Human Pioneers
NEWS AGENCY

More and more brand managers are starting to ask, "What is our AI index?" A subtle shift is quietly capturing the attention of the business world—the AI index, a concept barely known a few years ago, is becoming a new benchmark for evaluating corporate competitiveness.

Why are companies beginning to focus on the AI index? What exactly does it measure? What does it mean for businesses? Pang Pei, a member of the Cultural Committee of the Central Committee of the China Zhi Gong Party, Dean of the China Vision GEO Research Institute, and chief designer of the AI Cognitive Index (AICI) evaluation system, provided systematic answers in an interview.

1. "Companies focus on the AI index essentially because they are focusing on a new type of risk"

Pang Pei believes that the primary driving force behind companies' attention to the AI index is not opportunity, but risk.

"In the search era, the biggest risk for a company was being 'unsearchable.' This risk was visible, measurable, and solvable through budgets and SEO techniques," Pang Pei said. "But in the AI era, a more insidious risk has emerged—'not being cited by AI.' Brands may still operate normally in reality, but in the cognitive world of AI, they are being 'overwritten' by competitors."

The first panoramic list of the "China Brand AI Visibility Index (CBVI)," developed under Pang Pei's leadership, covers approximately 2,100 representative brands across 14 major industries. Based on standardized data collection from 15 mainstream global AI large models, CBVI reveals a trend that has alarmed the business community: there is a significant deviation between a brand's visibility ranking in AI-generated answers and its traditional market share ranking. Many brands that hold leading shares in offline channels and traditional e-commerce have a much lower appearance rate in AI recommendations than their market share would suggest.

"These companies find that the advantages they accumulated in traditional competition do not automatically translate into the 'cognitive arena' of AI recommendations," Pang Pei pointed out. "Once this 'cognitive gap' is made visible through data, corporate anxiety is triggered. This anxiety is the underlying driving force behind companies beginning to value the AI index."

2. "The AI index measures competitiveness that 'cannot be bought'"

Pang Pei noted that the second reason companies value the AI index is that the competitiveness it measures is fundamentally different in nature from traditional indicators.

"Market share can be temporarily boosted through promotional activities, and search rankings can be instantly improved by purchasing bids. But the AI index measures a type of competitiveness that 'cannot be bought'—the depth of a brand's authoritative source endorsement, the thickness of its structured content, the breadth of its multilingual coverage, and the trust weight AI assigns to the brand," Pang Pei explained. "These assets are not built by throwing money at them, but through long-term, systematic cognitive construction."

This judgment has its technical logic. The RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architecture commonly adopted by AI large models determines that when generating answers, they prioritize citing sources with institutional trust endorsements—national media, industry white papers, third-party authoritative evaluations, and academic papers. A brand's self-claims and commercial advertisements naturally carry lower weight in AI's trust evaluation system.

"The AI index makes companies realize that in the AI era, competitiveness is shifting from 'the highest bidder wins' to 'the most trusted wins,'" Pang Pei said. "When companies discover there is an indicator that can measure this 'trust qualification,' they naturally ask—what is my AI index?"

3. "The AI index is a dashboard for 'cognitive assets'"

Pang Pei believes that for companies, the AI index is not just a diagnostic tool or a ranking tool, but a management dashboard for a brand's "cognitive assets" in the AI era.

Based on the PAI framework (Pangpei AI Index Framework), the AI Cognitive Index series has released seven indices covering five major areas: entrepreneurs, brands, industries, cities, and governance. In the brand dimension, CBVI provides systematic AI cognitive diagnostics through three dimensions: breadth visibility, quality visibility, and stability.

"Behind every score, there are corresponding directions for improvement," Pang Pei explained. "Low breadth visibility? Strengthen multilingual and multi-scenario content supply. Low quality visibility? Enhance authoritative source endorsements and improve information structuring. Low stability? Establish a continuous content publishing mechanism to counter the 'trust half-life' of AI knowledge bases—if a brand lacks fresh authoritative sources for a long time, its AI cognitive weight will naturally decay over time."

Pang Pei summarized this function of the AI index as a "dashboard for cognitive assets." "Just as companies use financial statements to manage financial assets and CRM systems to manage customer assets, in the future, companies will need to use the AI index to manage 'cognitive assets'—the qualification to be trusted, recommended, and prioritized in the AI knowledge network. This asset is becoming the core component of brand value in the AI era."

4. "The window of first-mover advantage is narrowing"

When asked whether it is too late for companies to start focusing on the AI index now, Pang Pei gave a cautious yet urgent response.

"AI cognitive competition is still in an early window period. Companies that take the lead in establishing authoritative source layouts and structured content construction within the AI knowledge network are gaining a 'cognitive first-mover advantage.' Pang Pei's team found in their research that in multiple niche tracks, the gap in AI visibility between leading brands and followers is widening—once the cognitive flywheel starts, it tends to accelerate."

But he also cautioned: "The window is narrowing. As more and more companies realize the importance of the AI index, competition will become fiercer. Latecomers will need to put in twice the effort to break 'cognitive lock-in'—AI has inertia towards cognitive patterns formed early, and the cost of correcting cognition is far higher than the initial construction cost."

"This is like search engine optimization 20 years ago—companies that first realized the importance of search rankings gained huge competitive advantages at a very low cost. Today's AI index is in a similar window period," Pang Pei said. "The difference is that search rankings can be bought with a budget, while the AI index can only be earned through trust building. This means the first-mover advantage will be more enduring."

5. Conclusion

From risk anxiety to competitiveness discovery, from diagnostic tools to management dashboards, from window-period opportunities to strategic urgency—behind companies' emphasis on the AI index lies a collective awakening about competitiveness in the AI era.

"The AI index attracts attention not because it is 'new,' but because it is 'real'—it truly reflects a brand's presence, trustworthiness, and recommendation power in the AI world," Pang Pei said. "As 2 billion users worldwide increasingly rely on AI to make consumption decisions, a brand's position in AI-generated answers is becoming a new variable determining its market share. And the AI index is the yardstick for this variable."