Britain is considering subsidising manufacturers’ energy bills; Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, is offering incentives for electric-vehicle-makers, adding to a long-running industrial-subsidy scheme. Governments from Germany to Indonesia have flirted with inducements for chip- and battery-makers. However, the global manufacturing push will not succeed. In fact, it is likely to do more harm than good.

Today’s zeal for homegrown manufacturing has many aims. In the West politicians want to revive well-paying factory work and restore the lost glory of their industrial heartlands; poorer countries want to foster development as well as jobs. The war in Ukraine, meanwhile, shows the importance of resilient supply chains, especially for arms and ammunition. Politicians hope that industrial prowess will somehow translate more broadly into national strength. Looming over all this is China’s tremendous manufacturing dominance, which inspires fear and envy in equal measure.

Jobs, growth and resilience are all worthy aims. Unfortunately, however, the idea that promoting manufacturing is the way to achieve them is misguided. The reason is that it rests on a series of misconceptions about the nature of the modern economy.

One concerns factory jobs. Politicians hope that boosting manufacturing means decent employment for workers without university degrees or, in developing countries, who have migrated from the countryside. But factory work has become highly automated.  

Many of the good jobs created by today’s production lines are for technicians and engineers, not lunch-pail Joes. Less than a third of American manufacturing jobs today are production roles carried out by workers without a degree. By one estimate, bringing home enough manufacturing to close America’s trade deficit would create only enough new production jobs to account for an extra 1% of the workforce.  

What about the argument that, given the war in Ukraine and tensions with China, the rich world must reindustrialise for the sake of national security?  But in today’s ultra-specialised world, across-the-board subsidies for reindustrialisation will not do much to boost war-readiness. Making Tomahawks is entirely different from making Teslas. Far from suggesting that countries at peace must develop the capacity to make lots of drones, the war in Ukraine shows that a wartime economy can innovate and multiply production volumes remarkably fast.

The final part of the manufacturing delusion is the idea that China’s industrial might is a product of its state-led economy—and so must be countered with a similarly extensive industrial policy everywhere else. China does indeed distort its markets in all kinds of ways, and early in this century it manufactured an unusual amount given its level of development. But those days are past.

China has not escaped the global shrinkage of factory jobs since 2013. The share of its workforce in factories corresponds to America’s at a similar level of prosperity; and it is lower than it was in most other rich economies. China’s 29% share of global manufacturing value-added is a function of its size rather than its strategy. After years of fast growth, it now has an enormous domestic market to support its manufacturers. Innovation is begetting innovation; a “low-altitude economy” of drones and flying taxis promises to take flight soon. Yet, even though China’s goods exports have grown by 70% relative to global GDP since 2006, they have fallen by half as a share of the Chinese economy.

The way to rival the manufacturing heft of China is not through painful decoupling from its economy, but by ensuring that a sufficiently large bloc rivals it in size. This is best achieved if allies are able to work together and trade in an open and lightly regulated economy; factories in America, Germany, Japan and South Korea together add more value than those in China. As the pandemic showed, diverse supply chains are a lot more resilient than national ones.

Alas, governments today are heading in precisely the opposite direction. The manufacturing delusion is drawing countries into protecting domestic industry and competing for jobs that no longer exist. That will only lower wages, worsen productivity and blunt the incentive to innovate.

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The world needs robust productivity growth more than ever to address pressing global issues: inflated balance sheets, financing the transition to net zero, bridging empowerment gaps, and funding a demographic transition with more retirees and fewer workers.  And a fundamental unit of productivity growth is firms. If firms do not increase their productivity, economies don’t either.

This research finds that a relatively small number of firms making bold strategic moves generated the majority of productivity growth in the period studied, in powerful bursts rather than in a smooth trickle of gradual change, and through strategic moves, top-line growth, and portfolio shifts more than efficiency gains. This was a more concentrated, dynamic, and sporadic pattern than existing literature tends to highlight, with progress on productivity being defined by a few firms moving a mile rather than many firms moving an inch. Single firms can move the productivity needle for entire economies—the “power of one.”

