The Journal, the Wall Street Journal's flagship podcast, features Centium AI founder Michael Rueckert on the premiere of its new Work Mode series on AI at work.
The Wall Street Journal featured Centium AI founder Michael Rueckert on the premiere of Work Mode, a new series from The Journal, the paper's flagship podcast, about how artificial intelligence is changing the way people work. Host Ryan Knutson named Centium AI on air and built the second half of the episode around how Rueckert created the company. It is the second time the Wall Street Journal has featured Rueckert and Centium AI, following the paper's November 2025 column on its AI power users.
The Journal is one of the most popular podcasts in the United States, ranked No. 21 in Podcasts on Spotify at the time of the episode's release.
Titled "How to Keep Up with AI at Work (Without Losing Your Mind)," the episode opens with WSJ columnist Callum Borchers, who wrote that original power-user column, describing what separates the professionals pulling ahead. The distinguishing trait, Borchers says, is relentless experimentation and a habit of re-prompting rather than accepting a first draft. Knutson then turns to Rueckert as the episode's case study, the AI power user who turned that habit into a business.
Rueckert told Knutson that AI first reshaped his marketing day job. He described building an agent named Monty, after the moose mascot at Snowbasin Resort, to turn hours of weekly customer survey data into action plans for the resort's operations teams. Away from that work, another problem had caught his attention. Snowbasin, a resort ranked number one by outlets including Ski Magazine and Outside, rarely surfaced when he asked AI chatbots to recommend ski resorts. As Knutson noted, that is a growing problem as more travelers turn to AI to plan their trips.
How can I reverse engineer this? How can I understand how AI makes that decision and start to position my brand in that pathway?
He spent his nights and weekends building a solution, using Claude and Gemini to write software that measured how often Snowbasin surfaced in AI answers, then applied a marketer's playbook to move the number: targeted media outreach, customer reviews, and a more AI-friendly website. Knutson reported the outcome on air.
In the end, his AI mind meld worked. The ski resort went from showing up in 3% of responses to 33%.
Rueckert posted the tool on LinkedIn, offered it to other businesses for free feedback, and drew hundreds of brands. Knutson described the turn from side project to company on air.
Michael realized that what started out as a tool to help him with his job might actually be a business. So he founded his own startup called Centium. Centium offers an AI version of search engine optimization. It helps clients improve how often they show up in AI chatbot answers.
The platform is now used by more than 200 brands.
Centium AI is built on the mechanism the episode traces. AI models behave like evidence-based decision makers. A model cannot ski a mountain or try on a pair of running shoes, so it relies on what credible third parties say about a brand, and it favors validating evidence like rankings and reviews. Centium AI measures that behavior at scale, prompting the five major AI models at the category level rather than about brands directly, which keeps the recommendations unbiased. Across the more than 200 brands tracked on the platform, the pattern holds: the brands that earn recommendations are the ones whose validating evidence sits in the sources these models read.
Rueckert also teaches marketing at the University of Utah, and the episode closes on the advice he gives students nervous about what AI means for their careers. He frames it as a move from performer to conductor. For most of the history of marketing, he tells them, a graduate joined the symphony and played a single instrument, email, social, or the website, running one function of the business. AI changes the seat.
If you use AI well, you step back and your role becomes a conductor instead. And you're deploying AI into the instruments and you're conducting the symphony.
For marketers, the episode is a signal that AI visibility has moved from a fringe idea to a subject the Wall Street Journal builds a series premiere around. The Snowbasin story, a little-known brand climbing from nearly invisible to frequently recommended, is the outcome Centium AI now measures and works to reproduce for the brands that use it.
Centium AI partnered with Long Run Labs on its largest study yet, 2,200 AI prompts across five models and 22 running categories, on how AI recommends running brands.
New Centium AI and Ski Area Management research finds ski resorts appear in 87 percent of winter AI travel answers but only 51 percent in summer.
Long Run Labs, the endurance-sports newsletter from Jonathan Levitt, features Centium AI in an essay arguing AI chat replies are the new top of the marketing funnel.
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