Qvery Podcast

My guest this episode is Polina Medvedeva, Head of Growth & Marketing @ nuvacom, an AI platform that helps teams consolidate all their AI activity under one roof.Polina has spent close to a decade in B2B SaaS and FinTech growth and brought a specific question to this conversation: how do marketing teams actually adopt AI internally? Not the theory. The reality, which as you will hear, is considerably messier.We cover a lot of ground:Why nobody in any company consciously decided which AI tools to use. Preferences formed individually, habits formed individually, and now organizations have inherited a collection of personal choices with zero shared context between them.The gap between personal AI and team AI. Polina pays for Claude Pro herself and uses nuvacom for work. The dividing line is three weeks. Anything shorter stays in Claude. Anything longer goes into nuvacom. The reason is not model quality. It is context retention.Why context beats model quality. After a certain depth, individual chat tools lose the thread. nuvacom is built around organizational memory that compounds instead of eroding. I have been solving the same problem with Claude Code and Google Drive MCP. Neither of us fixed it by just buying a subscription.Why the aha moment is now mandatory. The pressure to "AI everything" is creating performative adoption. Teams check the box and quietly drop tools when the pressure moves on. If your AI product does not create a genuine moment of value early, it is already dying.Why free users are now a liability. In traditional SaaS, free users were your best asset. In AI-native products, every interaction burns compute. Polina put it simply: having free users is financially a bad thing. Design for speed to paid, not breadth of free adoption.What has not changed about hiring. Stack and attitude. Same criteria as ten years ago. AI amplifies people who already have the right qualities. It does not create those qualities.Why the fundamentals do not have an AI exception. The wave is real, but good timing does not exempt you from figuring out who your product is actually for.Polina's parting advice: stay strong, and use pen and paper for note taking.

Episode 1: Founders ChatIn this debut episode, Qvery co-founders Vlad Shvets and Piotr Babel sit down for an unfiltered conversation about how they met, why they started Qvery, and their vision for the future of marketing in the age of AI search.Meet the foundersVlad has spent over a decade running marketing for SaaS brands, always focused on what it takes to make brands discoverable on the web. Piotr brings 15 years of experience across software development, architecture, infrastructure, and AI. They first met 12 years ago and even competed in a startup weekend together. That spark to build something from scratch never went away.The moment everything changedTowards the end of 2024, Vlad noticed something shifting at his consultancy. The ROI from SEO and content marketing was declining. Then came a new kind of request: "How do we optimize for ChatGPT?"The problem? In mid-2024, nobody knew. There wasn't a single tool that could measure which brands were visible in ChatGPT. So in early 2025, Vlad reached out to Piotr with an idea: build the software to measure and grow brand visibility in AI search engines. Piotr's response? Hell yeah.The industry woke up fastFast forward to February 2026. When they started, the SEO industry was split: those evangelizing AI engine optimization and those dismissing it as hype. Now everyone agrees this is the priority.ChatGPT keeps shipping new features and now has its own browser. Google has rolled out AI Mode to 200+ countries. Vlad and Piotr put a stat on Qvery's website: 50% of search will be AI-driven by 2027, per Gartner. But sitting here in 2026, they call that a gross understatement. The reality? 100% of search will be AI-driven by 2027.Three pillars of AI search visibilityPillar 1: Your own website. The playbook has changed. It's no longer about long skyscraper articles. AI search engines only cite your content if they don't already know the information. They want new perspectives, case studies, data, real experiences.Pillar 2: External mentions. It used to be about links. Now it's about mentions and the context around them. An unlinked mention with positive context beats a link that says your product sucks.Pillar 3: UGC platforms. Reddit is now responsible for close to 20% of all citations in Google AI Mode and ChatGPT. Both OpenAI and Google pull Reddit data directly through API. Getting mentioned on UGC platforms means getting recommended by AI search engines.Back to basicsAI Engine Optimization takes you back to marketing fundamentals. Have a great product. Focus on brand building. Play the long game. Do genuinely good marketing. It sounds too simple, but it's true.Thanks for listening. If you have feedback or ideas, reach out.Subscribe to the Qvery Podcast for more on AI engine optimization and winning in the agentic web.