This latest offering in decades of McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) research on productivity carves out new ground from typical treatments of the topic. Those have focused on broad economic factors, such as labor-market dynamics, technological advances, capital investments, and fiscal and monetary policy, rather than firm-level features. Or they have focused on productivity dispersion and diffusion patterns across millions of often-anonymous firms. This research zooms in on those firms that are most relevant for driving growth and enriches quantitative analysis with sector- and firm-specific case studies in line with MGI’s tradition of analyzing the “micro-to-macro” roots of productivity.

Fewer than 100 firms in the research sample of 8,300—a group that the authors have dubbed Standouts—accounted for about two-thirds of the positive productivity gains in each of the three country (US, Germany and UK in four sectors: retail, automotive and aerospace, travel and logistics, and computers and electronics) samples the authors analyzed. Standouts are defined as firms that added at least one basis point to their national sample’s productivity growth.  To give a sense of how important a single firm can be, just another dozen or so of the largest Standouts could have doubled productivity growth in their entire country.  The number of firms that were responsible for the largest drags (negative contributions of at least one basis point) on productivity growth—referred as Stragglers—was even smaller. Only 55 Stragglers accounted for 50 to 65 percent of the firm-level productivity drag in the three country samples.

The relationship between Standouts and sector growth is, of course, a symbiotic one. Standouts drive the growth of sectors, but some sectors also have the market dynamics, technology, regulation, and competitive setting that provide fertile ground for Standouts. There were more Standouts in sectors where firms could create new customer value and scale new business models than in sectors that were mostly about efficiency. For instance, the US computer and electronics sector came with many scalers and disruptors. Often when demand is faltering, other sectors are relative deserts, tending to produce more Stragglers or firms that restructure.

About 10 percent of firms accounted for 90 percent of productivity growth in the period studied. Looking at all firms, about 50 percent increased productivity faster than the sector average. Indeed, 20 percent of all firms increased productivity 1.5 times faster than the sector average while also increasing their employment share.

The millions of micro-, small, and medium-size enterprises (MSMEs) outside our sample collectively contributed up to 30 percent of productivity growth in the four sectors in the national statistics.8 Indeed, a handful of them may emerge as the Standouts of tomorrow.

Four types of Standouts ranked by size of contribution: Improvers—large firms that mainly contribute by advancing their productivity levels—made the largest contribution to productivity growth. Disruptors, or small firms that grew productivity and share very rapidly, actually made the smallest contribution. Scalers, which were already far above the sector’s average productivity and grew their share of employment, and therefore drove productivity growth mostly via employment reallocation, made the second-largest contribution.  Restructurers are less productive firms that made a positive contribution by losing market share and employment to more productive firms or exited altogether.  

Some Standouts remain Standouts over long periods, but many change over time. With a limited sample, about two-thirds of Standouts in 2011–19 remained Standouts in 2019–23.   The other one-third fell back, while new firms emerged as Standouts—including former Stragglers turning around.14 So, at any point in time, a few firms disproportionately matter, but these firms evolve. The story of productivity is highly dynamic.

Standouts share few common characteristics. They come from all sectors and all parts of the productivity curve, have vastly different starting points on common business metrics and past performance, and contribute to productivity growth in different ways. What they have in common is “doing things differently” more than “doing things more efficiently.”

What emerges from these case studies is that Standouts used a combination of five types of moves, often in combination. Four of these relate to scaling productive businesses or finding new ways to create value. Only one is primarily about efficiency and cost.   These strategies are:  Scaling more productive business models or technologies.  Shifting regional and product portfolios toward the most productive businesses or adjacencies.  Reshaping customer value propositions to grow revenue and value added.  Building scale and network effects. And transforming operations to raise labor efficiency and reduce external cost at scale.  These moves often trigger chain reactions that lead to bursts of productivity over specific periods and sectors in a pattern of “action and response” more than through the diffusion of practices.

