What you’ll find in this week’s Triple Threat:
💥 Power: How leaders are getting instant answers from their data to make real-time decisions
🎯 Precision: What new research reveals about the biggest shift in search behavior since Google
🚀 Momentum: The AI assistant that transforms raw client context into deal-closing assets
💥 Power: A tool that unlocks a new superpower for your business
ThoughtSpot: AI Analytics Without the Analyst
ThoughtSpot: AI Analytics Without the Analyst
What it is: ThoughtSpot is a cloud-based, AI-powered analytics platform that puts decision-ready insights in everyone’s hands. Ask questions in plain English—“What were sales by region last quarter?”—and get instant charts, dashboards, and AI-driven insights. No SQL, no analysts, just answers.
Instead of bottlenecking decisions with data teams, CEOs and operators can democratize access to insights, speed up campaign optimization, and let AI surface trends, anomalies, and growth drivers automatically.
Why it’s worth trying: Speed is a competitive advantage. With ThoughtSpot, your team doesn’t just stare at dashboards, they ask questions in real time. It’s like having a dedicated analyst on call, available 24/7, without the headcount.
How to Put It Into Play (for CEOs & Operators):
Board or Investor Updates – Build Liveboards to monitor KPIs (pipeline, growth, retention) and generate investor-ready snapshots instantly.
Sales Visibility – Give reps and managers the ability to drill into pipeline coverage, velocity, and win/loss drivers without ops bottlenecks.
Marketing Effectiveness – Track ROI in real time across campaigns, channels, and segments, shifting spend mid-campaign instead of waiting for monthly reviews.
Customer Retention – Use anomaly detection to surface churn risks or declining usage before they hit renewal.
Relevant Use Cases for Business Leaders:
Campaign Performance Tracking – See which channels or creatives are driving the best ROI.
Example: Compare Meta vs. LinkedIn ad performance in real time, then shift spend mid-campaign instead of waiting for end-of-month reports.Audience Segmentation Insights – Find out which customer groups drive the most value.
Example: Identify that email-acquired customers have 2x retention vs. social-acquired, then reallocate budget to lifecycle email campaigns.Conversion Funnel Optimization – Drill into drop-off points across campaigns, landing pages, or product flows to plug leaks.
Example: Identify that 40% of demo requests drop at the scheduling page, prompting a switch to instant booking with Calendly to recover conversions.Real-Time Growth Dashboards – Align the entire org with a single source of truth across pipeline velocity, campaign ROI, and retention.
Example: A CEO can open one Liveboard before a board meeting to see CAC, pipeline coverage, and churn risk in real time—no waiting for ops to prep slides.Churn & Retention Signals – Spot which cohorts are disengaging early and trigger targeted win-back campaigns.
Example: Detect that trial users from paid search show a 30% lower activation rate, prompting a nurture sequence tailored to their intent keywords.
How it stacks up:
vs. Excel & manual reports → Real-time answers, less prep time
vs. Traditional BI (Tableau, PowerBI) → Easier to use, no SQL or analyst dependency
vs. Outsourcing analysis → Faster insights at lower cost, democratized across teams
How to use it (high level):
Connect ThoughtSpot to your data (Snowflake, Salesforce, Google BigQuery, HubSpot, etc.).
Ask natural-language questions like “Which region has the strongest pipeline coverage for Q4?”
Explore automated AI insights with SpotIQ or use Sage (its GenAI assistant) to suggest deeper analysis.
Build Liveboards and share them across teams to unify decisions.
First step: Start risk-free with ThoughtSpot’s free trial. Connect one campaign or sales dataset, and let your team start asking questions directly. Track how much faster decisions happen when insights don’t bottleneck at data teams.
You can also see it in action here:
🎯Precision: A real-world case where the strategy clicked—and what it means for growth, trust, and traction
The Search Shift: What Resoneo and Adobe Reveal About AI-Led Discovery
For twenty years, Google taught us that search was about typing keywords and scanning lists of links. Two new studies, Adobe’s U.S. consumer survey and Resoneo’s analysis of 87,725 public ChatGPT conversations, prove that model is already breaking.
At first glance, the data looks like an adoption story.
