Zero Effort Search, 3 Levels of Loyalty, and the AI Trap Coming for Indirect-value Organizations

Not every organization measures success by whether a sales number went up. Governments, healthcare systems, nonprofits, and NGOs have long operated at a remove from the revenue line — but so do process improvement teams, innovation labs, customer experience functions, and digital transformation units inside otherwise profit-driven corporations. Call them Non-Profit & Loss (P&L) stakeholders, or indirect-value organizations. Organizations like this have always had to justify their budgets, their personnel, and even their impact. That burden of justification is about to get heavier.

Steven Van Belleghem, a customer experience strategist with nearly 25 years in the field, argues that AI will soon reduce the effort required to find better alternatives to near zero. Autonomous agents will compare providers and switch on behalf of users without a single conscious decision being made. But the more structurally interesting shift is in how visibility itself is being redefined. Traditional search rewarded volume — keywords, links, content density. AI-mediated search rewards authority: the credibility assigned by external voices rather than the organization's own. What others say about you now carries more algorithmic weight than anything you publish about yourself. For indirect-value organizations accustomed to making their case through internal decks and annual reports, this is a direct challenge. You cannot advocate your way to relevance in a system that discounts self-promotion by design.

Van Belleghem's three-tier model of loyalty offers a constructive map forward. Transactional loyalty — built on convenience and frictionless delivery — is where most public-sector reform and internal transformation efforts have plateaued. These improvements matter, but Van Belleghem is explicit: as AI commoditizes smooth transactions, they become table stakes rather than distinction. Transformational loyalty asks whether an organization genuinely improves the lives of those it serves. Deep loyalty — the most demanding and most durable tier — is the sense of belonging, of being proud to be associated with an institution. Disney earns it. Very few government bodies, internal teams, or nonprofits have ever seriously tried.

Which brings us to the sharpest caution in this conversation. AI ecosystems risk replicating the capture dynamics of social media — platforms engineered not for user benefit but for retention. For indirect-value organizations whose legitimacy depends entirely on public confidence, surrendering that relationship to an AI intermediary is not a digital strategy. It is an abdication.

What we’re into this week:

Aaron:
I just have to say, this was a delight. Steven is so smart, and so…polished. I myself am not a natural public speaker and have had to work really hard to even get this far. I worked through Toastmasters at the beginning, so sharing that resource with folks in case they’re interested. 

Scott:

That’s really nice, Aaron. I’m also not a natural public speaker, so I’m with you there. For me, Steven’s interview reminded me of Anil Dash’s look into ChatGPT’s browser, Atlas, and how we are becoming agents of AI instead of AI being an agent for us. I know that Steven dwelled on the opposite, but that last bit about AI ecosystem capture really brought home Dash’s prescience for me. 

Ana

I also see a future that I can only greet with the 😮💨 emoji here. It’s kind of like “Welp, here we go again with facebook and apple and every walled garden there is.”

On the other hand, getting out in front of how to use AI, especially for indirect-value organizations, is the best move here. It was tough, but we were always trying to be really open and precise with the value we provided on the Enterprise Digital Experience team in GSA. It can’t just be “because it’s the right thing to do”; the numbers any team puts together just have to be tied to the right priorities and move the org in the right direction.  

I’m actually pretty optimistic that we’re starting to figure out what a world with a balance of technology and not-technology spaces might look like. It’s a small step, but if teenagers are like “Woah my life is way better if sometimes I don’t have my phone”, that’s a strong, positive signal. 

Credits: 

Guest: Steven Van Bellenghem
Host: Aaron Meyers
Producer: Ana Monroe
Article: A. Adams
Artwork: From "Bizzarie di varie Figure" 1624 Giovanni Battista Bracelli via the National Gallery
Why this artwork?: This print from 1624 (!) shows that fear of machines and how they’ll force change spans time and civilizations. Technology change seems to always topple us head over heels, but humans are adaptable.