Six shifts in the conventional wisdom on productivity growth emerge from this research findings.  A few firms driving productivity growth instead of the broad swath.  Incumbent improvers as much as superstars and disruptors.  Bold action and response more than imitation.  Strategy, portfolio shifts and value creation more than efficiency.  Scaling innovation more than creating new entrants.  And dynamic reallocation toward leading firms and business units as much as internal improvements.

It’s been several weeks since US President Donald Trump declared his global trade war, but Dinh Ngoc Hien is still busy tending to her stream of customers. One by one, they pluck cigarettes, noodles, eggs and soda from the shelves of her convenience store in Dong Nai, a heavily industrialized province just east of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s business capital. Hien has been here since dawn, and she’ll remain after dusk. Then she’ll lock up, get on her motorbike and zip through the bustling streets of a place that could have more to lose from Trump’s policies than almost any other.

The president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, unveiled on April 2, targeted Vietnam with a 46% rate—one of the highest for any country, threatening to devastate large swaths of its economy. The nominally socialist nation of 100 million has woven itself tightly into global commerce since the late 1980s, when it began allowing free enterprise and started mending its war-ravaged relationship with the US. Adidas, Apple, Intel, Levi Strauss and Samsung Electronics have all set up manufacturing bases here, along with hundreds of other international companies. Today, net exports to the US account for around one fifth of Vietnam’s gross domestic product.

While the tariffs have been put on hold until July and are the subject of multiple court challenges, the fear they’ve caused across Vietnam continues—especially in Dong Nai. When the 34-year-old Hien was a child, the Delaware-size province was a place of open fields and rice paddies, where farmers toiled much as they had for centuries. Now its western flank is an urban extension of Ho Chi Minh City, a sprawl of highways and industrial sites girded by commercial strips where workers can spend their extra cash. Most of Hien’s customers have jobs in nearby factories; so do her husband and her sisters and their spouses. “All these changes are good,” she says. “Our lives are much better now. We live in bigger houses, and everyone in the family has a motorbike.” With business brisk, she has plans to expand: “I want to see myself grow into a real entrepreneur.”

Hien’s ambitions, and those of millions of her compatriots, will hinge in part on what happens in the coming weeks. The Vietnamese government has dispatched several delegations to Washington and pledged to remove what the country’s trade minister described as “barriers that hinder investment and business activities.” It’s promised to eliminate illegal transshipments, whereby Chinese companies evade import controls by sending their wares to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and designating them as “Made in Vietnam”; Trump’s trade negotiators describe this as a major problem. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also suggested that deals with Vietnam and other Asian countries could require them to impose economic measures of their own against China, a crucial Vietnamese trading partner.

And in addition to those potential concessions, Vietnam has offered something that might be more impressive to a president who’s openly using the office for personal profit: facilitating the development of a Trump-branded golf resort that went from proposal to construction in a matter of months. The White House has said that Trump complies with conflict-of-interest rules; the Trump Organization, his family real-estate company, said in a statement that its Vietnam deals were signed before last year’s election, and that the firm has “zero connection to the administration.” Its local partner, Kinh Bac City Development Holding Corp., did not respond to a request for comment.  Still, it’s not clear whether any of this will be enough to change Trump’s plans.

The tariff assault has been particularly stunning for Vietnam, given its unique history with the US. American bombing devastated large parts of the country in the 1960s and ’70s, contributing to the deaths of as many as 3 million Vietnamese—at least half of them civilians. More than 58,000 Americans were also killed in the conflict. The normalization of relations, 20 years after the end of hostilities, marked an extraordinary historical pivot. The two countries soon grew closer, partly thanks to US policymakers encouraging companies to “friendshore” their production away from China.  Trump’s tariff announcement, then, wasn’t just another policy decision. It was a direct strike on decades of political and economic rapprochement, delivered with the stroke of a pen.

Virtually all of the Vietnamese businesspeople to whom Bloomberg Businessweek spoke for this story say they’re optimistic the government can find common ground with the US, and in public, officials are urging calm.

