It has been one of those weeks where seemingly unrelated conversations start connecting.

A few days ago I had the privilege of joining a world-class breakfast hosted by Retail Media Football Club. Henrik Mourão, EVOLVE member, founder of Retail Media FC and one of the leading voices in retail media in Brazil, invited us to spend the morning with some of the country's most respected leaders across commerce, media and advertising.

One sentence in particular stayed with me.

Maybe uncomfortable.

As I listened to the discussion, I realised this wasn't really about publishers.

It was about every business built around how people discover information.

Google isn't disappearing.

People aren't suddenly abandoning search.

What's changing is something much deeper.

The path between a question and an answer.

That observation stayed with me throughout the day.

Then, a few days later, it connected perfectly with this week's EVOLVE Expert Session hosted by our UK ambassador, Bérengère Chaintreau-Fuchs, together with Tilda Molho.

What looked like two completely different conversations turned out to be exactly the same conversation.

One of the most interesting moments that morning came from someone connected to UOL, who shared how the company managed to survive one of the biggest disruptions in the media industry because, years earlier, the group had built another business inside its own ecosystem. That business became PagSeguro, later PagBank, and eventually completed a multi-billion-dollar IPO.

I kept thinking about that story on my way home because it challenged the way we usually define companies. UOL is a publisher, but the business that helped protect the wider group came from payments. Amazon is a retailer, a marketplace, a logistics network, an advertising business and a technology company. Mercado Livre followed a similar path across commerce, payments and media. Google built its power by organizing discovery, while OpenAI is beginning to influence what gets discovered before people ever reach a website.

Those businesses operate in different industries, yet they are increasingly competing around the same economic question: who controls the path between a question and a decision?

The answer affects who creates the information, who organizes it, who earns the recommendation and who ultimately captures the value. That was the bridge into this week’s EVOLVE Expert Session, hosted by our UK ambassador Bérengère Chaintreau-Fuchs with Tilda Molho. While the breakfast in São Paulo focused on publishers and retail media, the session looked at the same structural shift through international commerce and AI-powered discovery.

Tilda’s question was practical and increasingly difficult to ignore: what happens to a company when AI becomes one of the places where customers decide whether it is worth considering at all?

One example Tilda shared kept coming back to me after the session. She spoke about a company called Parts in Motion. Before trying to grow, before investing heavily in marketing, they spent almost a year building their product catalogue. Twelve months.

Imagine explaining that to most founders.

"We're going to spend the next year working on product information."

Most would probably think you've lost your mind.

Until you realize something.

Maybe they weren't building a catalogue at all.

Perhaps they were teaching AI how to understand their business and that changes the conversation. You see, for years we've assumed our website existed for people. Today it also exists for machines.

Your product descriptions, reviews, pricing, certifications the way you classify your products ,the language you use.

Individually they don't seem particularly important.

Collectively they become the way AI reconstructs your business before recommending it to someone else.

Maybe that's the shift we're all underestimating.

The customer isn't the only one trying to understand your company anymore.

As the conversation continued, Tilda made another observation that I suspect many people in the room underestimated. She wasn't talking about translation. She was talking about taxonomy.

At first, that sounds like a technical problem.

For example years ago, Mitsubishi learned that the hard way. The Pajero had become a successful model in Brazil, but when the company expanded into Spanish-speaking markets, it had to be renamed Montero because "Pajero" carries a very different meaning across much of Latin America.

More recently, the Danish bakery Lagkagehuset entered the UK under a completely different brand, Ole & Steen. The products didn't change. The recipes didn't change. The name did. They understood that asking millions of British consumers to pronounce Lagkagehuset before buying a coffee was creating unnecessary friction.

Both examples illustrate the same point.

International expansion is rarely about translating words.

It's about translating meaning.

That hit particularly close to home.

When I started building EVOLVE, I knew exactly what I wanted to create. I had spent years helping companies expand internationally. I had developed a framework. I believed experienced operators could help companies enter new markets faster by opening doors, transferring knowledge and reducing execution risk.

