While Judge Amit Mehta has imposed penalties on Google for its anticompetitive behavior, I’m convinced that the big winner in the antitrust trial is… Google. And, to a lesser extent, the rest of Big Tech wins, too.

Confused? Don’t be.

What did Judge Mehta’s ruling say? Why do I think Google won more than they lost? And, more importantly, what does all of this mean for your business?

That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 23m 03s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Welcome to the show. I’m Tim Peter.

A few weeks ago, I talked about which of the Big Tech companies are most likely to win in the AI space. My leading candidates in order were:

As I said at the time, “Google has an added challenge in terms of its anti-trust situation, which is a big deal and could trip them up massively. They might be able to buy their way out of this, you know, with major fines or, I don’t know, contributions to presidential libraries or some nonsense like that, but we don’t know.”

Well, we’ve just learned the first set of penalties Google will face for its anti-competitive behavior. And I don’t care what anyone else says. Google won. Yes, they still face another antitrust ruling and the adtech case later this month, but at least in this first one they got off super easy. Most importantly, the judge’s ruling ensures that Google stays a prominent and probably dominant player in search and artificial intelligence. I’m going to get into why in just a moment.

But the real question is what this means to you, and what do you do about this reality? In other words, how do you make sure you don’t lose when Google wins?

This is episode 468 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

So first, what happened in the trial? There is lots to unpack. Judge Amit Mehta mostly went with the lightest penalties he could have. Google really got off super easy.

And if you think it’s just me saying that, The Verge reported on the large number of Google’s critics who were not happy with the ruling. Similarly, Google’s stock price shot up between 8-9% after the ruling came out. So Wall Street certainly thinks they won. Wall Street certainly wasn’t going to push up the stock price if Judge Mata had wanted Google to sell off, you know, Chrome or Android, for instance.

You should read through the ruling if you get the chance. Certainly parts of it. It’s super clear. And it gives great insight into how Google’s business works, both today and going forward. I’d debate a few minor points about the overall marketplace and how Google responds to it and who’s likely to win and why, but generally it’s as good a primer as you’re going to see.

Essentially, the judge ruled that Google has a monopoly in the market for general search engines — what they call GSEs all throughout the ruling — and that Google illegally leveraged that monopoly to hurt competition.

To remedy the situation, the judge ruled that Google needs to face several penalties. There are several penalties, several remedies that they have to deal with.

The judge ruled that several of the recommended penalties from the plaintiffs from the Department of Justice and some of the other folks involved went too far and didn’t address the core problems of Google’s anti-competitive behavior. The two major ones that the judge ruled are that Google doesn’t have to sell off the Chrome browser and that it doesn’t have to sell off Android. Those are enormous sources of data for Google.

They’re hugely important in terms of it learning how customers behave. But the judge ruled that those were well outside the scope of the general search engine market. So Google gets to keep them and keep using them as they always have. That’s huge. The penalties the judge did impose are as follows. First, Google has to give what are called qualified competitors access to some of its data.

I’m gonna get into this a lot in a moment. As the ruling states, this is a quote, “the size of Google’s index gives it a key competitive advantage over existing small GSEs like DuckDuckGo and emerging companies in the GenAI space like ChatGPT.” Witnesses testified to what is known in the industry as the 80-20 problem. “Building a search index that can answer 80% of queries is capital intensive, but attainable in the short to medium term.” This is a sub-quote within this. They said “you can get to 80-20 pretty quickly.” And they described ChatGPT’s goal, “…to answer 80% of queries with its own search index and the difficulties associated with answering the remaining 20%.”

Now back to the main part of the ruling, “…it says answering the remaining 20%, which comprises long tail queries is particularly challenging because it requires the index to contain very specific and often obscure sources.” Here’s another sub quote, “When sources are less common, we may not even know that they even exist and we may thus not discover what makes the best source.” Apple’s Eddie Cue during the trial noted, “to me the only thing that’s keeping them [and he’s talking about ChatGPT here]… the only thing that’s keeping them from potentially doing that again is growing their search index. They have to get better at the search index part. They’re very good at their LLMs. You know, they’ve already built large language models that are as good or better than most. What that will do is give a product is create a product that gives better results, new capabilities. You know, those are things that people are interested in today.”

That’s a big deal. So we’re going to get into this in some detail in a little bit.

Another ruling that the judge made was that Google still gets to pay companies like Apple, Samsung, Mozilla/Firefox, and Opera for making Google the default search engine in their mobile phones and browsers. While it might seem like a good idea to stop these revenue sharing payments, the biggest losers, if they were to do that, would be… Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, and Opera, and almost certainly consumers of their products.

And it wouldn’t hurt Google at all. Quite the contrary. They’d get to keep billions — tens of billions! — of dollars every year. As the court rightly points out, Google’s facing greater competition in the form of AI products from folks like ChatGBT or Perplexity or Microsoft’s Copilot or Claude than it’s faced in years.

What he did require was a bunch of data sharing. The court wrote that,“Google sees long-tail queries in orders of magnitude greater than its next closest rival, Bing. Because it sees such queries far more often, Google is more adept at answering them. Data sharing remedies thus can help to close the sizable advantage Google has in answering long-tail queries, thereby improving product quality and attractiveness to new users.”

So what the judge is saying here is by giving access to long tail queries, they’re going to help Google’s potential competitors, “qualified competitors,” create better products.

But there’s a caveat here, and it’s an OK caveat. The judge wants to make sure that these qualified competitors are in fact competing and not just what’s called “free riding,” know, leveraging Google’s success for their own benefit.

As he wrote in the ruling, “qualified competitors’ competitive advantage will have to come from innovation and differentiating their search services from Google.” So Google must share data from its index, but not the whole index. It only has to share :

And Google only has to do this for web URLs it has crawled. Not for images, not for videos, not for any structured data that they get from commercial partnerships.

As the judgment states, “qualified competitors will receive a one-time only snapshot of the relevant data contained in Google search index or at or around the time they’re so certified.”

Now the reason that they did this was, “it enables qualified competitors to build their own search indexes to answer long tail queries, thereby giving them the kickstart they need to compete. Further, a one-time disclosure minimizes the risk of free riding identified by Google’s expert economist and acknowledged by the plaintiffs.”

So whatever companies get this data can use it to build their own indexes and they can use it to build their own general search engines to start competing with Google more effectively.

It’s on them, though, to execute and to gain customer attention for their product. It’s not Google’s job to drive their success, according to the judge, only to eliminate the big existing barrier to that success, the lack of a proper index.

Google also has to share what’s called its “Glue” and “RankEmbed” data with qualified competitors. This is again from the ruling. “The data underlying Glue consists of information relating to (1) the query, such as its text, language, user location, and user device type, (2) ranking information, including the 10 blue links and any other triggered search features that appear on the search engine results page, such as images, maps, knowledge panel, et cetera. (3) search interaction information, such as clicks, hovers, and duration of the search engine results page. And (4), query interpretation and suggestions, including spelling correction and salient query terms.”

They also have to share their Navboost memorization system that, as the ruling says, “aggregates click and query data about the web results delivered to the SERP” and its RankEmbed data that are ranking models. “[Some percentage] of 70 days of the search logs plus scores generated by human raters and used by Google to measure the quality of the organic search results.”

These are all things that help Google’s AI learn better what quality pages are. It helps them, this is from the ruling, “more efficiently identify the best documents to retrieve, even if a query lacks certain terms. RankEmbed particularly helped Google improve its answers to long tail queries.”

Now that’s all fantastic. This will help potential competitors build more effective indexes and have a better sense of (A) the pages they should pay attention to, and (B) the things that aren’t worth worrying about because the customer interaction data says it’s not that important.

The court imposed limits here too, though. The data will be shared, “at least twice… [noting that] a more than one-time disclosure is reasonable given the importance of updating training data with fresh information.”

Reading from the ruling though, the court, however, “intends to set a cap on the number of such disclosures that can occur during the term of the judgment.” And like the earlier data disclosure notes, a cap protects against “…qualified competitors free riding on Google’s data, and it will lessen the burdens associated with implementing privacy measures that will have to be applied before disclosure occurs.”

Google also has to supply data around what are called “certain auction changes” in its ad platform. This one is actually super interesting and may prove hugely valuable to advertisers. But the court left it to a “technical committee” — consisting of folks with “expertise in software engineering, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, economics, behavioral science, [and] data privacy and data security” — to work out the details of exactly what data Google has to provide, how frequently they have to provide it, and for how long they have to provide it. Actual members of that committee are still to be determined too.

Now, I’m going to watch that one closely, but at the moment, I really can’t judge what impact that’s going to have on Google, and more importantly, what impact it’s going to have on you.

There are also a series of smaller remedies around search syndication and such, but most of those aren’t material to this discussion, so I’m going to skip them.

While these data sharing remedies aren’t nothing, Google also gets to keep private all kinds of data that the plaintiffs in the case sought:

In short, they basically get to continue doing what they’ve always done. Yes, they have to provide qualified competitors with data, but, and this is key to the whole thing to me, the competitors have to be able to put that data to work. It’s on them to make the data work.

Those competitors still need to develop capabilities and utility that customers want if customers are going to switch from using Google. Their competitors still need to gain distribution. That means they need to find a way to put those capabilities in front of customers and attract them to use it. And then they still need to monetize whatever they offer. They have to find a business model that works. They need to find a way to pay for it.

And that last one is a huge deal. Journalist Ed Zitron, I would say he’s an AI pessimist. I would say he’s as bearish on AI as a real thing as you can get. And he had a thing on BlueSky recently where he said,

every model provider is selling monthly software subscriptions and token-based API calls at a discounted rate, because if they had to charge their real costs, they’d immediately make their already unprofitable customers’ businesses even less economically viable. As a result, we are in a deadly situation where every company building software on top of AI models is already unprofitable, and that’s before model companies are forced to start charging their actual costs.

He concludes by saying “these costs that are so severe that they’re causing the most successful companies in the industry, who do not even have to pay for their own infrastructure build out, to lose billions of dollars.”

In other words, only companies with very deep pockets have the best odds of weathering wherever we end up. They have to find a way to pay for this. Which, as much as I hate to say it, leads us back to Big Tech.

Now note that I am including OpenAI/ChatGPT in the Big Tech bucket at the moment. They are as well positioned as anyone. VCs are pouring a metric crap ton of money into the company to help it become Big Tech’s newest members. They could win. Time’s gonna tell though.

But for now, Google remains the 800 pound gorilla that scares the hell out of every other 800 pound gorilla. They’ve won their first antitrust battle pretty handily, pretty significantly.

The second one later this month could be huge because it gets to the heart of how Google pays for all its success. A negative ruling there could be fatal. They’ll also appeal that one all the way to the Supreme Court or, again, you know, make a donation to a presidential library if needed. Their ad solutions are existential. They win that one or they die.

For now, though, Google wins. So if that’s the case, what do you do about it? Well, I go back to things we’ve talked about before.

First, you must understand your customers. What do your customers need? How are they asking these questions? Where are they asking these questions? You can use tools like Heatseeker.ai or SparkToro or SEMrush or lots of other ones to better understand those questions.

Then you want to develop content that answers those questions well. In particular, though, focus on content that answers customers’ questions clearly and concisely. You’re writing for AI agents and bots as well as people, and those agents and bots need simple, clear answers to their questions.

You need to distribute that content broadly. Obviously, I remain convinced of the need for a hub-and-spoke approach to your content — where the hub is your own web presence, like your website and your email list and the spokes consist of social and syndicated content platforms.