After three days of discussions in late May, Vietnamese officials said they’d made progress with their US counterparts on a deal to head off the crippling 46% tariff. More meetings will follow this month. The best Vietnam can hope for in the short term might be provisional concessions—subject to more detailed negotiation and, of course, to Trump’s personal and political whims. With such an agreement, exports could continue, albeit with enough surrounding uncertainty to make it difficult to run a modest factory, let alone plan the future of a fast-emerging market.

Lithium-ion batteries have some emerging competition: Sodium-based alternatives are starting to make inroads.  Sodium is more abundant on Earth than lithium, and batteries that use the material could be cheaper in the future. Building a new battery chemistry is difficult, mostly because lithium is so entrenched. But, this new technology has some advantages in nooks and crannies. 

For a few years, we’re starting to see the chemistry make progress, though not significantly in the big category of electric vehicles. Rather, these new batteries are finding niches where they make sense, especially in smaller electric scooters and large energy storage installations.

Two years ago, lithium prices were, to put it bluntly, bonkers. The price of lithium hydroxide (an ingredient used to make lithium-ion batteries) went from a little under $10,000 per metric ton in January 2021 to over $76,000 per metric ton in January 2023.  More expensive lithium drives up the cost of lithium-ion batteries. Price spikes, combined with concerns about potential shortages, pushed a lot of interest in alternatives, including sodium-ion.  

There’s one key point to understand here. Sodium-based batteries will need to be cheaper than lithium-based ones to have a shot at competing, especially for electric vehicles, because they tend to be worse on one key metric: energy density. A sodium-ion battery that’s the same size and weight as a lithium-ion one will store less energy, limiting vehicle range.

The issue is, as we’ve seen since that 2023 story, lithium prices—and the lithium-ion battery market—are moving targets. Prices for precursor materials have come back down since the early 2023 peak, with lithium hydroxide crossing below $9,000 per metric ton recently.  And as more and more battery factories are built, costs for manufactured products come down too, with the average price for a lithium-ion pack in 2024 dropping 20%—the biggest annual decrease since 2017.

One researcher the authors spoke with at the time suggested that sodium-ion batteries might not compete directly with lithium-ion batteries but could instead find specialized uses where the chemistry made sense. Two years later, we’re starting to see what those are.  One growing segment that could be a big win for sodium-ion: electric micromobility vehicles, like scooters and three-wheelers. Since these vehicles tend to travel shorter distances at lower speeds than cars, the lower energy density of sodium-ion batteries might not be as big a deal.  While smaller vehicles and stationary installations appear to be the early wins for sodium, some companies aren’t giving up on using the alternative for EVs as well. 

Ultimately, lithium is the juggernaut of the battery industry, and going head to head is going to be tough for any alternative chemistry. But sticking with niches that make sense could help sodium-ion make progress at a time when we need every successful battery type we can get.

Donald Trump has used his first five months back in office to attack longtime allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union, insisting the United States “will no longer tolerate being ripped off.”

His posture with trade partners has been more competitive than collaborative, imposing or threatening heavy-handed tariffs under the pretense that they’re running up trade deficits to enrich themselves at Americans’ expense. He’s right that U.S. manufacturing jobs have sharply dropped since the turn of the century, gutting industrial cities across America’s heartland that have in turn flocked to him in voting booths. But it’s hard to make the case that globalization has been a zero-sum game.

For the last 23 years, Forbes has compiled the Global 2000 list, ranking the world’s 2,000 largest companies by revenue, profit, assets and market value, with equal weights for each of the four metrics. Twenty years ago, the 2,000 companies on the list combined to record $21.9 trillion in annual sales, $1.3 trillion in profit, $80.7 trillion in assets and $26.6 trillion in market value. Every half decade since, all of those numbers have steadily climbed, and this year’s totals amount to records of $52.9 trillion in revenue, $4.9 trillion in profit, $242.2 trillion in assets and $91.3 trillion in market cap.

Much of that astounding growth, including more than doubling in revenues has taken place in the U.S., where the S&P 500 index is up fivefold in the last two decades. It’s home to Walmart, the company with the highest 12-month sales in the world, Alphabet, the world’s most profitable company, and Apple, the most valuable company as of April 25, when the data used to rank the list was compiled.

