What AI Search Is Teaching Us About Customer Experience
One of the advantages of being part of Perseus is having access to businesses and leaders tackling many of the same challenges. While our businesses operate independently across different markets and geographies, an experiment or lesson from one team can often spark ideas elsewhere.
This knowledge sharing is particularly valuable with AI. As the technology evolves, we’re looking to our businesses to see how they’re experimenting within their own markets and what they’re learning along the way.
One recent example comes from IDS, a Perseus business providing dealership management software to the RV, marine and trailer industries. Their team explored a question that is becoming increasingly relevant as consumers adopt AI tools: what determines which businesses are recommended when someone asks an AI platform where they should shop?
Their experiment uncovered an interesting connection between AI search, customer reputation and the operational systems working behind the scenes.
Customer Experience Influences Discoverability
As consumers increasingly turn to AI tools for recommendations, IDS wanted to understand what determines which dealerships those tools surface. More specifically, they were interested in whether a dealership’s existing digital presence and reputation could influence its visibility in AI-generated recommendations.
To explore the question, the IDS team ran a simple experiment. They asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity to recommend dealerships across several markets, then compared the businesses that appeared in the results and looked for signals that might help explain why certain dealerships were being recommended over others.
What they found was interesting. Dealerships they expected to appear prominently weren’t always the ones being recommended. Instead, their analysis suggested that reputation signals, including the volume and quality of customer reviews, could be playing an important role in how dealerships surface in AI-driven search.
For IDS, this insight created an interesting connection back to the software itself. A DMS (dealer management system) can help teams keep track of open service orders, automate follow-up and maintain visibility across the customer journey. Those capabilities ultimately influence the customer experience, and customer experiences influence what people say about a business. These signals are increasingly becoming part of how AI systems understand and recommend businesses.
Looking Beyond the Dealer Market
The IDS experiment focused on dealerships, but it raises a broader question for vertical market software businesses: could the systems running a business behind the scenes increasingly influence how that business is discovered?
As AI changes how people search, evaluate options and make purchasing decisions, the signals that shape discoverability may be changing too. Customer experience, reputation and operational consistency have traditionally felt several steps removed from search.
This creates an interesting opportunity for vertical market software. Our businesses build systems that are at the center of their customers’ operations. If these experiences influence reputation, and reputation increasingly influences AI-driven discovery, the impact of operational software may extend further than we traditionally think.
Learning From the Experiments Happening Around Us
What makes the IDS experiment interesting to us isn’t just what it revealed about AI search, it’s also a good example of how learning happens across Perseus.
IDS asked a question rooted in the dealer market, but the connection they uncovered between AI, customer experience and discoverability is relevant well beyond it. For another business, that insight might lead to a different question entirely: how is AI changing the way customers find us, evaluate our products or make decisions in our market?
As AI continues to change our markets, no single business will have all the answers. Having more people asking good questions, and making what they learn available to others, gives all of us more to build from.
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