You do want to make sure though that you’re giving as much attention to the spokes as you are the hubs so that your customers and AI tools find you everywhere. These days it’s not just about being in one place, you’ve got to be everywhere.

The next thing you want to do is learn more about structured data and apply it to your site. Structured data matters a ton to AI tools. This part of the world is continuing to evolve, but start with schema.org, then look to expand into other structured data types to better help AI bots understand your content.

And of course, you need to keep learning. Google may have won for now. We’ll see where we are in about a month. And things are changing fast. What I have to say today is certainly no way, in no way the last word on this topic. I’d suggest you take a look at our past episodes, including

I’ll link to all of those in the show notes, as well as many of the episodes that those themselves link to and the links embedded in those.

In any case, I’m confident that if you focus on your customers, if you focus on their needs, if you create content that is easily read by both people and machines, if you get that content in front of your customers, both on your website and on various spokes of the hub and spoke, and if you keep learning, it really doesn’t matter whether or not Google wins, because you’ll win too.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about here today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too? Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 468, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

And if you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest my book called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. You can pick up a copy on Amazon.com Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech or bookshop.org. And let me know what you think. I’d really love to hear from you. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, let me know what you think. Drop me a note. Put a comment on LinkedIn or YouTube. I’d really love to hear from you. I would so much appreciate learning from you as much as anything.

With all that said, I want to thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I will be back next week with a new episode. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win for Big Tech? (Episode 468) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

For all the talk about zero-click search, folks seem to keep overlooking one of its key consequences: How Google (and others) will make money. In short, Google can’t survive in a zero-click world. Their entire business depends on clicks. Paid clicks.

The shift towards zero-click results signals a genuine turning point for how you think about marketing your business, in part, because it will absolutely grow your costs for acquiring new customers.

So, what’s the real story behind zero-click search? Does it forecast a world where Google is doomed? And, most importantly, what does it mean for your business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 18m 01s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

AI and the reality of zero-click search go hand in hand. And while I think that the response to these, this idea of zero-click marketing, is a good one, this is the bigger picture.

So what is the bigger picture? What is the deeper meaning of artificial intelligence and zero-click marketing?

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 467 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

I want to talk about the reality of search marketing today. And this episode is very much a follow-up from last week’s discussion about the rise of a agentic AI among your customers. You don’t need to listen to last week’s episode for this one to make sense. But I’d like you to be aware that I’m building on a ton of assumptions that explored in gory detail last week. If you’ve got questions about those assumptions, you definitely want to check out last week’s episode.

It’s also a little less future focused and much more focused on our current reality, maybe where we’re going to be for the next six months or so. As I talked about last week, things could change at any time. So some of this may not age perfectly, but I think the bigger picture holds true.

I don’t think we’re going to see a massive shift in customer behaviors in the next three to six months. I explained the systemic reasons why that’s the case last week.

For one additional piece of evidence why I think that’s so, look at the public freak out that happened when ChatGPT, when OpenAI released its GPT-5 model this week. And more importantly, how the company backtracked and made its legacy models available to customers. Customers don’t typically accept change all that fast. We saw that play out in the most pure way possible over the last few days.

What’s also true is that while I think that this stuff is going to hold true for the next, you know, three to six to maybe nine months, I could absolutely be wrong about this.

As I mentioned last week, keep our core and explore methodology in mind. Focus 80% of your efforts on your core and about 20% of your efforts to see if things are changing. And that way, that should help ensure that you’ve got your bases covered in either case.

Regardless, this comes back to the bigger picture of where are we with search? And is Google losing? Is AI taking their business? Is zero click killing us?

Well, it’s complicated.

First, data for the last couple of months is potentially very misleading. I’m not convinced that the current data — that is data from June, July, and August — tells us as much as we might think it does.

We know that use of ChatGPT and other AI tools is highest among younger people and better educated people. And there’s one large group of people that falls into both of those buckets, and that is students, particularly high school and college students. They’re not in school right now, and they are heavy users of these tools.

When we look at data from similar web or Google trends, we see that OpenAI’s traffic declined in July, and the gap between Google and OpenAI got wider. Over the last few weeks, that gap seems to have shrunk a tiny bit, which does align with kids heading back to school. So there’s some evidence that suggests that’s right.

What it also suggests is that any boost you see in ChatGPT’s numbers in the next month or two might be driven largely by students and not by the larger market.

Maybe.

Why does that matter? Well, it depends on what you’re selling.

If students represent a large share of your customer base, then those numbers could be very meaningful to you. If they don’t, if you sell to a broader market than just students, then it means that activity by those student groups is going to make it tougher to see what’s genuinely happening with your actual customers. Non-commercial activity — or at least commercial activity unrelated to your business — might mask your reality.

Now, normally I’d tell you to simply pay attention to your analytics, but there’s two problems with this approach.

The first is that your analytics might not tell you the whole story if you’re not doing the work to appear in AI answers right now. I’m going to come back to this a little later in the show, but it’s an important point.

The second is that customer behaviors seem to follow a pattern right now of what’s called “explore and exploit.” This is a super common behavior among decision making strategies. People do this in all kinds of realms. What explore and exploit means in this specific case is that a fair number of folks are using AI for exploration. They’re engaging with AI to answer questions, to learn, to get exposed to new ideas, and yes, to find products and services they like — hotels, restaurants, clothing, technology, and so on.

However, at the same time, they can’t really buy through these tools (e.g., agentic AI) yet, at least not easily or consistently. Again, see last week’s episode for more on this topic.

Instead, when they’re ready to buy, when they’re ready to exploit what they’ve learned, they’re likely to navigate directly to you or search for you by brand name. And we’re seeing lots of companies that we work with getting significant increases in clicks and click-through rate on brand in terms of Google Search Console, as well as big lifts in “direct/none” traffic in their analytics. In other words, customers coming directly to the site.

But only after they found the brand during their explore activity.

This is critically important when we talk about the zero click search situation. Notice I called it a situation. I didn’t call it a problem. At least not yet. The reason is because today it’s only a real problem for certain industries. If you’re in publishing, for instance, or some other industry where your revenues are directly tied to your traffic, you do have a problem. Customers who don’t click — and more to the point, get the answers they need in the search results themselves — cost you real money. That’s a huge problem. No doubt about it.

Most other businesses, though, sell things, actual real physical products or services that the search results point to, but they don’t deliver.

For instance, if you sell hotel rooms, any zero-click answer isn’t robbing you of hotel reservations. Potential guests still have to book your hotel through some site. If you sell consulting services, clients still have to contact you to arrange the services that they need. If you sell software as a services, customers still have to sign up. If you sell books… they still have to go to a bookstore in some way, or form, whether online or in person to get the book.

For most businesses, zero click doesn’t have to mean zero revenue.

Now notice that I said your customers have to buy or reserve through some site. There is no guarantee right now that that site will be yours. Even when they don’t choose a competitor, they could still buy through a third party or some other intermediary. You know, they could buy through Amazon. They could buy through Expedia. And in some cases, that intermediary is Google.

For example, in cases like Google Shopping Ads or Google Metasearch for hotels, you’re not selling through Google, but you are paying for the clicks. And those still cost you money. You’re paying, in effect, a commission for Google to drive the sale.

More importantly, remember that in the past, at least some of those opportunities were free. We’ve gone from a free click to a paid click. Gatekeeper is going to gate and all that. You might have heard that once or twice before around here.

That to me is the biggest shift in search that we need to keep in mind. Search is not a free channel. We can argue whether it ever was. SEO activities always had a cost after all. Today though, you’re going to need to pay when customers are ready to buy from you, no matter whether they found you in traditional search or because an AI told them about you. And that’s the future we’re going to live in for a while. I simply don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Here’s why.

Google had revenue of $54 billion from Search in Q2 and $96.4 billion overall. They earned $33 billion of their $31 billion total earnings from services, notice that’s more than their overall earnings. Services include things like Maps and Android. We know that search and YouTube make up 75% of the total and search alone is 65% of the total number.

During that same period, paid clicks were up 4% and paid click revenue was up 12%. Think about that for a moment. By definition, Google has to be charging more for every click or else clicks and revenues would be more in line with one another and they’re not. Call me crazy, but someone should write a book about what this means for your business.

Anyway, to drive this revenue, Google is spending $85 billion this year largely on what they called “AI infrastructure investments.” It’s pretty easy to see that they’re paying for these investments on their revenue from search and ads more generally. And they’re going to keep on doing it.

Sundar Pichai, the CEO said in Q2 2024, this is a quote, “the risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing.” That $85 billion dollar number includes an additional $10 billion that they just announced in this quarterly earnings call. They just said, “nope, we need to spend an additional $10 billion on top of the $75 billion we had already planned to spend to keep driving that.:

The plain truth is that as I talked about on The Becoming Radical podcast recently, Google can’t survive in a zero-click world. I’m going to say that again. Google cannot survive in a zero-click world.

56% of its total revenues and some major percentage of its earnings, probably around 70%, came from clicks on search ads.

And yes, I know that I’m only looking at Google’s numbers here, but the same basic pattern exists for Meta and Amazon to say nothing of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and or Claude. And those last three have monumentally worse revenue numbers than Google does.

As I talked about last week, any or all of these players can only win if they successfully monetize what they offer to the marketplace. And at least some of that monetization almost certainly has to come from your business, from you in the form of ad dollars, and quite possibly for purposes of user experience and traceability, from clickable ads.

In short, it’s not that you should be worried about zero click, it’s that you should be worried about the end of free clicks. Remember, again, gatekeepers gonna gate. They have to pay for their investments in AI or search or customer experience. They have to. That’s the reality we live in.

So what do you do about this? Well, you almost certainly should be working to get some short-term awareness boost by showing up in AI answers today. In fact, I’d encourage you to do that. For starters, it’s largely free, again, ignoring labor costs or the cost of qualified SEO folks who understand how to show up in these tools.

Normally, I would tell you you’re gonna base that decision on your own analytics and then invest as the demand grows.

But as I mentioned earlier, your analytics might not tell the whole story if you’re not doing the work to appear in AI answers:

This is one case where you probably have to build in advance of the data. To flip a well-known quote on its head, “if you don’t build it, they won’t come.”

Longer term, you also need a strategy that connects you with customers directly, too. I’ve talked about this a lot in recent episodes and in my book. For reasons of time, I’m going to link to all of those in the show notes.

The point remains that the immediate future of search is not zero click. It’s zero free click. If you’re not adapting your marketing to that reality, you’re setting yourself and your business up for less revenue, higher costs, or both. So maybe let’s not do that.

There’s already a solution for zero-click marketing. It’s called marketing. The marketers and e-commerce folks who do a good job of that are going to win no matter what happens. I’m confident you can be one of them.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about here today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 467, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

And if you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest my book called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. You can pick up a copy on Amazon.com Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech or bookshop.org. And let me know what you think. I’d really love to hear from you. I would genuinely appreciate it.

I want to thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other.

The post AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Agentic AI is almost certainly going to be huge… and probably soon. Early versions of agentic AI already exist today. Some of them even work pretty well. And the early data suggests customers are OK with the idea of agentic AI.

Those facts lead to a few key questions for you:

Some of these questions have easy answers. Some… less so.

In this episode of the podcast, I try to break down what’s going on with agentic AI, when your customers might make the switch, and lay out a few ideas that you can put into practice, today, to ensure you can succeed both today, and whenever agentic AI breaks big.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

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Hi, and welcome back to the show. Over the next few weeks, I plan to talk about the future of customer experience in digital.

