Getting Your Brand AI SEO Ready for 2027
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Key Takeaways
The DISRUPT THE DEFAULT 2027 seminar by Primal pulled together the marketing trends for 2027 and a full view of how brands can adapt for the AI era, so they are ready for shifting consumer behaviour and a new search system through AI SEO within 90 days.
- Five firm rules for AI Transformation: how to put AI to work across the organisation, starting with the leader’s vision.
- The ElevateSEO approach: the new rules of search, built around answering questions, earning credibility and measuring AI visibility.
- The Unpromptable Idea: joining human insight with AI to build campaigns that go past an ordinary prompt.
- Lessons from leading brands: how Aura, OWNDAYS and Smooth E got up fast and adapted to grow.
- Know where your customers really come from: steering clear of the cheap-click trap and building quality content that answers both AI and the reader.
- Google’s view: the direction of an AI-first company and how new consumers search.
- The next step for brands: holding the balance between AI for speed and people for building trust with consumers.
DISRUPT THE DEFAULT 2027: Marketing for the AI Era has wrapped, and it was a big one. Primal hosted the exclusive seminar at One Ultra Screens, One Bangkok, bringing more than 100 executives, brand leaders and marketers into one room. Together they worked through a decade of lessons, the marketing trends shaping the year ahead, and where AI Search is heading in 2027, all aimed at putting brands a step in front over the next 90 days.
This recap gathers the key thinking from all seven sessions in one place, with the ideas and plays the VIP speakers and specialists shared on stage.
Table of Contents
1. What You Do in the Next 90 Days Decides Next Year
By Mark McDowell (Chief Executive Officer, Primal)
Mark opened the day with an honest look at where AI Transformation actually stands. Most executives and their teams already use AI every day. Far fewer organisations have moved past personal use into genuinely rebuilding how the company works.
To close that gap in the final stretch of 2026, he set out five firm rules for reaching real AI Transformation within 90 days, before 2027 properly begins.
Rule 1 (Leadership): the shift to AI stalls the moment senior leaders stop pointing everyone in one direction. The CEO has to drive it in person. When leaders back the change in earnest, research shows staff attitudes and AI adoption improve by 55%.
Rule 2 (Managers Go First): a team takes its cue from its manager. When team leads use AI seriously, weekly use across their people rises 2.1 times, and the time saved shows up fast. A creative brief drops from 14 days to one. Keyword research drops from seven days to three.
Rule 3 (Access for All): open AI tools to everyone and you surface your AI Champions, the people who pull their colleagues along. Overall willingness to use AI climbs from 80% to 98%.
Rule 4 (Standards): clear rules and system checks keep low-quality work out, which protects the brand. That means no hype words, no claim without a credible source, and plain, direct language.
Rule 5 (Knowledge): build a Central AI Brain that connects your CRM, brand, ways of working and AI skills in one place. AI then learns and pulls insight up to 50% faster, and the company stops losing hard-won knowledge every time someone leaves.
2. 10 Years of Search Data. One Year of New AI Rules
By Eric Siritiraset (Team Lead, Client Services, Primal)
Over the past ten months and more, Eric and the Primal team put over a billion data points to one question. Where did the clicks on the search page go? People had not stopped searching. AI tools like AI Overviews now read the page, summarise the answer, and hand it over before anyone needs to click through to a site.
Data from 250,000 accounts showed people still search mainly through Google (53.74%), YouTube (25.84%) and ChatGPT (10.73%). With the game changed, brands need a different approach, the one Primal calls ElevateSEO. It runs on five new rules.
Rule 1: Start Optimising for Questions. Drop the keyword stuffing and build prompt ecosystems instead, content written to answer a real question, hold its context, and stand as the best answer for that prompt.
Rule 2: Be Worth Citing. Letting the bots crawl your site is the easy part. Structure the content so AI can lift the facts and the expertise out of it and credit you correctly.
Rule 3: Authority Across The Web. Credibility no longer sits on your own site alone. It has to spread across the places people and AI already trust, from social to partner sites to Digital PR.
Rule 4: It Needs to Understand You. Old search meant one page for one keyword. AI Search breaks a single prompt into smaller topics, so brands need entity clarity, a clear picture of who they are, what they cover and where their expertise lies.
Rule 5: Traffic Is No Longer the Whole KPI. Counting traffic and click-through rate is not enough on its own. Track AI visibility, mentions and citations, and the sentiment of how you get quoted, alongside the traffic.
3. The Unpromptable Idea
By Neil Boonmee (Art Director, Primal) and Nai Apiwatmongkol (Creative Director, Primal)
Neil and Nai took on a problem everyone now shares. When anyone can give AI the same prompt, everyone gets much the same answer back. What wins people over is the human insight and the big idea behind the work.
Find the tension. Work out why a consumer would want to listen in the first place, then let AI help stretch that idea across platforms.
Let AI remove the limits. It closes the gaps in budget, location and time, which puts high-end production within reach. People still set the direction, the mood and tone, and the dos and don’ts. The Tipco juice campaign showed how. The team wanted to tell a story about returning to nature, and AI handled the editing and background changes, more than 30 versions across 30 situations, inside a tight budget and timeline, with no full reshoot.
Keep the human touch. AI can produce any image or line of copy. People decide the direction, hold the brand voice accurate, and choose the emotional connection that sets a brand apart.
