Monica Tomasso on moving AI visibility from answers to action
Monica Tomasso is CEO, Chief AI Visibility Expert at Monic AI Systems, which helps businesses understand how AI assistants represent and recommend them. The conversation traces the company’s origins in a reading-comprehension app and explores how AI-driven discovery is changing buyer conversations, while keeping research distinct from human judgment.
AI visibility work should go beyond tracking mentions to explain why competitors are recommended and what businesses can change. AI can support research and monitoring, but relationship-building and editorial judgment still need a human touch.
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?
Monic AI Systems actually began with something very personal: an AI reading comprehension app I built for my son.
The idea was simple. He would read aloud, an AI agent would listen, ask questions, and evaluate whether he actually understood what he’d read. Because reading words and understanding their meaning are two very different things.
That distinction sparked a much bigger realization about businesses.
AI systems can crawl thousands of websites, retrieve information, and even cite a company without really understanding what makes that business valuable or why someone should choose it.
I founded Monic AI Systems in 2025 to solve that problem.
Today, our AI Recommendable™ platform helps businesses understand how major AI assistants perceive them, where competitors are winning recommendations, and what needs to change to become more credible, understood, and recommended.
But we’re already building for the next shift. AI is moving beyond answering questions into taking action. Instead of simply recommending a company or a brand, an AI assistant may help schedule the consultation. Instead of suggesting a product, it may help complete the purchase.
We’re exploring that future firsthand by connecting AI recommendations to real booking capabilities.
That’s what makes our approach different. We’re not just helping companies appear in AI-generated answers. We’re building toward a future where businesses can move from being understood, to being recommended, to being chosen, and ultimately, acted upon.
And remarkably, that entire vision began with a question I was trying to answer for my son: Did you actually understand what you just read?
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
The interesting irony is that some of our most valuable opportunities are already coming through the very AI systems we help clients understand. We’ve had a few of our clients find Monic AI Systems through ChatGPT, which is a pretty compelling demonstration of why this work matters.
We also generate opportunities through LinkedIn thought leadership, speaking engagements, professional relationships, and referrals. I spend considerable time researching how AI recommendations are changing, and sharing those findings attracts business leaders who realize this is something they need to understand.
Where I’d like to see more growth is through strategic partnerships with agencies, consultants, and technology companies that already serve businesses but lack the tools, research capabilities, or expertise to help their clients succeed in AI-driven discovery. We’re not simply measuring AI visibility. We’re helping businesses understand how AI perceives them, strengthen their credibility and authority, improve their chances of being recommended, and ultimately turn those recommendations into real business opportunities.
Ultimately, I want our own business to demonstrate the principle we teach clients: you shouldn’t have to chase every customer. You should be discoverable, credible, and recommendable when a potential client is ready to buy.
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?
I’ve handed a significant portion of our research and monitoring workflows to AI. Our platform uses AI to investigate how businesses are represented across the web, analyze buyer questions, identify visibility gaps, and help produce research that would otherwise require enormous amounts of manual work.
What I won’t hand over is relationship-building and final editorial judgment.
I’ve experimented with AI-generated outreach, thought leadership, and content production. AI is incredibly useful for research and first drafts, but I’ve learned that something can be technically correct and still feel completely generic.
A journalist doesn’t want another polished pitch that could have been sent to 500 people. A prospective client doesn’t want to feel like they’re talking to an automated sales funnel.
So I use AI to do the heavy lifting, but I bring the human perspective back into the parts that require judgment, curiosity, empathy, and genuine relationships.
The real opportunity isn’t replacing humans with AI. It’s freeing humans to do the work that actually requires them.
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?
Absolutely. We’ve already had businesses discover Monic AI Systems through ChatGPT, including a specialized software company that came to us because it wanted to understand why competitors were appearing in AI recommendations when it wasn’t.
What fascinated me was how different that conversation was from a traditional sales inquiry. The prospect wasn’t asking what SEO was or why online visibility mattered. They already understood the problem. They wanted to know why AI recognized other companies in their category but seemed to overlook them.
That’s a fundamental change in the buyer journey.
AI assistants are increasingly acting as research partners, helping buyers compare options and develop opinions before they ever contact a company. By the time someone arrives at your website, they may already have a shortlist of providers and an AI-generated understanding of the market.
That’s why I believe businesses need to start asking a different question. Not just "Can customers find us on Google?" but "When customers ask AI who they should trust, are we even part of the conversation?"
And if we are, what is AI actually saying about us?
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?
I’d tell anyone working in AI visibility to stop selling the measurement and start solving the problem.
We’re seeing an explosion of tools that tell companies how often they appear in ChatGPT or other AI assistants. Measurement matters, but a dashboard showing that you’re invisible doesn’t tell you how to become recommendable.
Over the next 12 months, I’d focus on three things.
First, understand how AI systems actually discover, interpret, and recommend businesses. That means going beyond prompt tracking to examine machine readability, content structure, entity clarity, third-party credibility, citations, and the real questions buyers are asking.
Second, connect the research to action. Don’t just hand a client a visibility score. Help them understand why competitors are being recommended, what evidence is missing, and what changes can improve their position. Then measure whether those changes are making a difference.
Third, prepare for the next evolution: AI agents that don’t just recommend businesses but help customers take action. Booking appointments, requesting proposals, and purchasing products are increasingly becoming part of the AI experience. Our industry needs to start thinking beyond appearing in the answer and toward what happens after the recommendation.
What would I ignore? The obsession with guaranteed AI rankings, shortcuts that promise instant visibility, and the idea that publishing more AI-generated content automatically builds authority.
I also wouldn’t build a business around a single AI platform. These systems are changing too quickly.
The companies that will lead this industry won’t be the ones producing the prettiest dashboards. They’ll be the ones that can demonstrate real business outcomes.
AI visibility is the starting point, not the finish line.
Thank you to Monica Tomasso and the team at Monic AI Systems for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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