Search, of course, is the dominant paradigm for customer experience. If search wasn’t the most common experience, Google wouldn’t be the 800 pound gorilla that scares the crap out of every other beast in the jungle. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, and soon, agentic AI, Google is in a precarious position.

My friend Mike Moran wrote me a thoughtful note about the risks that agentic AI in particular presents to Google, and I think he’s mostly right. I also think that it’s a very complicated and more than a little uncertain situation. And it’s tough to explain without first talking about what is and isn’t likely to happen and why I think that.

So today I’m going to talk about the adoption of agentic AI, its likely effects on customer behaviors, and what that might mean for your business. Full disclosure, this one might get a little long, so I hope you’ll hang with us throughout.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 466 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

What’s the big deal about agentic AI? So the basic idea, if you’re not familiar, is that agentic AI can perform a wide array of tasks. It can adapt to a variety of situations and it can make decisions on your behalf without requiring you to provide much, if anything, in the way of oversight. In short, it’s an AI assistant that takes care of things that maybe you don’t have the inclination, the knowledge, or most commonly the time to do yourself.

The two examples I see of agentic AI that people share all the time are having an agent plan a vacation for you or researching some particularly thorny business challenge. You simply set the agent to the task and within a short period, usually a couple of minutes, it’s taken care of everything for you.

In the vacation example, for instance, it would provide you with your completed reservations and an itinerary. You just go where you needed to go. In the business research situation, it would give you a checklist and a guide for how to address the problem. And in some cases, it may have already completed some of the tasks itself, like emailing vendors or team members, that sort of thing.

These tools already exist today. These are not science fiction. Some of them are pretty good and getting better. I mean, most aren’t, but they’re real and they’re coming in a much bigger way — and probably relatively soon. Which leads to a few big questions.

I think anytime you talk about new technology, there are always three main pillars that either drive or limit, depending on your point of view, adoption. There may be others, but this tends to cover the bases. They are:

I think that the answers to most of the other questions — the timing to reach mass adoption, the company’s best position to win, and to a lesser degree what they mean for your business — all follow from the adoption question.

Put more simply, until these tools are used by a meaningful segment of your customers, a meaningful set of your customers, the rest of the questions really don’t matter.

I also want to be super upfront that I suspect that adoption, mass adoption, could occur literally any day now. Digital has long shown us that customer adoption follows what I always call Hemingway’s “bankruptcy pattern.” You know, “How do you go bankrupt? It happens slowly, then all at once.”

We’re in the slowly moment right now. But all at once could happen at any time. People could wake up tomorrow, realize that these tools provide better capabilities or better utility, and just simply switch instantly.

To talk about these each in a little more detail, capabilities and utility is still not perfect for most of these. Now, one of the biggest things limiting the utility of these tools today is their access to data and their access to websites. We’re seeing things where these tools have to work with the web as it is. And some people may not want that to happen.

For instance, Amazon is restricting Google’s Mariner, which is one of their agentic AI platforms, as well as others by using its robots.txt file — which, if you’re not familiar, is a tool that many websites use to tell search engines what they can and can’t do on a site.

It’s to be determined whether or not agentic AI will always follow those rules, but it certainly could be a problem for them. I strongly suspect Amazon will almost certainly do some level of IP based filtering to write blocking specific IP addresses to prevent these tools from working with their data, right? Because they want to they want their tools to work with their data, not other people’s. It doesn’t look like companies like WalMart or Shopify are doing that yet. We’re going to have to see how that will play out. What’s absolutely true though, is that agentic AI needs to work with the web as it is.

I’ve shared these stats plenty of times here. There are over 200 million actively updated websites out in the world and over a billion total websites. Agents that have to wait for “the entire web” to update to their needs probably never take off or at least they’re going to be pretty late to the party. And I don’t think customers will adopt a tool that doesn’t give them what they’re accustomed to today. If it doesn’t provide utility, nobody’s going to switch.

Now, I think Google has a real advantage in this area because it already crawls the whole web. It knows how the web works and what’s on the web better than just about anyone.

Another factor influencing utility is compute capabilities. How much raw computing horsepower do they have available to them? And the Big Tech companies hold all the cards here. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they’re the things that ChatGPT, for instance, sits on top of, right? The Big Tech players are in a pretty good position. We also see that Oracle is getting into this game in a big way.

By contrast, if we think about app developers, they’re at a relative disadvantage compared with hardware or cloud providers if they can’t make the capabilities work on device. Even somebody like Apple’s got a problem there because they don’t provide a lot of these capabilities within the cloud directly. If you could make a device work, then that might play to Apple or Samsung or Meta’s capabilities pretty well. But right now, the cloud is where it’s at, and that really seems to favor a few members of Big Tech in particular.

There’s also a real question about privacy and AI. The CEO of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, gave a talk, appeared on a panel recently and raised some excellent points about how much access these tools would require to your very personal, very private information — something I’m going to talk about more in just a moment — for them to be able to do the kinds of things that most of their developers are promising. I don’t know how much that’s gonna matter to many consumers. We’ve seen people give data freely to all kinds of people lots and lots of times in the past. So that may be an odd issue, but it’s something to pay attention to. I suspect it’s gonna vary by market and region.

I will tell you the early data suggests that may not be that big a deal. Booking.com did some recent research and found that, and this is a quote, “just 12% feel comfortable with AI making decisions independently, while 25% remain unsure and 10% feel very uncomfortable, refusing to trust AI without human approval.“

Now when you add those up, you go, well, wait a second, that’s about 47% of people. That sounds like a pretty big number. I’m not sure though. Those numbers make me more certain that adoption of AI assistance will happen quickly rather than slowly as they gain capabilities, as they gain, as they offer utility. Why do I think that? Well, because you have to remember that roughly 10% of US consumers today don’t own a smartphone, 90% do. There’s always going to be 10% of the population who don’t get on board with a new technology. If today, this early in the game, only 10% feel very uncomfortable, it might mean that resistance, at least for now, is pretty light. Yeah, those numbers could get larger. The smartphone data, though, suggests that I can’t imagine them getting smaller. And that’s a positive sign for AI agents in the near term, as long as they can deliver utility.

Also, they also have to manage the second leg in this particular stool, which is distribution, know, access to markets. And I think the biggest item affecting distribution here is the form that agentic AI takes.

We don’t really know what Agenda AI is going to look like in the longer term. Is it a standalone app or function? Or is it embedded inside each of the apps and devices that we already use every day? I suspect it’s going to be the latter, but I wouldn’t rule out the former. If it’s just built into the mobile OS, then Google and Apple are in a really good position.

If it’s a standalone app like Siri or Alexa or Instagram or Google search on your device, or it’s part of the core device operating system — think Siri or Alexa on Google search on Android — I think the device OS developers are likely to provide hooks for other app developers to leverage. Think about something like Apple’s WebKit for browser functionality within an app or Google’s ads and map APIs that allow you to place ads within an app or show people directions within an app.

Because again, the developers also need access to device capabilities and the cloud, which again brings us back to our Big Tech friends being in a somewhat comfortable position here.

If it becomes an app, who knows? That’s the Wild West. Anyone could be the app that consumers choose. Obviously, ChatGPT wants to be one of them. Perplexity wants to be one of them. But it’s impossible to say. Nobody could have predicted Facebook or Google when they first started and look where they are today. Plenty of other competitors could have wanted the theory and that absolutely could be true this time around too.

There’s also the possibility that we’ll have new devices that people use, you know, instead of using our existing devices, our phones and the apps on them. Maybe we’ll have smart glasses, maybe we’ll have smart watches or other wearables that actually connect to our AI that does these things for us.

Meta, for instance, cares about this one a lot, like so, so much. Mark Zuckerberg just shared a lengthy post outlining his vision for what he’s calling “personal superintelligence.” And one of the most important paragraphs in that post said, “personal super intelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.” [Emphasis added.]

Notice he talked about glasses that understand our context, not smartphones, not watches, not anything else. In other words, that’s Mark Zuckerberg saying, I really want you to use our devices, not Androids, not iPhones, not watches from Google and Apple.

I’ve talked about this before, but Meta needs adoption of new devices or they’ll always be as vulnerable to gatekeepers like Apple and Google as anyone else. That same problem is one of the reasons that ChatGPT has talked about creating its own phone and its own web browser and why Amazon is buying a company called Bee. Bee, if you’re not familiar, makes an AI powered bracelet that, according to the Wall Street Journal, “records everything you say.” Nothing to worry about there, nothing to be scared about there. Right?

In each of these cases, though, whether it’s Meta, whether it’s ChatGPT/OpenAI, whether it’s Amazon, the companies want and need to be independent of Google and Apple because gatekeepers are going to gate and all that.

What’s funny is they might be right. You know, what we talk all the time about people love their phones and, you know, they haven’t really chosen other devices, but agentic AI could be the killer app that drives adoption of new devices rather than the other way around, rather than “we have these new devices and they drive the adoption of agentic AI.”

I’m going to tell you, I lean towards mobile OS winning. I think that’s, you know, the dominant platform. Probably. But that’s undoubtedly biased on my part because it’s a device I use every day and I still see everyone else using. You know, maybe glasses or watches or bracelets or pins clipped to our clothing will be a better form factor. I’m not saying I’m absolutely about saying that it couldn’t happen. Outside of Star Trek, though, there’s just no evidence supporting that kind of move yet.

Of course, it doesn’t matter how these players bring agents to market if they can’t solve for the third leg of the stool, which is monetization. Now, this is the toughest one to predict from my perspective.

I have to assume that it’s going to work in ways that we’ve seen in the past. You know, venture capital will be happy to fund these at a loss to gain market share — huge market share — under the assumption that money will follow. Take a look at what’s happening with OpenAI and ChatGPT.

It also means that monetization is a far later concern for all of these folks right now, which makes it tougher to predict. Nobody’s trying to figure out how to monetize these perfectly yet.

How much will consumers be willing or able to pay? Tough to tell. They don’t pay for search. They don’t pay for social generally. Will these tools work on affiliate programs and take a cut of every sale? Will they be entirely ad supported? It is so hard to know for sure, which means it’s also tough to know who wins.

I suspect ads will likely play a non-trivial role, which means that the folks with the most ad experience, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, probably have some kind of head start there. Maybe. Obviously, some smart folks in a garage could come up with entirely new monetization schemes, but it’s just really tough to tell.

So who’s going to win with this kind of world?

Well, if you haven’t figured it out by what I’ve said, I still think Big Tech as a whole has a huge advantage. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, ChatGPT, and maybe Meta have the capabilities. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple have the distribution. Meta might get there if they can get more folks to buy their hardware. It’s certainly what they’re banking on. And ChatGPT is clearly trying to move in that direction. On the final part, on monetization, Google, Amazon, and Apple have that in place. Google through ads, Amazon through commerce, and Apple through its hardware and mobile OS. Microsoft might have it, and Meta and ChatGPT seem to lag here without hardware or ads respectively.

The only two companies who consistently come up in all three categories, though, are Google and Amazon. Google has an added challenge, of course, in terms of its antitrust situation, which is a big deal and could trip them up massively. They might be able to buy their way out of this, you know, with major fines or, I don’t know, contributions to presidential libraries or some nonsense like that, you know, but we don’t know.

