Helping Executives Find the Right Community: What AI Search Can Teach Us

Choosing an executive community is a decision about where a leader will find the judgment, experience and relationships they need for the decisions ahead.

An executive can have an extensive network and still struggle to find the right person for a particular conversation. Some questions are difficult to raise inside the company. Others require experience the leadership team has not yet acquired. A useful community gives executives access to people who understand the responsibility they carry and can challenge their thinking with relevant experience.

Finding the right fit starts with the decision

The starting point should be the decision.

A founder building a leadership team may need peers who have managed the transition from founder-led execution to a larger organization. A CEO preparing for an exit may need perspectives from people who have navigated that process. A CFO evaluating AI investment may need to compare assumptions about costs, controls and returns. A private equity operating partner may need to understand why an initiative worked in one portfolio company and failed in another.

Each need calls for a different combination of people and experience.

Job titles provide only part of the answer. Company scale, ownership, growth stage and decision authority affect whether another executive's experience will transfer. The strongest peer relationships can combine comparable responsibility with enough difference in perspective to expose assumptions.

The setting matters too. Open events can introduce unfamiliar ideas and relationships. Private conversations can support candid discussion of sensitive decisions. Relationships that continue over time allow peers to revisit advice and learn what happened. Executives may need several of these formats within a wider community.

Contribution is part of the fit. Selection should consider what a person can contribute alongside what they hope to gain.

What community organizers owe executives

For community organizers, this creates a responsibility to make the experience understandable before asking for an executive's time.

Terms such as “exclusive,” “hand-picked” and “senior” need supporting detail. Who participates? How are people selected? What subjects bring them together? What is confidential? How do relationships continue? What does participation require?

At Open Future Forum, these questions sit at the intersection of community building and growth. We bring together founders, senior executives, private equity leaders and investors through private gatherings, open events, peer exchange and original research. Our public content needs to help each person assess where that model fits their needs.

When someone uses an AI assistant to explore executive communities, the initial shortlist depends partly on the information available to explain those distinctions. That gave us a practical question to investigate: does our public content help the right executives understand where we can be useful?

In September 2026, we began working with Pomo, an agentic marketing platform that tracks how brands appear in AI search answers and tells marketing teams what to change next. Pomo's first report examined 23 distinct questions and 120 archived answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. After that baseline, Pomo sent our team a daily email flagging what had shifted and which pages or explanations to update.

We used its findings to examine where Open Future Forum was being considered, where our presence was inconsistent, and which explanations deserved more attention.

Being understood and being considered are different problems

An accurate description of Open Future Forum is useful to someone who already knows our name. Discovery also requires us to be considered when someone starts with their own need: a CEO seeking candid peer conversations, for example, or a director looking for practical AI governance guidance.

Pomo's September 17 report exposed differences at that level:

These were small, selected samples. We treated them as diagnostic signals for editorial decisions. They did not prove that a particular page was responsible for an omission, or that another article would automatically change the answer.

They did, however, make the next investigation more specific.

Choose content priorities by the audience you want to reach

A visibility gap becomes commercially relevant when it overlaps with an audience and a need the organization is well placed to serve.

For Open Future Forum, that includes founders, CEOs, functional executives, private equity leaders and investors. Our network brings together private gatherings, open events, peer exchange and original research. The task is to explain the relevant part of that model to each audience.

A useful test for a proposed article is:

• 01Who would ask this question?
• 02What decision are they trying to make?
• 03What evidence or experience can we contribute?

Those questions help control the temptation to pursue every search opportunity.

For example, an article for private equity operating partners should help them evaluate conversations about portfolio value creation. It needs to address the problems that make peer exchange worthwhile: revenue growth, margins, working capital, management capability, technology and exit readiness.

That specificity also clarifies the role of the broader community. An operating partner may need other operating partners for one discussion and CFO, CISO or CEO perspectives for another. The content should make those connections understandable without implying that every audience needs the same gathering.

