Zahir Hasan didn’t have to tell me his company’s numbers were wrong. I’d sent Hasan, COO of the Oslo-based research firm Clovion AI , a list of methodology questions about “Surviving the AI Funnel,” Clovion’s new study of how Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini recommend brands across a conversation. Question ten was routine, the kind of thing you ask every research team. The report says the three AI assistants flatly contradict each other on brand facts 15% of the time, based on 33 verified contradictions. Was 33 really enough to support a claim about which model tends to undersell a brand’s features and which tends to oversell them? Hasan’s answer wasn’t a defense of the number. It was a correction. “The real number is 330,” he wrote back. “A designer dropped a zero in layout.” The same slipped decimal, he said, had also turned 2,040 brands into “204” on page seven of the PDF that I’d been sent in advance of its publication. A revised version is coming out this week. So, I got the corrected figures first.…