And I certainly wouldn’t count out Microsoft, Apple or ChatGPT. They are each strong in some of the key areas. Weirdly, I do think ChatGPT seems the weakest to me. But given that they’ve got a huge VC backing, they’re absolutely not going down without a fight. Of course, finally, I would never discount the two kids in a garage scenario, you know, some innovative geniuses who figure out how to reduce compute loads or move AI on device or drive a whole new monetization system that could upend everything we know, assuming one of the incumbents doesn’t buy them first.

So given this, given that it’s still early days and it’s tough to really predict, the question becomes, what do you do about it?

I think this part is actually really easy because first, you want to pay close attention to your customers. That’s always true, but it’s especially true in a rapidly changing marketplace. Remember that idea of “slowly, then all at once?” When this breaks for AI agents, assuming it happens, it’s probably going to happen fast. You want to at least be a fast follower. You want to be ready when your customers are.

Second, don’t be afraid to be a fast follower. With this much change going on, you can occasionally get some quick wins through a first mover advantage, but you can also waste a lot of time chasing trends down a dead end. I’m sure there were companies that made a little bit of money with the metaverse or NFTs or, I don’t know, Second Life back in the day.

I’m also pretty sure some of them would have rather spent that time focusing on other bigger, more meaningful trends for their business. I lean toward the saying that you’re better served being a fast follower than getting way, way out in front of your customers on this one.

Our “core and explore” methodology, which I’ve talked about before and I’ll link to in the show notes, or that you can read more about my book, Digital Reset, is a really useful model at times like these. Feel free to check those out. Just remember that the fast is as important as the follower.

And you can’t move fast if you don’t know what you’re doing or where your customers are heading, which leads to my third, final recommendation: Keep learning.

These tools and customer adoption of them are changing so crazy fast right now. You absolutely should be testing these and learning more about them for you and your business. You should be learning how they can help you better connect with customers today. You should continue to focus on what works, the core of “core and “explore.” And you should explore a little bit, spend a little bit of time testing them out to see what might happen.

Finally, you need to get more comfortable with change because we’re going to see change happen whether we like it or not.

Now, will customers adopt agentic AI? Yeah, I think so.

When? Tough to say, but it’ll probably happen all at once when they do. And it will depend upon utility, it will depend upon distribution, and it will depend upon monetization of these tools.

Who wins? Probably one of the Big Tech giants. But don’t be totally surprised if some wild card seizes the day.

Most importantly, what do you do about it? Pay attention to your customers, be a fast follower, and keep learning.

Because ultimately, as customers use these tools, it doesn’t really matter which one they choose in the long run. It matters that you’re focusing on your customers’ needs so that they and their agents ultimately choose you.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Be sure to let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 466, and an archive of all of our past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

And if you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest my book called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. You can pick up a copy on Amazon.com Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech or bookshop.org. And let me know what you think. I’d really love to hear from you.

Thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week, and until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Unlike a lot of folks, I’m not convinced that AI agents are the end of brands. Sure, there’s a risk. But I still believe most customers will choose brands that work for their needs & and will train their agents, as those evolve, to pick their preferred options in many cases.

Of course, getting customers to train their agents that you’re the right choice isn’t something you can wait to do when (or if) agents become available. Instead, it’s something you can (and should!) do right now. Even better, it works for your brand and business… right now. What’s not to love about that?

In this episode of the podcast, I take a look at why brands will continue to matter, why “the brand is the prompt,” and what you need to do to get customers to ask for you by name.

Want to learn more about it? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

You might also enjoy this webinar I participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 23m 48s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Every few months, I like to revisit prior episodes of the podcast for two reasons:

The idea is to see if I’ve got a new perspective on a topic and share the latest, while building on existing materials.

Sometimes, though, the topic changes so fast, I can’t wait several months to revisit it. Instead, it requires a new look in just weeks.

That’s the case this time around. I’m revisiting an episode called The Brand is the Prompt from mid-June. And the reason is because of how quickly customer behaviors are shifting around AI and how much buzz the idea of zero click search is getting.

To me, AI and zero-click search are two sides of the same coin. Because, in both cases, it’s entirely likely that your customers got the answers they needed, then had no reason to visit your website or any other component of your digital presence. Their “search” — in the broadest sense of the term — is done.

That behavioral shift has led to excessive heartache and headlines about how many aspects of our day-to-day life as marketers and commercial leaders are doomed:

And so on.

In my view… that’s all bullshit. Seriously.

I don’t believe for a minute that customers are going to stop seeking out brands and businesses and experiences that matter to them. I don’t believe for a minute that customers aren’t going to choose brands and businesses and experiences they trust. Sure, they may turn to AI or search — zero click or otherwise — for new ideas and inspiration. But they’re also going to remember the brands and businesses and experiences that they liked and loved. They’re going to ask for those again and again, by name. They’re going to teach their agents about those preferences so that their agents recommend the brands and businesses and experiences they want.

In my view, there’s a word for marketing in a “zero click” world. It’s called “MARKETING.” It’s about differentiating your product or service. It’s about building awareness and interest and desire and action. It’s about connecting with customers as human beings and helping them address their needs and solve their problems. It’s about being a trusted resource in their lives.

In short, it’s about building a brand people want to ask for by name. And it’s something I’ve summarized as “The brand is the prompt.”

Take a few minutes and check out this past episode of our podcast, “The Brand is the Prompt,” then let me know what you think. It’s coming at you, right now.

As I mentioned before the break, I’ve got this new theory that I’m thinking about to ensure that you don’t get burned by customer shift to AI agents. That idea is “the brand is the prompt.” Marketers need to make their brand top of mind so that customers and AI agents explicitly ask for you and they ask for your business by name.

There are number of supporting predicates behind my argument.

The first is that AI tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Google’s Project Mariner—which is Google’s AI agent platform—won’t always, and don’t always, surface brands or links. It’s going to be tougher and tougher for you to get seen.

Another is that getting into AI answer engines can be challenging… and it’s certainly evolving. Yes, we are seeing fairly strong correlation that shows that sites that rank well in Google also tend to get mentioned more often in large language models.

But, first, that’s not a one-to-one relationship by any stretch. Just because you rank number one doesn’t necessarily mean you will be the first thing mentioned. And second, there’s no guarantee that that current behavior will remain true over time.

Another huge challenge that we need to keep in mind is that I’m fairly confident that AI agents will favor their own ecosystems. Google will point you to Google assets. Amazon will point you to Amazon assets. If you’ve got an agent that’s made by ChatGPT, they’re going to point you to other OpenAI assets in all likelihood, at least a fair bit of the time.

That’s the problem we’re dealing with in traditional search today. I think by now you’re probably pretty familiar with the idea that “gatekeepers gonna gate.” And if you’re not, I would strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. The link is in the show notes, of course.

My conclusion from these various principles is that we need to work towards a situation where customers want to prompt AI with your brand, not a generic product.

So if I say “book me a room at the John Rutledge House inn (full disclosure: John Rutledge House Inn is a client) the John Rutledge House Inn wins. By contrast, if I say “book me a hotel,” that specific hotel loses… as do lots and lots and lots of other hotels that weren’t asked for by name.

If you don’t build brand preference today, you risk commoditization and longer term, irrelevance. Your brand must be built today across experiences that appeal to people, that appeal to AI agents, and over time, appeal to hybrid experiences.

So I mentioned that I posted this on LinkedIn the other day and I got an amazing number of replies and some really strong counter arguments. And I want to walk you through these and see what you think.

So the first counter argument came from my friend Michael Goldrich who said that AI agents will do the prompting, not the user. Basically his argument is that AI agents will be proactive, they’ll be personalized, and they’ll be connected to your data; things like your loyalty programs, your email and your calendar, other things like that.

So the agent will suggest hotels and flights and restaurants based on your preferences and your patterns without needing you, the user, to prompt a brand. The agent will tell you when options are ready and suggest what to book. Therefore, brand prompting by the user is probably only a short-term behavior. AI-driven recommendations are the long-term future.

That’s a great argument. I think there’s a lot of wisdom and intelligence in that.

I also think that while that may happen long term, I still think the long term is probably pretty far off for most users. In the meantime, we have to teach the agents the brands that matter to us, either via explicit prompts or by building that loyalty and recognition with those brands so that the agent learns them. Again, for our businesses, if our customers don’t know what brands our customers want, then that’s gonna be a problem for us. The data won’t be there. Even in the long run, agents need an initial data set to know which brands matter. So building the brand today matters a ton, even if Michael is right that in the future it will already know our preferences or glean them implicitly from our actions.

So I still think it becomes really important for us to build those brand relationships with our customers today or risk being in really bad position in the future when the AI just quote unquote decides for our customers.

That then leads to the second question, which was posed by Tammie Carlisle and Mark Simchock, which was, “how do you get customers to know your brand to prompt it in the first place?”

This is a great question. This is a huge question. Before the brand is the prompt, the brand has to be built and positioned and differentiated enough to exist in the customer’s mind. And each of them pointed out that many brands are too weak, too undifferentiated, or frankly not visible enough for this to happen. Mark Simchock hit this on the head. He said, “before the brand is the prompt, there needs to be the brand is the brand.”

Now, let me be really, really, really clear. I completely agree with this point of view. The heavy lifting is brand building first. It’s kind of what I just said a moment ago about Michael Goldrich’s point. “The brand is the prompt” is a strategic goal. We need to work on the distinctiveness and positioning to make that possible.

And the good news is this is something we should be doing today anyway. Like there’s no downside in this today or in the future. I’m going to get into in a little bit some of the ways you can do that. But again, I’m going to be pretty transparent: That’s a big chunk of what my book is about.

We’re working on this right now to ensure that people search for you by name, that people connect with you on social by name, that people engage with your email marketing or want to get on your text message list, your SMS marketing list so that they’re engaged with you all the time. That’s crucially important. Right now that then just sets you up for a better position down the road. So again, I think this is a win-win both short term and long term.

And again, I’ll talk about some ways to do that, but to me that is a huge component of it right there.

The third counter argument I heard was articulated in a number of different forms. Peter Syme and Pedro Colaco, talked about how many markets are already brand blind. They argued that some industries are already commoditized. They used airlines as one example and how, you know, one called them steel tubes. The brand doesn’t really matter. For these markets, the customer optimizes by parameters that matter for a given experience, not by the brand. We might prioritize the loyalty program or the price or the location or how quickly it will get us there or, you know, in B2B, past working relationships or, you know, specific technical attributes. So not brand love.

Sure, strong brands help if it exists, but for large segments, brand simply doesn’t matter.

Honestly, this one gives me some pause because it’s absolutely true for some categories that they are commodity driven. However, I would argue that brand includes your relationship, the experience people have had with you and the trust they have in you. Strong brands need to exist if we let ourselves be commoditized, regardless of what industry you’re in. You’re always going to be fighting for better position, both today and tomorrow. The challenge is to avoid this trap in the first place.

I think that this argument from Peter and Pedro is the most dangerous place we can be.

In the book, I talked about why it’s so critical to build your brand. Big Tech has worked for a long time to position your company’s products and services as commodities, and our job as marketers is to fight that every single day. If we simply accept that we’re commodities, we’ve already lost.

So maybe we should do that. Maybe we should actually work to ensure we’re not just commodities.

And I think there’s a lot of things we can do to ensure that we’re differentiated, to ensure that we stand apart based on the idea of the brand as the prompt. And I want to get into those now.

The first thing we need to do is let’s talk about commodities, true commodities first, where you’ve genuinely been commoditized.

We have to look to move from being this invisible commodity, this completely commoditized product to a preferred choice within the set of other people who are somewhat commoditized. We need to build some trust and we need to build some real hooks with our customers, whether they’re emotional or whether they’re functional, even if brand name recall isn’t necessarily going to be possible. And the larger umbrella of these, you will see, works for both situations we’re talking about.

