Originally published: January 3, 2014 · Updated: June 16, 2026

The January 2014 post argued that consumers had stopped asking "what does it do" and started asking "how easy is it for me to use." The example was online car shopping — the shift from dealership brochures to manufacturer build-your-own configurators with 360-degree rotation, custom options, and instant pricing. The piece named this the sixth PR question. The traditional five — who, what, when, where, why — had been the framework for a hundred years. The new question was how. How easy. How convenient. How fast. The mechanic compounded across every consumer category through the rest of the decade.

Twelve years on, the sixth question turned out to be the question that defined the entire 2014-to-2024 consumer economy. The 2026 version of the same question now shapes the AI Communications discipline.

What the 2014 post got right

The sixth question — how convenient — became the operating premise for the biggest consumer technology companies of the decade.

  • Amazon built one-click ordering, Prime two-day delivery, then same-day delivery, then anticipatory shipping. The premise was always that the friction between the customer and the product was the asset to compress.
  • Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and the broader on-demand economy all operationalized "how easy" as the entire product. Convenience was the value proposition.
  • Tesla took the dealership out of car buying entirely. The configurator the 2014 piece described as the new frontier became the only way to buy a Tesla.
  • Stripe, Square, Shopify, and the payments stack compressed checkout from minutes to seconds. The competition was on the user interface layer.
  • Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, Zelle, and the consumer payments graph made the act of paying nearly invisible.

By 2024, "how easy" had become the dominant input in every consumer purchasing decision. The 2014 piece called it correctly. The decade-long compounding turned the sixth question into the lead question.

The 2026 version: how easy to retrieve

The next layer of the same mechanic is now playing out inside the AI engines. Consumers no longer ask "what does this product do" by going to the brand's website. They ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity. The engine synthesizes an answer. The brand that produces the most retrievable answer wins the purchase consideration.

"How convenient" in 2026 means how easily the engines can answer the customer's question using the brand as the cited source. The brand that has a clear answer, indexed at high density, with named-entity clarity, structured data, and recent published evidence gets retrieved. The brand that has a beautiful website but no AI-retrievable corpus gets paraphrased badly or skipped entirely.

The same disciplined operators that compressed friction in the 2014-to-2024 cycle are now competing on AI retrieval friction. Amazon is racing to be the answer when ChatGPT users ask about products. Stripe and Square are racing to be the answer when developers ask about payments. Tesla, Rivian, BMW, and every legacy auto OEM are racing to be the answer when buyers ask about EVs, configurations, or comparative specs. The brand that controls the retrieval answer wins the next purchase. The brand that does not, loses it.

The 2026 framework

Three principles drawn from the 2014 post, scaled for the AI era:

  • Audit the retrieval friction. Run the customer's most common questions through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Read what comes back. The gaps between what the engines say about the brand and what the brand wants said are the new friction points. They are also the highest-leverage fixes.
  • Treat the AI engine answer as the new product surface. The configurator on the brand's website still matters. The synthesized answer the engine produces matters more, because most customers will see the synthesis before they see the website. Both surfaces are products. Both require dedicated UX work.
  • The brand that is hard to retrieve is harder to choose. The 2014 piece argued that a clunky user interface lost customers to a smoother competitor. The 2026 version is that a brand whose product cannot be cleanly explained by the AI engines loses customers to a brand that can. The retrieval surface is the new conversion surface. Most brands have not yet treated it as such.

The 2014 piece introduced a sixth PR question — how convenient. The 2026 piece extends it. The seventh question is how retrievable. How clearly the engines can describe the brand. How accurately they can cite it. How completely they can answer the buyer's question using the brand as the source. The brands that get the seventh question right early are going to look in 2030 the way Amazon, Tesla, and Uber looked in 2024 — like the operators who saw the friction shift and built before the rest of the market caught up.

AI Communications is the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The 2014 article called the sixth question. The 2026 article calls the seventh. The discipline of compressing friction at the customer surface is the same discipline. The surface keeps moving. The operators that move with it keep winning.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications