Story & Lesson Highlights with Yarden Brikman of West Hollywood

Yarden Brikman shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.

Hi Yarden, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to share your story, experiences and insights with our readers. Let’s jump right in with an interesting one: What do you think is misunderstood about your business? 
People think building an AI startup is straightforward. It is not. The space changes so fast that nothing stays relevant for long. We have already had to pivot, rebuild, and shift our approach several times just to stay ahead.

The biggest misunderstanding is how quickly you need to adapt. U&AI is not a fixed product. It is something we are constantly reshaping because the entire AI ecosystem keeps moving. That speed is the reality of building in AI.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am Yarden Brikman, the founder of U&AI. I come from a creative and strategy background, and I ended up building a company in a space I never planned on: AI presence.

U&AI is a mid-touch SaaS platform that helps brands become visible and shoppable on AI platforms like ChatGPT. What makes it unique is that we are building in a space that keeps changing. One month the focus is visibility, then it is shoppability, then it is conversions. We have had to rebuild and rethink parts of the product again and again, and that is actually what I enjoy the most.

My story is pretty simple. I moved to the US, ran a creative agency, and saw firsthand how confused brands were when AI platforms started influencing buying decisions. There was no clear playbook, so we started creating one. That eventually became U&AI.

Today we work with brands that want to stay ahead of how AI shapes their reputation, their visibility, and their sales. It is a new category, which is exactly why it is exciting to build.

Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
I was a creative director long before anyone gave me a title for it. That was always the core. I loved taking something complicated and turning it into a clear story people could connect to.

AI did not replace that part of me. It changed the environment around me, which forced me to evolve. I am still a creative director, but the stories I tell now are different. Instead of brands fighting for space on social media, we are shaping how they show up inside AI platforms.

So I did not lose my identity. I just moved it into a new medium. Creativity is still the job.

What did suffering teach you that success never could?
Suffering taught me things that a successful job in an advertising agency never could. As a creative director inside an agency, you live in a very defined world. You know your craft. You lead the work. You guide teams. You shape ideas. But everything around you is handled by someone else. HR filters candidates. Finance handles taxes. Strategy handles projections. Leadership deals with business plans and pivots. Your job is to create.

When you leave that and build your own company, the entire world shifts. Suddenly you are the one hiring people, and there is no HR handing you a clean list of candidates. You are the one dealing with taxes, cash flow, legal documents, business models, projections, pricing, fundraising, and mistakes you never imagined you would need to understand. You go from being an expert in one area to being a beginner in twenty.

That shift comes with struggle. Real struggle. You have days where you feel completely lost, days where you question whether you should have stayed in your comfortable, successful job, and days where you are teaching yourself skills that other people spend careers mastering. There are moments where it feels like too much.

But that process builds a type of resilience that success never gives you. You stop depending on a system to hold you up. You learn how to operate in uncertainty. You learn how to make decisions without all the information. You learn how to trust yourself, even when you are not sure you are right. And you learn how to keep going, even on the days when the only person who believes in the vision is you.

That is what suffering taught me. It turned me from a creative director inside a system into someone who had to build an entirely new system. And that growth, as painful as it is, is what eventually turns the struggle into success.

Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
The biggest lie right now is that anyone is an expert in AEO. The field is basically being born in real time. There is no ten-year playbook, no industry standard, no person who truly “knows” how this space will look a year from now.

People project confidence and talk like they can predict the future of AI platforms, but the truth is simple: we have no idea. None of us. We live from hypothesis to hypothesis. Something works for a few months, then the platforms change, and you have to rebuild your thinking from scratch.

The people who actually win in this space are the ones who admit they do not fully know. They learn fast. They switch directions when the data proves them wrong. They adapt without taking it personally. They evolve with the platforms instead of pretending to control them.

There are no experts here yet. There are only people who are willing to learn faster than everyone else.

Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. What is the story you hope people tell about you when you’re gone?
I hope people say I was honest, passionate, and that I built things that actually mattered. Someone who showed up, did the work, and stayed real the whole way through.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.UandAI.co
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/yardenbrikman
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/yarden-brikman-1ab04028