Now, leaders of many of the most prominent companies in the U.S. and around the world are fretting that a trade war could stunt that growth.

While the top 100 American companies on the list have gained, on average, 10.5% in market value, underperforming the top 100 companies outside of the United States by three percentage points. In fact, since Trump took office, the S&P 500, which has swung wildly, has gained a mere 0.59%, versus nearly 20% gains for stocks in Europe and China. Over the past 10 years, the top 100 U.S.   Stocks on Forbes list have an average cumulative return of 488% versus 143% average return for the top 100 stocks outside the United States.

In terms of overall numbers, the United States is still first by a wide margin, with 612 companies on the list headquartered here, a slight drop from 621 last year. China is next with 317 companies represented, including firms based in Hong Kong.

The U.S. remains the world’s most powerful economy, and it’s up to Trump and Congress to decide whether what is effectively the tax revenue from government heavy-handedness on trade deals, is worth sacrificing the economic gains the United States and its allies have long benefited from due to globalization.

Proficiency with AI tools has quickly become a top skill, and companies are working to train their employees how to use it. At the same time, AI is also emerging as a useful training tool in its own right.

Across industries, AI is helping companies create training materials faster and more efficiently, as well as allowing them to design new, more interactive methods to train workers. Artificial intelligence technology is also enabling a shift toward on-the-job instruction that can guide employees in real time. The benefits can be wide-ranging, from massive cost savings for the companies to providing a safer place to simulate tasks in which the cost of an error could be severe.

Creating training content just got easier.  BSH Home Appliances, a subset of the multinational technology Bosch Group, has been using an AI-generated video platform called Synthesia to create material ranging from compliance trainings to technical trainings. The platform allows users to quickly generate videos from prompts or documents and include generic avatars in their videos or even AI avatars of themselves. The videos can range from two minutes to 45 minutes, and the company has been significantly scaling its use of the platform after seeing a 70% cost savings in external video production.

Welcome to the simulation.  Sometimes, watching a video isn’t enough. That’s where simulation-style training comes into play.   For example, researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and software company Robust AI have developed an AI-powered program to teach and simulate the basic tenets of laparoscopic surgery. Using the actual tools used in surgery, medical students complete exercises to transfer rings between pegs without dropping them and within short time constraints, mimicking the delicate movements surgeons need to complete with swift precision.  A recent study from this year showed the program is as good and even slightly better than faculty human evaluators when rating surgical skills. Currently, students are using the program informally, but it is headed to become an official part of the curriculum. Since surgical training involves significant oversight and input from senior surgeons who are typically already inundated with responsibilities, and since mistakes come with significant costs, improvements that allow students to do more realistic training in lower-pressure settings have enormous potential.  Benefits of improved AI-enabled simulation-style training stretch beyond the operating room, however.

The pursuit of real-time training.  Thanks to AI, Strivr is also making progress on its next frontier: augmented-reality-powered experiences that guide workers in real time and connect them to information they need while performing a job. The company is working with 10 design partners to build out early versions of its platform for real-time guidance, called WorkWise.  “The end result of all of this is going to be someone—let’s just say a warehouse worker—putting packages on a truck. They’re going to be wearing smart glasses, and the glasses are going to be telling them what to do in real time. This is kind of ironic, given what we’ve been doing for the last 10 years, but you’re probably not going to have to train people, or you’re going to significantly reduce the amount of training time required,” says Belch.

1. nistic.  The most profound negotiation breakthroughs often happen because of something unexpected—a surprise emotional encounter, unanticipated common ground, or a crisis that reveals a shared problem. Skilled mediators learn to watch for emotional turning points, informal channels, surprising areas of alignment, and other subtle opportunities that can transform conflicts.

The most significant challenge for business leaders is transforming the organizational culture to empower employees at all levels to manage disputes effectively. By embedding conflict resolution skills throughout the ranks, leaders can ensure that their organizations thrive even in the face of internal tensions. That means moving beyond seeing conflict as something to be avoided and framing it as a potential source of energy, innovation, and growth. That shift begins with creating safe, facilitated spaces for difficult conversations about sensitive issues in order to normalize the idea that conflict, when handled well, drives improvement rather than destruction.