So we need to ensure we’ve got things like structured data, our inventory, our location, our pricing, other features that matter, is easily accessible to AI agents, to aggregators, and to human beings.

We need to partner with platforms where customers set their preferences. So that could be channel partners. That could be specific third parties that we work with. And it could be things like the agents themselves over time. We need to think in terms of maximizing value that customers get so that we can differentiate within specific products that, you know, we’re competing with. And we need to create some memorable connections: What sets us apart?

If it’s always price, if it’s always price, you’re in a race to the bottom. And that’s a race that’s really tough to win over the long term.

So we need to think about how do we create an experience? How do we get more data about our customers so that we can focus on their specific needs so that we start to set ourselves apart from the choice? And then that becomes something that the agents can learn from if and when they come around, right?

We may also be able to say, you know what, encourage people to say buy from the people I bought from last time. There’s an opportunity to win repeat business that doesn’t require explicit loyalty to your brand. That’s a huge opportunity that we have.

Now, of course, if you’re already differentiated and you have some differentiation, we need to double down on that. We want to become an explicit prompt, both for customers and for any AI agents that act on their behalf. A lot of that’s going to come back to strengthening the emotional bonds and brand recall today before AI agents dominate.

We want to invest in marketing that reinforces specific brand phrasing. “Stay at a specific hotel. Book a specific airline. Buy from this specific company.” Encourage our customers to think and speak in terms of our brand.

Microsoft has done this for years, where they have taken a specific application or specific technology and they do this thing that they call “embrace and extend.” They do this a lot with “standards,” where they take a true standard and then they layer some additional capabilities onto it. So you can learn the standard but, oh, Microsoft’s flavor of it is just a little different and requires people or causes people to think of Microsoft’s version first.

The next is we want to tell a consistent brand story. Our differentiated position must shine through in our content, in our reviews, in our communications, and in any channel that we’re working through. AI models and the agents that will be built on these are going to learn from these broad signals that are created today or created over the next few years.

We have to make sure that people today are already engaging with those. If not, we’re going to put ourselves in really bad position. And of course, we’re gonna build direct customer relationships. We want to gain the data for customers and put it into our CRMs, put it into loyalty programs, put it into personalized content that works for that customer so that they know who we are and we show that we know who they are so that we’re building a trusted relationship.

Finally, we want tp invest in memorable experiences so that we can drive more word of mouth. I can’t picture a world where agents exist, where people still don’t say, “my gosh, I had the best experience at this restaurant,” or “I had the best experience with this travel scenario,” or “I had this best experience with this company that I worked with to help solve a problem for my business.”

That’s still going to be true, and that will create people who haven’t engaged with our brand before to say, “I want to work with them too. Hey, my favorite agent, go connect with this brand and tell me if they’ll work for us.”

That’s hugely important.

I said there’s kind of an umbrella over all of this and you may have noticed that this sounds an awful lot like “Content is King, Customer Experience is Queen, and Data is the Crown Jewels,” which you’ve heard me talk about many times in the book. You’ve heard me talk about many times here on the podcast. You’ve read many times on the blog.

I think all of those remain important and will continue to be important for a long time to come.

Fundamentally, the brand is the prompt. That will be true years from now, and it’s already true today, even if customers are searching for you, even if customers are engaging in social and looking for you. If they’re not looking for you by name, you’re not creating the kind of environment where you’re going to succeed both today and longer term.

So what do you think? I way off base here? Am I missing something obvious? You know, is this really a pipe dream or am I onto something here? By the way, hint, I’m seeing clients of mine be successful today already doing this. So I’m not so sure I’m off the mark too much. But let me know what you think. I want to hear from you. I want to hear your point of view.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 465, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

I know I’ve mentioned this already during the show, but if you’re looking for something to read to dive further into this, may I suggest the number one new e-commerce book on Amazon.com called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. I’d love it if you’d pick up a copy and let me know what you think.

Finally, I just want to say so much thank you for listening. This show would not happen without you.

We’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Revisiting The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Google seems scared. Customers seem ready to jump. Behaviors are shifting fast and furious.

While I tend to think Google is in the best possible position to win the AI wars, they’re also the fattest target for startups like OpenAI. The Mary Meeker report illustrates many of the ways that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic threaten the Big Tech status quo. But, increasingly, Google’s own actions also show that they’re concerned. My suspicion is that their data — which they have more of than anybody — isn’t giving them much comfort. (That’s only a suspicion; I could definitely be wrong there. Again, though, their actions are speaking fairly loudly all on their own).

Regardless of who wins, it’s possible that marketers will pay the price. You’ll need to adapt to a rapidly changing marketplace, one where you customers will interact your brands in entirely new ways.

So, who’s paying for dinner now that AI is eating the world? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 23m 43s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Google’s running scared these days. It’s almost like they’re looking over their shoulder and afraid of what they see. Situations like these always, always remind me of the Hemingway quote about how people or companies in this case go broke: “slowly, then all at once.”

We are in the “slowly” phase at the moment, and “all at once” feels like it’s right around the corner.

And that reminded me of an episode from a little earlier this year that asked, “AI is eating the world, but who’s paying for dinner?” It was based on the recent Mary Meeker AI report, which outlines the ways in which the world is changing, not just for marketers but for the overall market.

I’m going to have a lot more to say in the next few weeks about the state of AI and marketing, a big picture view of how AI and zero click marketing are combining to make this the most interesting — and challenging — time that marketers have had to face in quite a while. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more on that topic.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy as we revisit this look at AI is eating the world, but who’s paying for dinner? It’s a little bit longer than our typical episode, but I think you’ll find it worth your time. So let’s dive in and check it out. Coming at you right now.

You know, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last, I don’t know, two or three or four years, you’re probably aware that AI is moving faster than anything we’ve ever seen before.

But underneath the hype, there’s a problem nobody’s talking about. Who’s going to pay for all of this? Like, where does the money come from? And most importantly, what happens to marketers when the bill comes due? That’s a really critical lesson that I think we need to think about as we go forward as marketing and customer acquisition folks.

This is episode 464 of The Big Show. Today we’re talking about how AI is eating the world, but who’s paying for dinner?

Let’s dive in.

So I’ve been reading the Mary Meeker report for the last 24 hours or so. Longtime listeners of the show and readers of the blog know how much I love Mary Meeker’s report. If you’re not familiar with Mary Meeker, she’s a venture capitalist. She’s been around for a long time. She was an early investor in Facebook. Super, super smart woman. Tremendously, tremendously smart team she’s put around herself. And I devour her report every single time it comes out.

It is a massive report this year. 340 pages almost entirely focused on artificial intelligence and what it means for the world today. Now, you know that this show literally started out as a place for me to think out loud. That’s where the title came from. This episode is going to be a little bit along those lines, in part because I’m going to be digesting this report for a couple of weeks. Again, this is a 340 page report. There’s a lot in there, some of which are not so relevant to marketers and e-commerce professionals, and some of which are very relevant.

But…

I want to talk about her key finding as it matters to you today, which is that AI adoption has outpaced the internet, mobile, and even cloud adoption curves. ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly users in just 17 months. That is faster than any technology we’ve ever seen.

So AI is not some future thing. You know that. It’s here. It’s now. It’s beginning to become baked into the customer journey.

What’s also true is that those numbers require some clarification. First, adoption is not constant by age group. Sam Altman, who is OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said this, he said,

“a gross simplification is older people use ChatGPT as like a Google replacement. People in their 20s and 30s, use it like a life advisor.”

That’s a big difference. That’s a huge deal in terms of how customers use these tools.

The second key thing that you want to take away is that adoption might not be as broad as you might think. People who listen to the show, people who I interact with on social media and the like, we’re all fairly early adopters. So I think we think people have really taken this too hard. And it’s not that they haven’t. Again, adoption has been huge.

But today they’re spending maybe 18 minutes per day on ChatGPT by “USA active users.” Now that’s up from roughly seven minutes per day in less than two years.

Side note, the Meeker report doesn’t show exact numbers, just ranges in 10 minute increments. The current number is definitely a bit below 20 minutes per day, but it’s getting close to there. And the earlier number was definitely more than five minutes per day, but far fewer than 10. So, you know, seven. Also, “active users” isn’t clearly defined in the report, so we’re not 100% sure how they mean or what they mean by active users.

Another chart in the report shows that the average session duration is a little over two minutes and that the average user has about seven to eight sessions per day, roughly double what it was less than two years ago. So again, tremendous growth. These are impressive numbers. My favorite stat that they show is that the Meeker report shows that searches for the term “AI agent” have grown almost 1,100% since January of 2024. So in less than 18 months, it’s grown almost 1,100%. That is genuinely remarkable. What is also true is that

A.) It looks like those searches may have plateaued as of maybe February this year.

Don’t get me wrong, one-tenth of 1% of 96 billion is still a pretty good-sized number. It’s also not everybody is searching for AI agents all the time. That’s a big deal. Also note, they’re searching on Google, right? Keep that in mind. We’re going to come back to it.

With no disrespect to Mary Meeker, far from it, I think she is brilliant. Part of her job is selling the world on the things she and her company have invested in, right? More than a few of her company’s investments are AI companies. So, you know, you can forgive her if she was to give you a glass half full look at the world. And again, I don’t think she’s wrong that this is a big deal. Because by any measure, AI adoption is already big and it’s getting bigger.

What it hasn’t yet done is taken over for Big Tech companies. And there’s a reason for that. And the reason is that the costs of AI are starting to show.

There’s a telling quote in the presentation from Microsoft’s vice chair and president, Brad Smith. He said,

“like electricity and other general purpose technologies in the past, AI and cloud data centers represent the next stage of industrialization.”

In other words, data centers, the cloud, and AI are just a cost of doing business, kind of like the internet was once upon a time. Meeker herself writes, “The world’s biggest tech companies,” — which quick aside, she calls “hyperscalers” and the rest of us call “Big Tech.” Anyway, she continues by saying that “…the world’s biggest tech companies are spending tens of billions of dollars annually, not just to gather data, but to learn from it, reason with it, and monetize it in real time.”

“It’s still about data,” she continues, “but now the advantage goes to those who can trade on it faster, personalize it deepest, and deploy it widest.” I might add, again, to those who can monetize it.

What I find really interesting is that according to her research, Big Tech has increased their capital and R&D spending roughly 20-plus percent per year for the last 10 years or so. But they’ve seen their cloud computing revenues increase roughly 37% per year during the same period. And I’m gonna come back to this in a moment.

There’s this paradox she points out called Jevons Paradox. They note it was first proposed back in 1865. Jevon was an economist.

Anyway, it states that, “the technological advancements that improve resource efficiency actually lead to increased overall usage of those resources.” So in short, “costs fall, performance rises and usage grows all in tandem.” So as your costs fall, usage grows, which raises your costs.

They conclude by stating “this trend is repeating itself with AI.”

By the way, the people doing this a lot, are folks like OpenAI and Big Tech.

If you look at OpenAI’s various actions over the last bunch of months, they’ve been super busy:

Now these all could signal bold ambitions for OpenAI becoming the next Big Tech player, connecting customers across a variety of applications and platforms.

I think it also kind of signals their current reality, which is that they don’t have any way of recouping the billions of dollars they’ve already spent in developing their products. According to reports, they generated $3.7 billion in revenue in 2024 and lost $5 billion. That’s a neat trick. They’re on track for apparently $9.2 billion in annualized revenue in 2025… against the $64 billion they’ve already raised in funding. And that’s before you consider the fact that open source is coming.

