AI Needs a Better PR Agency

When I started hi-BB, an AI-driven beauty discovery platform, people couldn’t stop telling me how cool it was. The oohs and aahs were everywhere, and the feedback was overwhelming. Everyone agreed there was too much noise in beauty, and what I was solving for felt obvious and overdue. It was exciting, validating, and energizing.

But lately, I’ve noticed a shift. It feels like AI is in the middle of a PR crisis. The mood has turned from wonder to worry. Every day, new headlines paint AI as a threat to creativity, culture, and even humanity. My feed is filled with doomists, whistleblowers, rising electricity bills, and moral collapse, all understandable as Sora, adult-content agents, and frictionless shopping dominate the news cycle.

If you’ve ever taken a road trip, you know that the start is always full of excitement, anticipation, and big dreams. After college, I drove cross-country with my sister and cousin in a beat-up Honda Accord. We left my parents’ house in Edison, New Jersey, at 4 a.m., determined to make it to Chicago in a single day. Five miles into the drive, we hit major traffic from a fatal crash on the Garden State Parkway. It was a gut punch so early in the trip. The parallel might seem like a stretch, but that’s where we are with AI right now. We’re still somewhere on the Garden State Parkway, stuck in the aftermath of the accident, unsure how long it will take to move forward. The optimism of that early morning and the first wave of excitement have been replaced by uncertainty and anxiety about whether we’ll actually make it. The extremes have taken over: techno-optimists who believe AI will save the world and cure cancer, and pessimists who think it will destroy everything. I find myself somewhere in the middle, thinking about the long game. For me, the real future lies in a single word: trust.

Right now, the only people who fully trust AI are those who build it, fund it, or are deeply passionate about it, and the kids cheating on tests. For everyone else, there’s still that lingering question: Are we sure this is going to be okay? When OpenAI announced frictionless shopping (a feature that could easily threaten what we’re building at hi-BB), I asked my team to step back and think about the long game. What matters most in this new landscape? What can’t be replaced or replicated as the ground keeps shifting? We came back to the same word again: trust.

When the internet began, people swore they’d never put their credit cards online. Many of you reading this probably think you’d never give your credit card to Sam Altman to do your shopping, but that might change, too. OpenAI already has over 800 million users. Amazon has around 300 million. The comparison is staggering. Amazon built a business around instant gratification, but most of the demand was generated elsewhere, through ads, influencers, and search. That gave Google and creators a way to monetize attention. OpenAI is building something entirely different. For the first time, intent, demand, and gratification are all being generated and fulfilled inside the same ecosystem. That’s not just innovation; it’s a complete rewiring of how we shop, search, and decide. This could be existential for hi-BB. The next time you open a chat looking for a beauty product, ChatGPT could recommend it, process the purchase, and never send you anywhere else. Instant gratification and demand generation in one fell swoop.

Side note: Every beauty brand right now is scrambling to figure out how they can show up inside these chat results by restructuring data, hiring prompt engineers, or bringing on experts to give them an edge. It’s going to be tricky. Unlike SEO (Search-Engine-Optimization), where you could buy keywords, here you’re competing with the dynamic language of private chat conversations (at least they’re still private…for now). Are we about to see a whole new industry emerge: LEOs (Large-Language-Model Engine Optimization)?

What hits home for me most is this: on one hand, what OpenAI built is exactly what I envisioned two years ago, which is validating, except they built it for everything, not just beauty. And if they have 800 million users, how long can a start-up like mine compete? These are the hard founder questions I’ve been wrestling with, and I know I’m not alone. Do we build on top of these new platforms or alongside them? Do we create brands people trust, even inside someone else’s walled garden? Or do we invent something no one else would dare to?

One of my advisors recently gave me a piece of advice I keep replaying: Don’t worry about what OpenAI is doing. Just build your audience. Build your users. Test. Run some experiments in your marketing. So this week, we’re running some ads against a new landing page. Check it out and tell me what you think!

The David-and-Goliath battles have started, and when AI can copy your company in seconds, you start to wonder what’s truly worth building, what can’t be cloned. I built hi-BB to help people. And in a world that’s becoming increasingly distrusting, can trust be the answer? Will you trust me?