The AI Reality Check
From workshops to minutes: Sōvyn’s nine LLM-sourced clients
Chintan Shah is President and Managing Partner of Sōvyn, the health tech and life sciences marketing and communications firm formerly known as KNB Communications. The company now sits at the point where deep tech expertise, science knowledge and broader marketing services overlap, and its own client pipeline shows how buyers are already using LLMs to shortlist agencies.
The practical move is not to chase every new AI tool, but to make the business easy for both people and AI assistants to understand. Sōvyn is seeing real leads from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, which means clear positioning now affects whether a firm is surfaced at all.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Almost 30 years ago, we were founded with a mission of providing marketing and communication support to some of the most innovative health tech and life sciences clients who were passionate about improving human lives. Originally, we were called KNB Communications, but after acquiring a digital agency in 2026, we rebranded to Sōvyn.
What makes us genuinely different is the intersection we’ve chosen to occupy: deep tech and science expertise, strong communications connections, and a broad range of marketing capabilities. Plenty of agencies can do one of these things well, and some can even do two. It’s rare to find all three under one roof.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
The majority of our business comes from the best possible source, which is our current clients. They continually expand their scopes with broader services, and they often recommend our services to people in their network.
After that, the next three largest channels are paid ads, organic search, and LLM referrals, in that order.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
In the past, we used to record workshops, send them to a human transcriptionist, and wait 24 to 48 hours to get a file back. AI now handles that in minutes.
Marketing Coordinators used to set aside days every quarter for CRM cleanup. AI has condensed that down to a quarter of the time.
Executive Assistants used to have to compare calendars and do time zone calculations before sending meeting invitations. They also provided reminders. AI has made scheduling much less stressful.
We can and have used AI to automate follow-ups with warm prospects, but we’ve largely taken that back into human hands. The relationship is both too valuable and too tenuous to hand over to automation. Nuance matters. A tongue-in-cheek reference to a previous conversation can make the difference between building genuine rapport and making someone feel like just another name in a sales sequence. AI can still flag when a lead needs a follow-up, but humans are still better at determining what that follow-up should say.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Customers are definitely changing how they find us. We’ve signed nine clients in the past six months who came to us via LLMs, including ChatGPT (6), Perplexity (2), and Claude (1). For a business like ours, this represents ROI in the nine figures.
They’re also coming to the table feeling better informed and with a higher level of confidence in our services before ever speaking with us. The prospect has typed into an LLM “best biotech marketing agencies” and has been told by an objective third party that we’re at the top of the list. The subsequent conversation looks a lot different than someone who clicked on a paid ad.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Ignore LLMs at your own peril. While it’s absolutely true that the majority of consumers are still using Google Search to conduct their queries, a substantial and quickly growing number of people are turning to AI to get answers instead of lists of results.
The number one thing you need to do is define your positioning perfectly and carry that clarity cross-channel. If your website, social media, executive thought leadership, and media coverage all explain your company differently, you will be less likely to be surfaced.
What can you ignore? Most of the panic. You do not need every new AI platform. You do not need to abandon your current tactics. The companies who will win over the next 12 months are the ones making themselves clear and credible wherever their buyers choose to look.
Thank you to Chintan Shah and the team at Sōvyn for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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