4. Three Brands on What They Got Wrong (Client Panel Discussion)
This panel brought three leaders from major national brands on stage to talk openly about the calls they got wrong, and what those lessons did for growth.
Bream Pornkamol Phetchatsada (CMO, Aura Wellness Group Holding, which runs Aura Bangkok Clinic, Aura Xpress Clinic and AURASOL) put it simply. Every mistake teaches you something. Hers came from a hundred-million-baht consumer product line the group had to pull when platform fees ate into net profit. Her take now is to pair data with gut feeling so you can dare to be a first mover, and to standardise service quality while customising the experience for local customers at each branch.
Ohm Parinwat Khanaphiboonphol (Regional Marketing Data Analyst, OWNDAYS) framed resilience as falling fast and getting up faster. The same campaign run across four countries gave completely different results, because consumer behaviour was different in each. He recommends pulling revenue, social sentiment and in-store feedback into one view, and moving the marketer’s job from fetching data to making the business decision in an AI world.
June Supapitch Pithayanukul (CMO, Smooth E and Siam Health Group) focused on the cost of starting slower. Deep research with Gen Z changed how the brand spoke to them, led to a sachet cream launch in 7-Eleven and a tie-up with the GL duo Ling and Orm, all while holding on to the core values of gentleness and cosmeceutical quality.
5. Where Your Customers Actually Come From
By a team of Primal specialists: Milk Viphusmith (Performance Marketing Manager), Chokun Khumwan (Performance Marketing Team Lead), Chet Techakarnsupat (Technical Director) and Tai Komin (Content Manager)
Their subject was the report that looks healthy while the company stays flat. It usually traces back to conversions counted twice, or back-end tracking that does not line up. The fix starts with the teams working together and tracking the same way.
The cheap clicks trap. One business ran ads that pulled a huge number of clicks at a very low cost each. Follow the money and only 5% actually bought. The ad platform’s AI is good at finding people who click, and still does not know who really buys. Unless the brand feeds real customer data, its own first-party data, back in to teach the system, the result it wants will not show up.
Niche industries still need to be online. Even B2B, industrial or high-involvement products belong online, and the content needs two layers. One is written so AI can read and rank it. The other carries enough trust for the person reading it, through whitepapers, product specs, FAQs and certificates.
Quality beats quantity every time. What runs out of road next year is content made for volume. What keeps working answers a clear user intent and reflects real experience, enough that AI will pull it as the first answer. That is the edge in AI Search for 2027.
6. Google: Preparing for Growth Today With Google AI
By Nye Treenongluk (Business Acquisition Manager, Google Thailand)
The picture came straight from Google. It is now an AI-first company, with Gemini past a billion users a month worldwide, and it is serving a new kind of super-empowered consumer.
Searches are longer and more involved. People search in more ways than before, including by image. Google Lens has climbed to 25 billion uses a month. Queries longer than seven words, the long-tail kind, grew 57% in Thailand year on year. AI Overviews that summarise the answer also help people decide to buy sooner and with more confidence.
YouTube is AI’s top citation source. It ranks first for citations in generative AI and AI Overviews. Long-form video with real depth gives AI the best material to crawl and quote back to users.
Creators are where this is going. 89% of Thais say creators directly shape what they buy. Google has built tools like the Creator Partnerships Hub and Partnership Ads, so brands can turn a creator’s video into an ad and connect it straight to purchase through YouTube Shopping.
7. Your Next Move
By Ben Heuze (General Manager, Primal)
Ben closed by drawing the sessions together into a direction for both organisations and marketers. When the technology shifts and behaviour shifts with it, how should a brand move to come out in front?
Consumer values have moved. People are sharper about what they choose. They look for the cheapest or best-value option, and their expectations on quality have not dropped at all. Brands have to find the balance and deliver value that outweighs the price.
AI can do almost anything, so choose what it should do. With everyone using AI to save effort, the smart brands know which work to hand it for speed and cost, and which work only a person should touch. Advice that needs empathy and real understanding is the second kind.
Judgement is the skill that matters next. The most useful skill for the next era is not knowing how to run the tools. It is the judgement to decide whether what AI produced is correct, good enough, and right for the brand.
Data with test and learn is the last piece. AI is only as good as the data you give it. If the person running it lacks good data, or will not test, learn and keep improving, the odds of getting the best out of the technology sit close to zero.
Ben left the room with this thought.
“AI is not here to take over or cut the human connection. It shortens the work so we have enough time to go back and build real conversations and trust with our customers.”
The Moves That Matter From Here
The seminar made one thing plain. Getting ready does not begin somewhere in the future. It is built from how you think and what you do today. For Thai brands that want to lay their marketing foundations, rebuild how they show up in search, and raise their performance with AI Search in 2027, the next step is to plan the approach with Primal’s search specialists.
Thank You to Our Sponsors and Partners
Primal thanks the nine partner and sponsor brands that helped bring this seminar together.
- Keynote Partner: Google Thailand
- Sponsors and Partner Brands: Aura Bangkok Clinic, OWNDAYS, Smooth E, TWOOAK, Tipco, CoffeeWORKS, Difflam, EASE (Union Micronclean) and MASON Pattaya
- Venue Partner: One Ultra Screens, One Bangkok
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