Lendi Tackles AI Measurement's Hardest Problem: Seeing the Invisible

By James Calloway

"You can't improve what you can't measure," said Michael McCash, GM of growth at Lendi, the Australian home lender now working to crack one of marketing's most stubborn measurement gaps: how AI chatbots influence brand discovery.

Most brands face two problems at once, McCash's observation implies. First, they don't know how to improve their AI-related metrics. Second, many don't even know what those metrics should be. That's the starting point for Lendi's effort.

The stakes are straightforward. As consumers increasingly ask chatbots for product recommendations and brand information, marketers lose visibility into a slice of the discovery journey they once tracked through search analytics. Measuring how conversational AI shapes that journey has, so far, remained what the source describes as "mostly still a mystery."

Home lending makes an especially hard test case. A mortgage is a high-consideration purchase, and a lender like Lendi depends on knowing exactly where and how prospective borrowers first encounter its brand. If a chatbot recommends — or omits — the lender in an answer, that moment currently happens largely outside the measurement systems marketers have built for search and social.

That's the gap Lendi is working to close under McCash, whose growth remit puts him at the intersection of acquisition and accountability.

Why does this matter beyond Australia?

Lendi isn't alone. The AdExchanger report frames the lender's work as a snapshot of a wider industry problem: brands everywhere are trying to define AI-era KPIs before they can even benchmark them.

The pattern echoes earlier measurement transitions. When digital search matured, marketers built click-through rates, quality scores and attribution models around it. Conversational AI has no equivalent standard toolkit yet.

What Lendi is attempting, in plain terms, is to invent the dashboard before anyone agrees on what the gauges should read.

What happens next?

If Lendi succeeds in making chatbot-driven brand discovery measurable, other lenders — and likely other high-consideration categories — will face pressure to build the same capability. The alternative, as McCash put it, is trying to improve something you can't see.

For now, the Australian lender's experiment doubles as a live case study in how quickly the industry's measurement playbook needs rewriting.