Discover why Qantas believes winning the AI search race isn’t about algorithms. Gerrit Walters shares insights from the Adobe Summit on ChatGPT, LLMs, and owning your brand’s online reputation.
At this week’s Adobe Summit at the ICC in Sydney, Gerrit Walters, Head of Commercialisation, Digital Capability and Performance at Qantas, delivered a fascinating presentation that flipped the script on how brands should be approaching Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude.
Speaking on stage, Gerrit opened with a relatable anecdote about a catch-up with his boss, who had just returned from a spectacular European holiday completely orchestrated by ChatGPT.
“She was positively gushing about how awesome it had been,” he told the audience, noting she used AI for everything from restaurant recommendations to sightseeing. But then, the mood shifted. “Her countenance kind of darkened a little bit, and she looked at me, and she said, ‘But you know what happened when I was at the airport? I quickly checked… one of the best airlines to fly between Europe and Australia, and Qantas didn’t come up, Gerrit. ‘What are we doing about this?'”
The “Inside-Out” AI Problem
That single question, ‘how do we get mentioned more by LLMs?‘, is one Gerrit says he has fielded “maybe a million times.”
As AI rapidly changes how consumers discover brands, executives are panicking. The reflex is to treat AI visibility as a purely technical problem to be solved by self-proclaimed experts. But Gerrit brilliantly argued on stage that this is an “inside-out” approach.
“We think that just being mentioned is enough,” he explained. “But at the end, what you forget is that there’s a human actually prompting that LLM, looking for an answer from you. And the question that they are asking is not, ‘Does your brand come up in LLM responses?’ What they’re asking is, ‘Why should I buy from you?'”
Back to Basics: Rebuilding Qantas.com
Before the generative AI boom hit, Qantas was already deep into a massive digital overhaul. Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the airline’s website was burdened with technical debt, low accessibility scores, and embarrassingly high “rage clicks.”
They decided to rebuild Qantas.com from scratch, focusing purely on speed, simplicity, and inclusivity. Eight months into the build, ChatGPT became a household name.
“We had that ‘oh crap’ moment,” Gerrit admitted on stage. “Are we building the right thing? The world’s changed under our feet.”
But their frantic research revealed a reassuring truth: doing the digital fundamentals well is exactly what LLM bots want. By optimising for accessibility, fast page loads, and clean infrastructure, Qantas saw a 6% increase in site conversions. At the same time, traffic from LLM bots surged, now accounting for 43% of their site traffic and doubling every few months.
The Trust Deficit and “Owning the Spread”
Getting mentioned by an AI might get a brand into the game, but it doesn’t close the sale.
Gerrit shared research revealing that 93% of people do not blindly take the first answer an LLM gives them, and 60% don’t actually trust the answer at all. Instead, he argues consumers use AI to generate a shortlist, and then they leave the chatbot to read real human reviews.
If AI is simply the “average of the internet,” as he pointed out, it will only ever reflect what real people are already saying about your brand.
“The game’s changed because people aren’t coming to your site, they go online to find out what other people think about what you deliver… and then only do they come to the site to buy,” he explained to the summit crowd.
“Which means that in the era of AI, you have to own the spread. You have to manage your reputation online as best you possibly can.”
Ultimately, the most profound insight from this digital leader wasn’t about algorithms, prompts, or code. It was a reminder of why we build businesses in the first place.
“The way you do that is by delighting your customers. You’ve got to get your customers to love your brand and your product so much that they go online and say positive things,” he concluded. “The irony of the matter is I believe now in the age of AI, what is going to matter most is what happens in real life.”
Sage advice indeed for navigating the new age of AI: while the technology is artificial, the experiences that drive remains entirely real.
