James Cadwallader thinks the most important reader on the internet isn’t human anymore. 

When he asked ChatGPT for a better showerhead, it visited 65 websites. With AI, he expects that number to hit 6,500 within five years, and most brands have no idea what those agents are saying about them.

Profound is his bet on that shift, and it’s already inside a third of the Fortune 100. In this episode he explains why AI slop is a skill issue, why he thinks billboards and dinners are about to matter more than ever, and why he believes humans are quietly becoming the API between reality and AI.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:10 What Profound does
2:56 Lessons from his first company, Kyra Media
6:46 AEO and GEO explained
10:19 Why ChatGPT ran 65 searches for one showerhead
12:19 How one model update can swing a brand's AI visibility
14:27 Why marketers will need 100x more content
15:55 How Profound keeps pace with the AI labs
18:28 Building a paranoid culture
20:47 How Profound won a third of the Fortune 100
23:20 Dead internet theory: the internet in 5 years
25:30 Humans as APIs between reality and AI
27:25 Why every brand will own its own evals
29:08 Marketing a product in 2030
30:20 How to avoid AI slop
32:56 The barbell: agentic marketing vs. human marketing
34:26 What excites him most: Profound Labs
35:42 Building the next Salesforce
37:30 Social media as a "biozone" for human data
40:56 Contrarian take: the AI labs won't eat every industry
41:49 How he stays sane