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Sami Akkawi

Sami Akkawi is the co-founder and chief executive of Petra Labs, a company that advises brands on how they are represented by artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT [1]. Before founding the company, he spent five years at Strategy&, PwC's consulting arm, on a deal strategy team that advised private equity firms and large corporate sponsors on acquisitions and growth in the marketing, technology, data and services sectors [2][3]. In that role he worked on more than 40 completed acquisitions and, over the course of his tenure, interviewed close to 1,000 senior marketing professionals, including budget holders at large consumer companies such as Nike and Pepsi, about what they wanted from their technology and services providers [2][3]. He has said that private-equity-focused consulting projects tended to run only two to four weeks, which allowed him to move quickly across many companies and gather a breadth of perspective that longer-cycle consulting engagements do not typically offer [3].

Akkawi has traced the founding of Petra Labs directly to patterns he noticed in those client interviews, where marketing executives described a growing gap between how their brands were being discussed by AI chat tools and their ability to monitor or influence that portrayal [2][3]. He has described being a heavy personal user of ChatGPT for tasks such as restaurant recommendations and drafting content, and has argued that this individual behavior was mirrored at scale by senior marketers who told him they lacked visibility into how their brands were being described inside AI interfaces, and lacked any means of verifying or correcting that description [3]. That observation, combined with a longstanding interest in starting his own company, led him to co-found Petra Labs, which builds software that shows brands how they are currently positioned by AI systems and then works to shift that positioning [2][3].

At Petra Labs, Akkawi has framed the company's work as a response to a broader shift in how consumers search for and evaluate information, away from traditional search engines like Google and toward conversational AI tools [3]. He has cited studies indicating that users trust outputs from tools like ChatGPT more than they trust colleagues or friends, and has argued that even though such tools account for a minority of overall search volume compared to Google, traffic referred from AI chat interfaces converts at notably higher rates because users treat the recommendations as vetted [3]. He has said Petra Labs' current work involves first assessing how a brand is described by AI systems and then applying techniques to influence that description, describing the task as adapting content strategy for a new type of reader, namely an AI agent, rather than solely a human one [3].

Experience

  1. Co-Founder & CEO
    Petra LabsJul 2025 to Present
  2. Engagement Manager, Deals Strategy
    Strategy&Jan 2021 to Jul 2025
  3. Investment Management
    Morgan StanleyJan 2018 to Aug 2018

Investments

  • Petra Labs

    New York-based enterprise answer-engine-optimization company building AI search attribution, LLM simulation and citation tracking for marketers.

Education

Media & appearances

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