77% of U.S. users already use ChatGPT as a search engine
Nearly one in four start directly with AI instead of Google, rising to 28% among Gen Z
Queries are longer, averaging 8 words compared to Google’s 3.5
60% of conversations stretch past 5 exchanges
The surface-level conclusion is obvious: ChatGPT is competing with Google. But the real signal is bigger. Search is no longer about retrieving links. It is about narrative building.
The hidden shifts behind the data:
Search is becoming consultative. Users are not just looking for facts. They are looking for advice, opinions, and synthesis. 30% of queries go beyond information-seeking into problem-solving, creativity, or coding. Google was built for answers, LLMs are being used for judgment.
Trust is being redistributed. With 36% of users finding new brands through ChatGPT, AI is not just an assistant, it is a gatekeeper. Visibility is no longer earned by backlinks and keywords, but by whether your brand appears in the AI’s “mental model” of the world.
Customer journeys are collapsing. A Google search often meant 5–10 clicks before a decision. In AI, the conversation is the funnel. Discovery, evaluation, and recommendation now happen inside a single dialogue.
Why this matters for your business:
Competing for AI visibility is not just SEO 2.0. It is closer to PR, thought leadership, and brand narrative strategy. You need your positioning statements, stats, and proof points to be part of the training data and knowledge graph these systems pull from.
The “zero-click future” is arriving faster than expected. Just as Google has moved more answers into snippets, LLMs now risk disintermediating your site entirely. Leaders need to prepare for a world where customer interaction happens in AI layers first, not on their owned channels.
Younger generations are already bypassing search. Gen Z is proving that trust in answers is portable. If an AI is fast, relevant, and human-like, it becomes the starting point.
How to apply it as a leader:
Run a brand prompt audit. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity about your company and category. If your brand is missing or misrepresented, that is a visibility gap.
Reframe content as answers. Create FAQ-rich pages, clear positioning statements, and data-backed insights that can easily be quoted by AI models.
Treat AI like an analyst briefing. Models summarize what they “know.” If you want to shape that summary, feed it authoritative content: studies, insights, press mentions.
Redesign the funnel assumption. Stop planning for 7–10 touchpoints before conversion. Start planning for AI-driven single-session discovery, where one conversation can make or break awareness.
Bottom line: The studies are not just about users asking longer questions. They are about the entire structure of discovery, trust, and competition shifting into AI-first channels. The leaders who act now will own visibility in a space where their competitors do not even realize the game has changed.
The links to both studies can be found here:
Adobe’s How ChatGPT is changing the way we search
🚀 Momentum — A custom GPT I create to help you take action today
Client Whisperer GPT: Build a Living Client Avatar
Most teams prepare for clients with surface research. A LinkedIn profile, a CRM note, and a quick scan of the website. Client Whisperer GPT goes deeper. Paste in client context such as bios, emails, websites, or meeting notes and it builds a full persona you can interact with. The avatar highlights goals, motivators, and pain points, then roleplays realistic conversations, challenges your approach, and even drafts proposals, RFP responses, and follow-up messages.
Who it’s for: CEOs, founders, consultants, and sales leaders who want to move beyond shallow prep and create hyper-relevant strategies for winning and growing accounts.
What it does: You enter client context. The GPT builds a reusable avatar that you can roleplay with, test pitches against, or ask for messaging tailored to that persona. It produces proposals, emails, and presentations aligned to what the client values most while flagging objections and blind spots you might overlook.
Why it’s worth using:
Builds a persistent avatar you can refine and reuse over time
Turns meeting prep into an ongoing client simulation lab
Generates tailored proposals, RFP responses, and follow-ups in minutes
Acts as both a research assistant and a practice partner, sharpening your relevance at every stage of the deal cycle
👉 Try Client Whisperer GPT
*Note: You will need a ChatGPT account (ideally a Plus or Team plan) to run this GPT.
Are you tired of growth feeling like guesswork?
Let’s make it simple.
Book a 30-minute Growth Plan session and we’ll map exactly how to use AI to streamline outreach, sharpen positioning, and turn customer feedback into a repeatable system for scale.
For more tactical insights on where sales, marketing, and AI actually converge, I share more daily on LinkedIn.
If this week’s Triple Threat helped you, send it to another operator who’s working through the same challenges.
Cheers,
—
Alexandria Ohlinger
CEO, Leadway