This feels a little to me like the dot-com bubble where some companies invested in “the internet,” but not in things that they could actually make money; for products for customers and in the products and services that they offered. You know, when you think about OpenAI, they’re kind of selling “the internet…” but not the things on top of the internet that actually make money.

And I think there’s an implication for all of us in marketing and customer acquisition, which is if you’re building your marketing workflows or you’re building your go-to-market strategy solely around ChatGPT or GPT APIs, you may be betting on a shaky foundation. I’ll admit, I’ve kind of come 180º on this. I originally thought they were the biggest threat to Big Tech, and they may still be. They may find a way to turn this into a lot of revenue really quick.

But if you contrast what OpenAI is doing with Google or Microsoft or Amazon or Apple, our old friends in Big Tech, they’re using AI to enhance existing high margin businesses like ads or cloud computing or hardware. They have integrated monetization paths. They don’t have to make AI pay for itself directly. They own the ecosystem. They own the platforms. And they own the distribution of how they put this in front of customers.

For example, we think about Microsoft Copilot and its deep integration with Microsoft Office. I know they call it 365, but come on, it’s Office. And Azure, their cloud computing platform.

Amazon is using AI to empower how quickly it gets orders to you, how it improves its ads, and how it improves its shopping user experience. Again, growing the business they already make a lot of money off of.

Google’s AI overviews and AI mode enhance the search monetization as well as, again, their cloud computing platform.

And Apple’s on-device AI could reinforce their dominance in selling hardware where they make a boatload of money.

The key differentiator is that Big Tech is integrating AI into already highly profitable and diversified businesses with huge user bases and a ton of different monetization options. AI is enhancing these existing revenue and profit engines rather than being the sole engine for revenue generation that OpenAI has got.

And again, I think that’s got a broad implication for those of us in marketing and e-commerce and customer acquisition because the smart money isn’t just on cool AI, it’s on embedding AI into some sort of scalable profitable ecosystem. We have to think about how are we using these tools in a way that benefits our customers and our businesses.

So I think we need to really think about how we’re putting AI to work for real. And I’ve got five quick recommendations.

Now all of this said, I do want to say we are clearly in a period of breathtaking innovation. I mean, we have seen so much change in the way AI is shaping the way that our customers interact with our businesses and that in the way that our businesses respond.

But it creates a certain degree of uncertainty. So we need to keep learning and we need to remain flexible.

If I could leave you with one last thought though, is OpenAI may have built the rocket, they may have built the vehicle, but the companies who are gonna make money on this are the ones that are selling tickets, who are connecting with customers, and who own the fuel supply.

You need to think beyond the rocket. You need to think beyond the tool. You need to think about the system you’re building because the marketers who will win in this next era aren’t just using AI. They’re thinking about how it shapes their business — and structuring their business around how it helps their customers.

The future of marketing and e-commerce won’t just be about using AI, but about intelligently investing in the right tools and using those solutions that are built to support sustainable business models. I think it’s really critical we make sure we distinguish between the two. And if you do a good job of that, you’ll succeed no matter what happens to any of the players.

I can’t wait to see what you do.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Be sure to let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 464, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

By the way, if you’re looking for something new to read, something cool to read, the talks about Big Tech and how you can build your business beyond Big Tech, I’d love to suggest the number one new e-commerce book on Amazon.com Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. Please pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Now before I go, I just want to say thanks so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back next week with a new episode and I can’t wait to talk about all the other cool stuff that’s going on in the world.

Until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Revisiting AI Is Eating the World, But Who’s Paying for Dinner? (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Does it seem like you are destined to fall behind when it comes to AI? I know for many marketers and e-commerce professionals, especially at small or mid-sized businesses, it can seem that way.

In some ways, it’s not just possible, but actually likely that you will. AI is incredibly fast. It’s incredibly powerful. To think that human beings can outthink AI is not realistic. As I like to say, “You’re not going to out-AI AI.”

But, in a far more meaningful way, I’m don’t think that our inability to keep up with AI is a problem. Because, just as we can’t out-AI AI, artificial intelligence can’t out-human humans.

Instead, there are many areas where marketers can not only keep up—and keep ourselves relevant. They’re also what will set us apart… and set us up for long-term success.

Is it impossible for marketers to keep up with AI? And what should we do instead? That’s what this espisode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 17m 02s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

 I was so lucky to have a talk with Stacy Smollin Schwartz from Rutgers Business School’s MS in Digital Marketing Program about my book “Digital Reset” recently — and there will be a link in the show notes, of course — One of Stacy’s questions was about how marketers early in their careers can succeed and how they can future-proof their career given the massive advances we’re seeing from AI over the last, you know, days, weeks, months, year.

The discussion starts at roughly the 42 minute mark in the talk, but again, you don’t really need to listen to that if you don’t want. The thing that I talked about at the time was how we’re not going to out-AI AI. It does what it does, and we are not going to succeed — whether you’re early in your career or whether you’re more veteran/that you’ve been doing this for a while — we are not going to beat AI by trying to be good at the things that AI is already better than most people at.

Instead, there’s a lot of research, there’s a lot of data that shows there are areas where we excel compared to these tools. According to the World Economic Forums Future of Jobs report, there are seven skills that matter today and are also among the skills that they expect to see the most growth in all the way through 2030.

Those skills are:

Now if you notice, only really two of those have anything to do with technology, technological literacy, and analytical thinking. All the rest are more about how we interact as human beings with one another. They’re not asking us to out-AI AI. They’re asking us to be better at being capable, resilient, flexible, curious, social beings… y’know, people. That’s what we do well.

And it really made me think of a post that Mark Schaefer put up on LinkedIn and the response that I did to it that talked about whether or not it is possible for marketers to keep up with AI.

So I hope you’ll enjoy this repost of a prior episode that asks and answers whether it’s possible for marketers to keep up with ai. Coming at you right now.

Mark’s post raises several super interesting questions. As I see it, these are:

I’m going to take these on one at a time.

First, yes, we are being left behind by AI, at least in part. I discussed this a few weeks ago in an episode called, “What If I’m Wrong About AI and Marketing Jobs?”

My basic thesis was that the infamous line, “AI won’t take your job, smart people who use AI will,” is increasingly wrong. In truth, some smart people will lose their jobs. And it won’t always be to smart people who use AI. It could be to dumb people who use AI. Or to people, smart or dumb, who decide that AI is good enough and a hell of a lot cheaper than continuing to pay smart people. If your job can be replaced by something faster, cheaper, or both, you kinda have to assume that some folks—CEOs, CFOs, et cetera—are absolutely going to use those faster, cheaper solutions at least some of the time. That’s a guarantee.

How many of them? How soon? Well, that’s tough to tell. But you’ve got to take it for granted that that will happen some of the time. And you’ve got to do the work now to prevent it from happening to you.

One way you can do that is by becoming a better user of AI, which starts to get at the second question a little bit. How can we be more transformational in our use of AI?

There’s not an easy answer to this. Part of the reason is that there aren’t that many off-the-shelf products that enable transformational use, especially for smaller businesses. Most of the AI vendors aren’t interested in building traditional products, at least as I understand it. They’re trying to get to an artificial general intelligence, a super intelligence that, if it comes to exist, could end all products and jobs as we know them, to say nothing of, you know, our entire society.

If you think that’s hyperbole, you think that’s absurd, remember that an artificial super intelligence would be the equivalent of inviting a far smarter alien race to share this planet with us. Like we could have little green men show up on the planet who are just way smarter than us. I’m pretty confident our lives would change if that happened and probably dramatically.

Now the jury is out on whether or not it’s likely we’re going to achieve super intelligence. And candidly, I’m not going to spend a lot of time worrying about it.

In our current reality, most of the AI tools we have access to, whether they’re ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or Perplexity or some other cool one you’ve found, really just provide support tools for individuals. I don’t want to diminish them. They’re deeply useful. They’re also deeply flawed. And we simply haven’t necessarily seen them be game changers on an enterprise scale yet.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are some enterprises and startups who doing cool things behind the scenes using AI. Google and Amazon and all of those folks certainly are working to do those kinds of things.

It’s just that most of the implementations that I’ve seen have been largely incremental. Some of them are cool, they’re just not hugely transformational.

By the way, I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Christopher Penn, who posted an amazing collection of insights about potential transformational uses of AI in his almost timely newsletter the other day. If you care about this topic and you aren’t reading Christopher’s work, you need to change that, immediately. I will link to him in the show notes. I learn from Christopher all the time and I think you will too.

As for the third question, are small businesses inherently challenged? Well, yeah. Sort of by definition.

But I’m not 100% sure that most of us will need to be power users in the way that Christopher Penn and large enterprises might need to.

When Mark put his post on LinkedIn, I replied and what I said was, "I’m reasonably sure that for the most part, people won’t need to get good at using AI. For the same reason, they don’t need to be good at HTTP or how the carburetor in their car works. The details will be abstracted away. They’ll be hidden beneath simpler user experiences, simpler interfaces. Even if we can’t compare AI to Google Search, the vast majority of people never used its Boolean operators or its advanced features. Instead, Google worked to make the product better at understanding what we wanted, or at least they did until they started making it worse, while we simply used it however it worked for us, in whichever way it worked for us.

What we need to do instead is be smart consumers of any product and ask questions like, what are the pros and cons of using these tools for me, for my customers, and for society at large? What are appropriate uses of these tools? When is it not appropriate to use them? How can I minimize the risks that they bring to the table? And how can I put AI to work for the largest number of people to the benefit of the largest number of people? I’m reasonably convinced that that is the most likely scenario, that AI will simply work under the hood for us."

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. First, MIT’s Technology Review had an article this week called, “Here’s Why We Need to Start Thinking of AI as Normal.” And their basic thesis is highly similar to mine. They kind of say that the complicated bits will lie beneath the hood. We just have to be smart users of the tool. We have to be conscious in how we’re using these tools in an effective, appropriate way.

Second, this isn’t just theoretical. We’re seeing AI become more normal every day. The Wall Street Journal had an article recently called, "The Hottest Job Of 2023 Is Already Obsolete." They went on to say,"Prompt engineering, a role aimed at crafting the perfect input to send to a large language model, was poised to become one of the hottest jobs in artificial intelligence. What happened?"

They’re saying AI increasingly doesn’t need specialized knowledge. Actually, they’re not just saying it. All of the decision makers who decide where they want to spend their money on finding the right people to get the most value out of their artificial intelligence investments are also saying it. They’re saying prompt engineers just aren’t necessary any longer. Anyone can use AI and get good results.

I also think there’s a hidden reason that we have to be conscious of here, and that is that I believe that there is a backlash coming around artificial intelligence. I believe that our customers simply will not embrace it as much as we may think they will, at least some of the time. I’m convinced that customers will absolutely want to work with identifiably human companies, at least for some products and services that matter to them.

To use the most obvious example, I cannot picture anyone wanting to use a robot doctor for any serious medical issues, no matter how effective that robot doctor might be. They’re going to want someone they really trust.

You know, I’ve always found it funny when we talk about a site like HealthGRADES, which is the the Yelp or the Google reviews or the TripAdvisor for doctors. And what’s really funny is most of the people who write reviews in HealthGRADES don’t actually know whether or not they’re doctors any good because they’re not qualified to. I certainly can’t. I know that I like my doctor. And if you read the reviews about doctors, they’ll talk about, “I really like my doctor. You know, she does a great job or he does a great job.” But they don’t actually understand whether or not the doctor is fully qualified.