The interpersonal skills that are integral to human-centered leadership are often called “soft” skills, but they’re what underpins the hard work of managing. Empathy, emotional regulation, taking time to read people: These are the skills associated with high emotional intelligence that enable leaders to build cohesive teams and successfully grow their businesses during uncertain times.

Today, though, effective modern leadership seems to be under siege, thanks to the high public profiles of “tough” leaders. As The Wall Street Journal’s Chip Cutter recently put it, “Corporate America’s long-running war for talent sounds more like a war on the talent these days.” This is occurring despite the fast-evolving needs of digitally maturing organizations and workforces that are often being retrained for new tasks.

Misconceptions about what makes a leader strong distract executives from recognizing where their core organizational strengths come from. To explain why your organization’s future success depends on cultivating human-centered leaders, the authors look at why the tough-leader persona is not effective or sustainable for achieving long-term results. The authors shared the belief that human-centric and strong — not tough — leadership is inevitably what will win the day.

Tough talkers need to learn some hard truths about accountability and empathy. Here are five key truths about human-centered leadership that can help them adapt effectively to modern work environments.

1. Strong leaders know that being empathetic doesn’t mean being nice. Tough leaders mistakenly think empathizing means giving in, but it doesn’t. Human-centered leaders empathize to better communicate and collaborate. Empathizing means connecting with what others are thinking and feeling, and it’s the skill that cultivates safe spaces for creativity, builds strong team alliances, and gets to clarity on issues.
2. Strong leaders are both demanding and supportive. Human-centric leaders aren’t soft about employees’ performance. They don’t ask for less. Instead, they set clear goals and priorities. They monitor progress at the team and individual levels. And they align work with employees’ identified strengths and skills.
3. Strong leaders build trust by being dependable. Tough-talking leaders often fail to appreciate that reliability — the foundation of trust — is what builds results.
4. Strong leaders focus on what’s best for teams. Discussions about workplace flexibility often focus on the extremes — fully remote work with open-ended individual choice versus mostly office-based work prescribed by a tough-talking CEO.
5. Strong leaders allow themselves and others to be fallible. The concept of the infallible leader is seemingly in vogue. Even in our fast-changing world, tough-talking leaders won’t admit to ever being wrong.

Cody Barbo has a folder on his phone filled with all the AI assistants, and at least once every month, the Trust and Will co-founder and CEO asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Grok, and every other model the same question: What is the easiest, cheapest, and best place to set up my will online?

The entrepreneur wants to see how his San Diego startup ranks against the rest of the estate planning industry when it comes to the answers that large language models are spitting out to hundreds of millions of users. 

“We’re competitive, so we’re like, is it us? Is it the OG, LegalZoom? Or is it a new player?” says Barbo, whose company has landed on the Inc. 5000 for the past two years after posting an average three-year growth rate of 1,127 percent. “Our search volume is getting eaten up by these tools.”

There’s no standard term yet for what Barbo is doing, but founders have started calling this practice “search everywhere optimization,” “generative engine optimization,” and “answer engine optimization.” While the acronyms vary, founders agree that finding the SEO equivalent for AI is the future of marketing, as more consumers take their queries to AI agents instead of search engines.

Even though the space is rapidly evolving in real time, founders are uncovering which strategies are most effective at surfacing company mentions in generative AI responses. Here’s what they’ve learned.