Make the community easier to evaluate

Some of the most useful work concerned practical questions.

Who qualifies? How does someone apply? What does participation cost? What time commitment is expected? How are guests selected? What is the difference between a private gathering and an open event?

Our FAQ now addresses these subjects. They matter because an executive evaluating a community needs enough information to decide whether to take the next step.

We also developed a five-article series, published with September 18 dates, covering three audience-specific questions and two broader evaluation questions:

The strategic purpose of these articles was to make the offering more evaluable. Readers could understand the choices available, identify what mattered to them, and assess whether Open Future Forum fit their needs.

For a selective community, a well-informed decision about fit is itself useful. The right measure of content quality includes the relevance of the people it attracts.

Turning a report into a daily editorial rhythm

A one-time audit shows where you stand. The harder part is keeping content aligned as AI answers change.

Each morning, Pomo's email summarized which tracked questions had changed, which competitors or sources had appeared in answers, and which of our pages were being cited or missed. It closed with a short list of specific updates, such as adding participation costs and selection criteria to the FAQ, or connecting CFO community pages to our AI investment research.

That changed how we worked. Rather than planning content quarterly, our team reviewed the email in a short daily check-in and assigned one or two updates. The FAQ changes and the five-article series above came directly from those recommendations.

Give on-site and off-site content distinct jobs

The report also identified six external domains cited in the sampled category answers. That informed our thinking about where information about executive communities was being encountered.

It would be too simplistic to turn that list into a placement schedule. A frequently cited source still needs to reach the right audience and provide a suitable setting for the story.

Our website is the place to explain the operating facts: who the community serves, how participation works, which events are available, and where the research can be found.

External content has a different opportunity. It can put those facts in a wider context, introduce relevant perspectives, and explain why the model matters to executives making a particular decision.

In our off-site work, that meant developing stories about how senior executives, founders and private equity leaders approach AI decisions, and how peer experience and research can inform their judgment.

A placement can extend distribution. Stronger corroboration comes when an identifiable participant, partner or writer contributes their own experience and assessment. Repeating the same organizational description across several websites adds less information for a reader.

The two parts of the content strategy should connect around the same audience questions while giving each publication a useful contribution to make.

Use research to substantiate the positioning

Open Future Forum's research program examines how executives adopt, fund, buy and evaluate AI.

That gives our content a basis for explaining why a conversation matters. A CFO discussion about AI investment can connect with findings on budgets and returns. A security discussion can connect with research on agent access and governance. A CEO or private equity discussion can examine where executive responsibilities and operating priorities intersect.

The editorial task is to make those connections visible and specific.

AI search analysis can suggest where an explanation is missing. The organization still has to supply the evidence, decide what it can credibly claim, and explain its relevance to the reader.

Measure the work at three levels

The immediate output of this work is observable: a five-article series, broader work on participation answers and governance content, and a common direction for on-site and off-site editorial planning.

The next evaluation should separate three levels of progress.

• 01Content: have we answered the relevant questions clearly and supported the answers with evidence?
• 02Discovery: in a comparable follow-up audit, do the same questions produce more consistent mentions and citations? Changes in prompt selection or engine coverage should be identified so that the comparison remains meaningful.
• 03Community growth: are those routes bringing relevant applications, appropriate event participants and relationships that continue beyond an initial visit?

A follow-up Pomo audit on September 23, using the same 23 questions and four AI engines, found Open Future Forum mentioned in 23 percent of answers, up from 18 percent on September 1.

For an executive community, the commercial objective is to help the right people recognize where participation could improve their decisions. Search visibility is one step in that process. The experience after discovery has to justify the interest.

Last updated: September 24, 2026

Murray Newlands

Founder, Open Future Forum

Murray Newlands has been building executive communities in Silicon Valley since 2019. Open Future Forum hosts private dinners and events for C-suite leaders and board directors navigating the AI era, grounded in a give-first philosophy.

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