Exmplaining what EVOLVE is was quite the challenge. People would have a hard time understanding it.

Is EVOLVE a community?

A network?

A platform?

A consultancy?

An advisory business?

None of those descriptions felt right because each one explained part of the picture while hiding another.

It took us a long time to arrive at the language we use today: an International Go-to-Market Operating System.

That wasn't a branding exercise.

It was an exercise in helping people understand what we actually do.

Listening to Tilda, I realised companies entering new markets face exactly the same challenge. The question isn't whether customers can translate your words. The real question is whether they understand what you mean.

In an AI-driven world, that distinction becomes even more important.

Large language models don't reward creativity when they are trying to understand a business.

They reward clarity. They reward consistency and above all, they reward meaning.

One part of the conversation hit particularly close to home. Tilda mentioned that B2B companies need to start turning years of human expertise into a digital presence. Otherwise, AI simply has nothing to work with.

I smiled because I hear a version of the same sentence almost every week.

"Carlos, I've heard about EVOLVE... but I'm still not entirely sure what you guys do."

At first, that used to frustrate me.

Today, I think it's one of the most interesting challenges we're working on.

We know what we do.

The companies we help know what we do.

The advisors that collaborate with us inside the ecosystem know what we do.

The difficult part is translating years of experience, introductions, market access, advisory work, executive relationships and international expansion into language that someone, or increasingly something, can understand in a few seconds.

Tilda wasn't really talking about marketing.

She was talking about knowledge.

Every B2B company has accumulated expertise over the years. The question is whether that expertise lives inside the heads of a few experienced people or whether it has become visible enough for someone outside the business to understand it.

That may become one of the biggest competitive advantages of the next decade.

Not because AI replaces expertise but because AI can only recommend the expertise it is able to discover.

There was one final observation that I found particularly refreshing. Tilda wasn't pretending to have all the answers. In fact, she argued the opposite. The tools are evolving so quickly that nobody fully understands how these systems rank, recommend or interpret companies. Her advice was remarkably practical. Test them. Ask ChatGPT about your company. Ask Claude. Compare the answers. Repeat the exercise a month later. Look for inconsistencies. Look for what is missing. Treat it as market research rather than a technology experiment.

That felt familiar.

The companies I've seen expand internationally rarely waited until they had perfect information. They entered a market, listened carefully, adjusted and repeated the process. The market rewarded the companies that learned faster, not necessarily the ones that planned longer.

Perhaps AI deserves exactly the same mindset.

Nobody has the playbook yet.

The companies that learn fastest will probably end up writing it.

The more I think about the conversations I had this week, the less I believe this is a discussion about AI.

Retail media.

Search.

SEO.

Or even international commerce.

It's a discussion about how businesses remain relevant when the way customers discover information changes.

Every generation has experienced its own version of this transition.

Companies had to adapt to the internet.

Then to Google.

Then to social media.

Then to marketplaces.

Now we're watching AI become another layer between companies and their customers.

The technology will continue to evolve.

The question for leaders is much simpler.

Is your business becoming easier to understand or harder to understand?

Because if customers struggle to understand you, AI probably will too.

And if AI struggles to understand you, the cost of being discovered may become significantly higher than it is today.

EVOLVE is a global private network and operating layer connecting senior commerce leaders, founders, operators, advisors, investors and board members across markets.

We help companies accelerate international growth by orchestrating trusted expertise, strategic relationships and commercial execution.

Every week, experienced operators, founders, investors and advisors come together to exchange operating experience, challenge conventional thinking and identify opportunities across commerce, technology, retail, marketplaces, payments and adjacent industries. The conversations are designed to surface operational realities, market shifts and strategic patterns before they become obvious.

This is not a marketplace.

It is a managed operating layer that turns market access into structured commercial execution.

That is EVOLVE.

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