1. Invest in long-form content.  Founders say one approach that has really worked so far is investing in long-form editorial content. That’s why Trust and Will has put so much emphasis on educational content on its website, publishing regular articles by industry experts and conducting a 10,000-person study in January. Brand-tracking software company Tracksuit has taken a similar approach, publishing articles about marketing, case studies, and original research.
2. Become the trusted answer.  Length is not the only factor to consider when creating editorial content for AI to crawl and cite. Founders recommend leaning into a niche and becoming the go-to source for industry leaders’ frequently asked questions.
3. Prioritize founder-first storytelling.  When it comes to optimizing AI search, Tyler Eide, founder and creative director of the Seattle-based design agency Parker Studio, has been advising his clients to lean into founder-first storytelling.  “There’s only so much you can control… so the best thing to do is to control what you can,” says Eide, whose company has worked with Google, Lululemon, and Zappos. That means having his founder clients ask themselves: “How can I get out into as many places as possible with the story that I want people to have?”
4. Expand your entire digital footprint.  If links are the currency of search rankings, brand mentions are the most important factor for determining visibility in AI responses, says Andy Crestodina. The co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios, a Chicago-based digital agency focused on web development and website optimization, says, “Have the biggest digital footprint. Make sure your brand is everywhere.”  Go on podcasts, participate in webinars, post on LinkedIn, write for every possible website, issue press releases, and repeat your elevator pitch in any video that may get transcribed. Make sure your company is listed on every review site, trade association website, and conceivable directory. Crestodina calls this basic digital public relations.  “Fill the web with your company name and surround it with relevant industry terms. Your new goal is to be in as much AI training data as possible,” says Crestodina.
5. Keep testing.  Like Barbo, keep experimenting to see if and when your company name comes up after prompting AI agents with questions.  “Best practices are good hypotheses. Everything I just suggested should be tested,” says Crestodina. “Use data to confirm or reject that hypothesis, and then iterate, rinse, repeat. It takes a lot of humility to be good at this.”

According to the author after two decades working with founders, C-suites, and visionary brand leaders, one truth has stood out: those who prioritize consistent visibility and strong messaging over the long haul outperform those who treat PR as a one-time tactic. Brands that embed credibility into their DNA — ideally from day one — are better positioned to attract capital, strategic partners, loyal customers and media attention.  If you’re serious about long-term success, it’s time to treat visibility and credibility as core business strategies — not last-minute fixes. Here’s where to start:

1. Clarify and own your value proposition.  Most founders know their product, but struggle to explain their deeper purpose. Media readiness starts with clarity: What problem does your solution uniquely solve? What market space do you dominate with authority?  Your messaging should present your distinct value in a clear, compelling narrative that can be understood in seconds by investors, customers and the press. This is the foundation of credibility: people can’t believe in what they can’t understand.
2. Invest early in thought leadership.  Thought leadership isn’t self-promotion — it’s a public expression of your expertise, perspective and values. Founders who share insights generously (before asking for attention) establish themselves as credible voices.  Start by writing advice-driven articles, speaking at relevant industry events or offering commentary as a media expert. Participate in real-time discussions through platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit AMAs, Instagram Live or niche Slack and Discord communities. These casual, interactive formats humanize your brand and demonstrate accessibility, transparency and relevance.  Credibility is built through consistency, not by sporadic posts or self-serving announcements.
3. Leverage your origin story.  Every entrepreneur has a story. The best know how to use it.  Your company vision came from somewhere—your frustrations, your experiences, your drive to solve a particular problem. That story makes your brand relatable and memorable. It’s the emotional bridge between your mission and your market.  Your personal narrative should appear on your “About” page, in social content, in media interviews and as part of your pitch strategy. People remember stories, not specs. Facts inform — but stories persuade.
4. Build media relationships before you need them.  Breakthrough media coverage rarely comes from blasting out a press release. It comes from relationships.  Whether you DIY or work with a publicist, start by identifying journalists, editors, and podcast hosts who cover your industry. Follow their work. Comment thoughtfully on their articles. Share insights or story angles that align with their focus.  Position yourself as a trusted expert before you pitch. That way, when a critical moment comes — your product launch, your funding round, your viral moment — they already know who you are.
5. Create a digital footprint that reinforces your authority.  In today’s world, your first impression lives on Google. If someone searches your name or company, will what they find reflect your expertise and credibility?  Audit your digital presence. Make sure your bios are consistent across platforms. Treat LinkedIn as your thought leadership hub. Ensure your website reflects professionalism and authority, not just basic functionality.  In short, make it easy for people to believe in you, because they can find evidence that others already do.