Instead, what we all look for is somebody who we trust. And I think that’s going to be true for many businesses, particularly in high consideration products and high consideration services. I just don’t see that being unusual, just as it’s not unusual today with people’s doctors.

I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I’m reminded of the Bill Gates quote, we always overestimate the change in the next two years and underestimate the change in the next 10. Given that, I don’t know if this behavior among customers will take six months or six years. I will be shocked if it doesn’t happen in a relatively narrow timeframe though. In other words, I think it could take four years, five years. But I don’t think it’s gonna take 10. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it took two, because Bill Gates’ two-year window started when ChatGPT first came out.

In any case, I go back to the questions I asked at the end of my reply to Mark’s post when we think about do we have to keep up with AI. I think the questions we need to be asking are

If you can come up with good answers for those, I’m really confident that you won’t need to keep up with AI. I am confident that you will not fall behind. Quite the opposite. Your customers will want to work with you more than ever.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Let them know what you think too. I’m sure they would love to hear that.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 459, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Thank you so much for listening. I want you to know this show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe. And as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Revisiting Is It Impossible for Marketers to Keep Up With AI? (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

You may have heard me say that “gatekeepers gonna gate.” Well, Google’s AI Mode shows exactly what that looks like in practice. AI Mode is so disruptive to the way the web has worked for years that it looks like Google’s closing the gate on marketers, setting the stage to make a big move away from organic traffic and towards more paid traffic.

Google’s not alone, of course. Pretty much all the Big Tech gatekeepers are doing something similar.

What can you do about it? How can you make sure that Google’s not closing the gate on your brand and business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 15m 52s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Hey, Big Thinkers. Welcome to the show. I’m Tim Peter.

Because of the rise of artificial intelligence, there’s been a lot of discussion around whether or not SEO is dead. Marketers and other business professionals have wondered what they need to do to “rank” among AI’s answers.

I’m not sure that’s the right framing, though. Because the problem isn’t about “showing up” in an AI answer — or at least, not the biggest problem. Most brands show up just fine when customers ask for you by name. The problem is getting customers to come to your site and interact with your brand even when you do.

Take Google’s AI Mode… please.

OK, ancient jokes aside, seriously, use AI Mode and search for some of your favorite brands or, better yet, yours. A link to those companies’ websites usually appears in the list over on the right (you can see a screenshot on my website for an example). But notice, there’s no link of note in the “main body content” even when I ask for it by name. You can click the little link icon in the body and Google will update the links in the sidebar. But that’s far from the long-standing experience of how things work on the internet. And, again, I’m asking for specific brands by name (which is otherwise always a good thing).

In short, Google has slammed the gate shut on marketers, making it harder for customers to come directly to your business. That’s a big deal. And it’s one that ultimately could be very bad for your business.

What can you do about it? How can you make sure that you find another way to connect now that Google’s closed the gate? This prior episode of the podcast takes a look — and offers some solutions.

Let’s dive in.

So today we’re gonna talk about AI Mode in the search. And Sundar Pichai was talking about this at I/O and he was talking about AI Overviews. He said, since launching at I/O last year, AI Overviews have scaled up. These are “over 1.5 billion users every month in more than 200 countries and territories.” He said that as people use AI Overviews, “we see they are happier with their results and they search more often.” He said “in our biggest markets like the US and India, AI Overviews are driving over 10% growth in the types of queries that show them.” And he followed that up by saying, “what’s particularly exciting is that this growth increases over time.”

He also said that AI Overviews are one of the strongest drivers of growth for visual searches in Google Lens and that Lens grew 65% year over year with “more than 100 billion” already this year. He didn’t say whether those were 100 billion users or 100 billion searches.

Regardless, one consequence that we’re seeing at the moment is that Google is keeping most of the traffic from those searches to itself. There’s been lots of people talking about this. Lily Ray over on LinkedIn talked about how Google AI Mode keeps users in AI Mode. My friend Michael Goldrich said “Google just killed the blue links. What hotels must do to stay visible and booked?”

I talked about the same thing over on LinkedIn, talking about how Google is slamming the gate shut in AI Mode for many businesses.

But that’s not what Google’s saying. In a recent interview with Nilay Patel, the link will be in the show notes, Sundar Pichai said that this is a quote, “Google is committed to continuing to send traffic to other websites and that users expect that from Google.” He also says that, “In five years, we will still send traffic to websites.:

Some folks seem to think Sundar Pichai is lying. Right? They’re like, I don’t think so, buddy. For instance, Lily Ray, this is a quote from her LinkedIn post, said,

“In my opinion, Sundar didn’t have great answers to Neelay’s questions about why AI overviews haven’t driven more traffic a year after launch. He, and the seemingly every Google spokesperson, claims that it sends traffic to a broader set of websites. At least all the evidence that most folks are seeing right now suggests that’s not the case.

Weirdly, I don’t think he’s lying. I think we need to remember how Google makes money. Google makes most of its money from ads, the overwhelming majority of its money from ads. Of course they’re going to send the traffic to websites. The difference is that this traffic is going to be paid traffic, not organic and definitely far from free.

We’ve seen this playbook from Google in the past. Think about how much they’ve increased ad loads in search results over the last bunch of years, over the last decade. For those in the hotel industry, Google introduced metasearch listings—that is ads by another name, paid metasearch listings—that showed prices from OTAs, online travel agencies, like Expedia and Booking.com. If you were a hotel, you absolutely could have your hotel website appear there too, as long as you paid Google.

Google replaced organic traffic with paid traffic. And ironically, most hotel owners and marketers thought that was a victory. They thought they’d won because suddenly we can compete against the Expedias and Booking.coms of the world.

Just imagine how giddy we’ll all be when Google allows you to buy ads alongside AI Mode answers. We’ll be thrilled, right? And we’ll reward them. We’ll buy those ads. We will reward them for putting another gate between us and our customers. It’s what we’ve done every other time.

By the way, just as a quick aside, their ability to monetize these tools is going to slow down the rollout. It is probably the thing most likely to hurt their ability to beat ChatGPT or Perplexity or any other competitor. I don’t think that’s gonna happen, but that’s the thing most likely to make them stumble because they can’t get rid of the goose that lays the golden egg without replacing it with another goose. Anyway, I don’t wanna go down that rabbit hole this episode… rabbits, goose, geese, pardon all the farm animals today. I promise I’ll come back to it another time. Back to the point at hand.

Lily Grozeva has a great post on LinkedIn that says most marketers still think AI search is about content. It’s not. It’s about signals and most of them live off your website. What Lily is talking about and what she’s saying here is that she says, “if you’re not referenced somewhere else, you’re not understood by the AI, you’re invisible.” And she advises people to, “make a map of influence. Use tools like Perplexity or Peak AI or SparkToro to understand where your audience hangs out and how the LLMs use this information to train themselves.”

She continues saying, “then build your presence there in podcasts, LinkedIn, Reddit threads, guest quotes, third party coverage.” And she concludes, “you’re not trying to rank, you’re trying to be recognized.”

I love that phrase. You’re not trying to rank, you’re trying to be recognized. We need to keep this in mind. I agree with Lily’s point of view almost 100%. The key word there is “almost.”

Nothing that Lily uncovered in her research is wrong, so far as I can tell. I absolutely agree that you have to make sure your web presence includes places where your customers hang out. These are the spokes of your hub and spoke strategy. If you’ve listened to the show before, you’ve heard me talk about spokes. You’ve heard me talk about the hub and spokes. I’ve got links in the show notes about how you can put these to work. Or if you want, you can see chapter five of my book available on amazon.com and also linked to in the show notes.

The fact remains, you need to build direct relationships with your customers. You need to provide the kinds of human centered, helpful content that answers customers’ questions. And you need that content to exist where your customers are. That includes spokes like LinkedIn or Instagram or Reddit threads or what have you. You also can’t rely solely—and solely is the important word here—on third-party sites, or else you’re letting other folks control your access to customers.

By the way, this isn’t just Google’s strategy, right? We know that gatekeeper is going to gate. Many of the links in today’s show notes are from brilliant people who I admire and they’re posting their content on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn itself is part of the problem. You can’t see this content without a LinkedIn account. And most folks aren’t duplicating their content and comments on their own sites. I know I’m not most of the time. Instead, we are putting ourselves behind their gates and thanking them for the privilege of being seen.

What blows my mind is when you link to a post on LinkedIn, if you just copy and paste, the title of the link is “Post Feed | LinkedIn.” Not who posted it, not what it’s about, just an anonymous, amorphous LinkedIn post in a generic LinkedIn feed on LinkedIn. Remind me again whose brand you’re building here.

Again, it’s our job to be seen. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google doing this or LinkedIn doing this or Instagram doing this or TikTok doing this. Your content plays a key role. It has to be seen. But it has to belong to you. So not just the spoke and to be fair, not just the hub. This is hub and spoke. You need to make sure you’re using both or else it doesn’t matter where you show up, you’re still not going to get traffic, you’re still not going get the kind of brand awareness you need, and you’re certainly not going to do it for free.

Once you get people to engage with you, you need to create deep, meaningful experiences that encourage your customers to search for you and recommend you by name to their friends and family and fans and followers.

And as you build these relationships, you need to convince your customers that you’re worthy and trustworthy to share their data with you so you can keep the conversation going. Otherwise, you’re going to be stuck behind Google’s gate praying for them to introduce more ads so that you can pay to be seen. Or LinkedIn’s gates, or Instagram’s gates, or TikTok’s gates. Google and the rest are trying to close the gate on marketers. Your job is to make sure your customers are willing and want to jump over those gates to reach you.

And I can’t wait to see you do it.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 463, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, by the way, I’d love to suggest the number one new e-commerce book on Amazon.com called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. Pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I would genuinely appreciate it.

With all that said, thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back next week with a new episode, and until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. Take care now.

The post Revisiting Google Closes the Gate (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

One of my favorite facts about the internet is that people will always tell you when you’re wrong. Seriously. It’s a feature, not a bug. Because when that happens, it helps you think more clearly, more deeply about your topic and your ideas. If you want to know what you really think, ask the internet. They’ll let you know whether you got it right… or not. That’s what happened last week when I talked about how companies can win in AI-powered search. Whether we’re talking about Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, or agentic AI, I’m increasingly convinced that “the brand is the prompt.” And what I mean by that is that we need to do the work now to ensure customers ask for us by name—now, and in the future.

I posted this notion, “the brand is the prompt,” on LinkedIn and people couldn’t wait to poke the theory full of holes. You love to see it. I genuinely mean that. Their feedback—and pushback—helped me realize the flaws in my reasoning… and improve them. Now, I’m even more sure that the brand is the prompt. And the counter-arguments I heard make the core argument even stronger.

“The brand is the prompt” is what this episode of the podcast is all about. Want to know what that means in practice? Want to hear the (truly great) arguments against the idea? And want to know how you can apply the concept to your brand and business? Then be sure to give this a listen (or read the transcript). You’ll be glad you did.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

You might also enjoy this webinar I participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 21m 05s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Welcome to the show. I’m Tim Peter. Customers are starting to delegate some of their decisions to AI. We’re seeing much, much more of this every day. There’s been a fair bit of growth here. And like many past technological shifts, I believe that when that happens—we’re still in early days—but when it happens, it will happen in a big way. It’s gonna happen fast.

