AI Already Decided Who You Are

The episode

I met Cher Jones on LinkedIn, then in her live rooms, then through her community — which is how a lot of meaningful professional relationships form now, in layers, over time, through watching how someone shows up when they’re not pitching anything. Cher trains organizations and individuals in personal branding. Not the polish version. The version that asks: what do people actually know about you, and is it accurate?

I booked her on the podcast because I’d been learning from her for years and wanted the conversation on record. What we ended up discussing — and what I keep returning to — was a small experiment I ran right before we started recording.

I looked her up on ChatGPT.

What I heard

The result was almost perfect. ChatGPT described Cher accurately: Canadian, personal branding expert, corporate training background, keynote speaker, known for digital communication. She was surprised. Not that it was accurate — she understood why it might be — but that the model had built a coherent picture of her from sources she hadn’t consciously managed for that purpose.

Nola: “Just before we started recording I looked her up on ChatGPT. It said: Cher Jones is a Canadian social media trainer, personal branding expert, and keynote speaker known for her expertise in helping individuals and organizations improve their online presence. Almost perfect. Then I asked it about me. It said: I’m sorry, but I don’t have any specific information about an individual named Nola Simon in my database.”

Then I looked myself up. Nothing. I didn’t exist.

At the time, I’d been active on LinkedIn since 2016, visible on social media through a period of significant professional activity. But I didn’t have a website. I hadn’t done media. I wasn’t cited in the kinds of sources AI models weight as credible. From the model’s perspective, I wasn’t a reliable entity. I was noise.

Cher’s response to this was the most useful thing she said in the conversation: the question isn’t just what are you putting out there — it’s what is being verified by sources you don’t control? LinkedIn posts don’t do it. Follower counts don’t do it. What does it is external citation: stages, articles, mentions, bylines, media coverage. The things that signal to a model that other credible sources have already decided you’re worth knowing about.

Cher: “It’s looking for what it would designate as a reliable source. You put content out there — but then where else do you show up that someone else has verified or validated your credibility? I think about the amount of stages I’ve been on over the last eight, ten years. And the media stuff where I’ve been mentioned and quoted in articles. I would assume that’s what it’s drawing from.”

The assumption underneath most personal branding work: if I put it out there, it counts. It counts for some things. For the systems increasingly making first impressions about you before you’re in the room, it often doesn’t.

Where the AGA shows up

This conversation was one of the early signals that became the Assumption-Ground Audit — specifically the piece of the methodology concerned with what you think you’re communicating versus what’s actually being received.

The assumption Cher named, and that I felt acutely when I disappeared from my own search results, is this: my professional identity is self-authored. That I am who I say I am, in the way I say it, to the audiences I choose. That the story I’m telling is the one being received.

It’s an assumption most professionals have never examined, because for most of history it was close enough to true. You were in control of your own introduction. You handed someone a business card. You shook their hand. The first impression was yours to make.

That’s not the current condition. The first impression is increasingly made before you arrive, by a system that has already formed a view of you based on sources you may never have thought to cultivate. And if that view is incomplete, inaccurate, or simply absent, the gap between who you are and who the room already thinks you are is yours to close — in real time, under pressure, when you can least afford to be doing it.

Cher’s framing for this: your brand supports what you’re asking for. If the external record of you doesn’t match the claim you’re making, the gap creates friction. The assumption-ground question here is: do you know what the external record of you actually says? Most people don’t check.

What I've carried forward

I built a website. I did media. I’ve been deliberate about external citation in a way I wasn’t before this conversation.

There’s a concrete example of how this plays out. When Erica Ehm was preparing for her interview for Blue Rodeo: Lost Together — a 2024 CBC documentary — she posted on Instagram asking her community for fan perspectives to bring into the room. I commented. She used my quote in the film. I didn’t know. Months later, someone messaged me out of nowhere: “I was watching Lost Together and Erica was reading quotes about Blue Rodeo and one was from Nola Simon and I thought — wait a minute, I know a Nola Simon.”

My words, in a national documentary, alongside Sarah McLachlan. Because I showed up consistently in Erica’s comments for years. Not strategically — genuinely. But the record it created was real, and it was being used without my knowledge or management.

That’s what Cher was describing. Not the content you publish. The trail you leave by being present. Not what you’ve prepared to say. What the pre-read says. What the search returns. What the AI generates when someone who doesn’t know you yet asks about your expertise area.

For most leaders, that question produces a pause. Then a longer pause. Because they’ve been focused entirely on what they communicate, not on what’s been decided about them before they open their mouths.

Cher was talking about personal branding. What she was describing, in AGA terms, is the assumption that identity is a broadcast. You send the signal and it arrives as sent. The disruption — the thing that makes this conversation still relevant and more urgent now than when we recorded it — is that identity is increasingly a synthesis. Something built from sources, weighted by systems, and delivered to your audience before you get there.

The assumption that you’re in control of that is worth auditing.

If you want to go deeper

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts →

If you’re a leader who hasn’t thought about what AI says about you when your name comes up — or an organization that hasn’t asked what assumptions your external record is creating — that’s an assumption worth looking at before it hardens. The Assumption-Ground Audit is where that work begins.