Conversational AI: Evolving from Basic Search & Chat

Your visitors have stopped typing keywords. They ask full questions in plain language and expect a real answer, because that's what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude give them every day. When a site hands back a page of results, a dead end, or a "leave a message" box, they leave, or they call your team with a question your site should have handled.

In our recent webinar Conversational AI: Evolving from Basic Search & Chat, Northern walks through what AI-powered search, chat, and guided tools can do for commerce, higher education, and public sector sites. Featuring Jay Ménard (Director of User Experience and Digital Strategy, Northern), Jon Beaulieu (Senior Growth Manager, Northern), and Aaron Baecker (Partner and Senior Director, Content Supply Chain, Northern), this session breaks down why the gap between what visitors expect and what most sites deliver keeps widening, and why closing it starts with your content, not a new platform.

The team covers how search and chat are becoming the same experience, why most wrong AI answers trace back to the pages behind them, what AI crawlers and on-site tools can and can't read, and a crawl, walk, run path for choosing where to start, followed by a live Q&A.

What you'll learn:

• The Behaviour Gap: Why visitors who get conversational answers from AI every day are landing on sites that still ask them to type keywords into a box, and what it costs when they leave.
• Search and Chat Are Converging: Why good search now gives an answer instead of a list of results, and why a good chat agent runs search under the hood.
• Content Is the Foundation: Why most wrong AI answers trace back to thin, outdated, or conflicting pages, and how grounding, one source of truth, and testing keep answers accurate.
• Build Around What People Actually Ask: How search logs, analytics, support inboxes, and user research show which questions to answer first, including a college where answering the top 10 questions first covered 80% of student tasks.
• What AI Actually Sees: Why content loaded by JavaScript, locked in images or PDFs, or blocked by bot protection is invisible to AI crawlers, and why your own site search or chatbot inherits the same blind spots.
• One Foundation, Two Directions: How the same content and data work powers on-site search and chat and improves visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, on the stack you already have.
• Crawl, Walk, Run: Where to start, from tuning the site search you already have, to AI site search, to a branded agent like Adobe Brand Concierge, plus custom AI tools that go live in weeks.
• Personal Agents: Why the next visitor to your site might not be a person, and how readable content gives their agent an accurate source to work with.
• How to Choose and Get Started: A simple way to match the problem you're seeing to the right fit, and a four-step path to assess, plan, implement, and measure.

You will leave the session with a clearer view of where your site sits today, which problems AI search and chat actually solve, and what to fix first so whatever you launch gives accurate answers.

Not sure where you land?

Connect with our team for a working session to map where your search and chat experience stands today, and what's possible from here. Want a quick read first? Run your site through our AI Readability Check.