It’s very much like Hemingway’s discussion of how bankruptcy happens: “…slowly, then all at once.” We see this all the time in technology.

And I think it’s critical that we don’t let this shift hurt our businesses. We don’t let it hurt what we do for a living.

So I’ve got this new theory, this new idea that I’ve been working on around how to ensure that you don’t get burned as customers delegate more capabilities to AI agents. And it’s pretty simple. I call it “the brand is the prompt.” Marketers need to make their brand top of mind so that customers and AI agents explicitly ask for you by name.

I shared this on social media the other day on LinkedIn specifically and received a bunch of outstanding feedback—and more than a little pushback—around the concept. So I thought it would be a good idea today to test it out with all of you and see what you think. Let’s dive in.

As I mentioned before the break, I’ve got this new theory that I’m thinking about to ensure that you don’t get burned by customer shift to AI agents. That idea is “the brand is the prompt.” Marketers need to make their brand top of mind so that customers and AI agents explicitly ask for you and they ask for your business by name.

There are number of supporting predicates behind my argument.

The first is that AI tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Google’s Project Mariner—which is Google’s AI agent platform—won’t always, and don’t always, surface brands or links. It’s going to be tougher and tougher for you to get seen.

Another is that getting into AI answer engines can be challenging… and it’s certainly evolving. Yes, we are seeing fairly strong correlation that shows that sites that rank well in Google also tend to get mentioned more often in large language models.

But, first, that’s not a one-to-one relationship by any stretch. Just because you rank number one doesn’t necessarily mean you will be the first thing mentioned. And second, there’s no guarantee that that current behavior will remain true over time.

Another huge challenge that we need to keep in mind is that I’m fairly confident that AI agents will favor their own ecosystems. Google will point you to Google assets. Amazon will point you to Amazon assets. If you’ve got an agent that’s made by ChatGPT, they’re going to point you to other OpenAI assets in all likelihood, at least a fair bit of the time.

That’s the problem we’re dealing with in traditional search today. I think by now you’re probably pretty familiar with the idea that “gatekeepers gonna gate.” And if you’re not, I would strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. The link is in the show notes, of course.

My conclusion from these various principles is that we need to work towards a situation where customers want to prompt AI with your brand, not a generic product.

So if I say “book me a room at the John Rutledge House inn (full disclosure: John Rutledge House Inn is a client) the John Rutledge House Inn wins. By contrast, if I say “book me a hotel,” that specific hotel loses… as do lots and lots and lots of other hotels that weren’t asked for by name.

If you don’t build brand preference today, you risk commoditization and longer term, irrelevance. Your brand must be built today across experiences that appeal to people, that appeal to AI agents, and over time, appeal to hybrid experiences.

So I mentioned that I posted this on LinkedIn the other day and I got an amazing number of replies and some really strong counter arguments. And I want to walk you through these and see what you think.

So the first counter argument came from my friend Michael Goldrich who said that AI agents will do the prompting, not the user. Basically his argument is that AI agents will be proactive, they’ll be personalized, and they’ll be connected to your data; things like your loyalty programs, your email and your calendar, other things like that.

So the agent will suggest hotels and flights and restaurants based on your preferences and your patterns without needing you, the user, to prompt a brand. The agent will tell you when options are ready and suggest what to book. Therefore, brand prompting by the user is probably only a short-term behavior. AI-driven recommendations are the long-term future.

That’s a great argument. I think there’s a lot of wisdom and intelligence in that.

I also think that while that may happen long term, I still think the long term is probably pretty far off for most users. In the meantime, we have to teach the agents the brands that matter to us, either via explicit prompts or by building that loyalty and recognition with those brands so that the agent learns them. Again, for our businesses, if our customers don’t know what brands our customers want, then that’s gonna be a problem for us. The data won’t be there. Even in the long run, agents need an initial data set to know which brands matter. So building the brand today matters a ton, even if Michael is right that in the future it will already know our preferences or glean them implicitly from our actions.

So I still think it becomes really important for us to build those brand relationships with our customers today or risk being in really bad position in the future when the AI just quote unquote decides for our customers.

That then leads to the second question, which was posed by Tammie Carlisle and Mark Simchock, which was, “how do you get customers to know your brand to prompt it in the first place?”

This is a great question. This is a huge question. Before the brand is the prompt, the brand has to be built and positioned and differentiated enough to exist in the customer’s mind. And each of them pointed out that many brands are too weak, too undifferentiated, or frankly not visible enough for this to happen. Mark Simchock hit this on the head. He said, “before the brand is the prompt, there needs to be the brand is the brand.”

Now, let me be really, really, really clear. I completely agree with this point of view. The heavy lifting is brand building first. It’s kind of what I just said a moment ago about Michael Goldrich’s point. “The brand is the prompt” is a strategic goal. We need to work on the distinctiveness and positioning to make that possible.

And the good news is this is something we should be doing today anyway. Like there’s no downside in this today or in the future. I’m going to get into in a little bit some of the ways you can do that. But again, I’m going to be pretty transparent: That’s a big chunk of what my book is about.

We’re working on this right now to ensure that people search for you by name, that people connect with you on social by name, that people engage with your email marketing or want to get on your text message list, your SMS marketing list so that they’re engaged with you all the time. That’s crucially important. Right now that then just sets you up for a better position down the road. So again, I think this is a win-win both short term and long term.

And again, I’ll talk about some ways to do that, but to me that is a huge component of it right there.

The third counter argument I heard was articulated in a number of different forms. Peter Syme and Pedro Colaco, talked about how many markets are already brand blind. They argued that some industries are already commoditized. They used airlines as one example and how, you know, one called them steel tubes. The brand doesn’t really matter. For these markets, the customer optimizes by parameters that matter for a given experience, not by the brand. We might prioritize the loyalty program or the price or the location or how quickly it will get us there or, you know, in B2B, past working relationships or, you know, specific technical attributes. So not brand love.

Sure, strong brands help if it exists, but for large segments, brand simply doesn’t matter.

Honestly, this one gives me some pause because it’s absolutely true for some categories that they are commodity driven. However, I would argue that brand includes your relationship, the experience people have had with you and the trust they have in you. Strong brands need to exist if we let ourselves be commoditized, regardless of what industry you’re in. You’re always going to be fighting for better position, both today and tomorrow. The challenge is to avoid this trap in the first place.

I think that this argument from Peter and Pedro is the most dangerous place we can be.

In the book, I talked about why it’s so critical to build your brand. Big Tech has worked for a long time to position your company’s products and services as commodities, and our job as marketers is to fight that every single day. If we simply accept that we’re commodities, we’ve already lost.

So maybe we should do that. Maybe we should actually work to ensure we’re not just commodities.

And I think there’s a lot of things we can do to ensure that we’re differentiated, to ensure that we stand apart based on the idea of the brand as the prompt. And I want to get into those now.

The first thing we need to do is let’s talk about commodities, true commodities first, where you’ve genuinely been commoditized.

We have to look to move from being this invisible commodity, this completely commoditized product to a preferred choice within the set of other people who are somewhat commoditized. We need to build some trust and we need to build some real hooks with our customers, whether they’re emotional or whether they’re functional, even if brand name recall isn’t necessarily going to be possible. And the larger umbrella of these, you will see, works for both situations we’re talking about.

So we need to ensure we’ve got things like structured data, our inventory, our location, our pricing, other features that matter, is easily accessible to AI agents, to aggregators, and to human beings.

We need to partner with platforms where customers set their preferences. So that could be channel partners. That could be specific third parties that we work with. And it could be things like the agents themselves over time. We need to think in terms of maximizing value that customers get so that we can differentiate within specific products that, you know, we’re competing with. And we need to create some memorable connections: What sets us apart?

If it’s always price, if it’s always price, you’re in a race to the bottom. And that’s a race that’s really tough to win over the long term.

So we need to think about how do we create an experience? How do we get more data about our customers so that we can focus on their specific needs so that we start to set ourselves apart from the choice? And then that becomes something that the agents can learn from if and when they come around, right?

We may also be able to say, you know what, encourage people to say buy from the people I bought from last time. There’s an opportunity to win repeat business that doesn’t require explicit loyalty to your brand. That’s a huge opportunity that we have.

Now, of course, if you’re already differentiated and you have some differentiation, we need to double down on that. We want to become an explicit prompt, both for customers and for any AI agents that act on their behalf. A lot of that’s going to come back to strengthening the emotional bonds and brand recall today before AI agents dominate.

We want to invest in marketing that reinforces specific brand phrasing. “Stay at a specific hotel. Book a specific airline. Buy from this specific company.” Encourage our customers to think and speak in terms of our brand.

Microsoft has done this for years, where they have taken a specific application or specific technology and they do this thing that they call “embrace and extend.” They do this a lot with “standards,” where they take a true standard and then they layer some additional capabilities onto it. So you can learn the standard but, oh, Microsoft’s flavor of it is just a little different and requires people or causes people to think of Microsoft’s version first.

The next is we want to tell a consistent brand story. Our differentiated position must shine through in our content, in our reviews, in our communications, and in any channel that we’re working through. AI models and the agents that will be built on these are going to learn from these broad signals that are created today or created over the next few years.

We have to make sure that people today are already engaging with those. If not, we’re going to put ourselves in really bad position. And of course, we’re gonna build direct customer relationships. We want to gain the data for customers and put it into our CRMs, put it into loyalty programs, put it into personalized content that works for that customer so that they know who we are and we show that we know who they are so that we’re building a trusted relationship.

Finally, we want tp invest in memorable experiences so that we can drive more word of mouth. I can’t picture a world where agents exist, where people still don’t say, “my gosh, I had the best experience at this restaurant,” or “I had the best experience with this travel scenario,” or “I had this best experience with this company that I worked with to help solve a problem for my business.”

That’s still going to be true, and that will create people who haven’t engaged with our brand before to say, “I want to work with them too. Hey, my favorite agent, go connect with this brand and tell me if they’ll work for us.”

That’s hugely important.

I said there’s kind of an umbrella over all of this and you may have noticed that this sounds an awful lot like “Content is King, Customer Experience is Queen, and Data is the Crown Jewels,” which you’ve heard me talk about many times in the book. You’ve heard me talk about many times here on the podcast. You’ve read many times on the blog.

I think all of those remain important and will continue to be important for a long time to come.

Fundamentally, the brand is the prompt. That will be true years from now, and it’s already true today, even if customers are searching for you, even if customers are engaging in social and looking for you. If they’re not looking for you by name, you’re not creating the kind of environment where you’re going to succeed both today and longer term.

So what do you think? I way off base here? Am I missing something obvious? You know, is this really a pipe dream or am I onto something here? By the way, hint, I’m seeing clients of mine be successful today already doing this. So I’m not so sure I’m off the mark too much. But let me know what you think. I want to hear from you. I want to hear your point of view.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 465, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

I know I’ve mentioned this already during the show, but if you’re looking for something to read to dive further into this, may I suggest the number one new e-commerce book on Amazon.com called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. I’d love it if you’d pick up a copy and let me know what you think.

Finally, I just want to say so much thank you for listening. This show would not happen without you.

We’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Apple told us at their WWDC that they’re seriously rethinking how they use AI on their devices, largely because they way they’s previously announced AI on their devices straight up didn’t work. You may also know that Apple has apparently begun looking at partnering with ChatGPT and others as the default search engines on their devices.

As you’re undoubtedly aware, Google is currently Apple’s default search engine on its devices. It’s also, arguably, the biggest player in consumer adoption of artificial intelligence.

Something’s got to give.

The point is that while any one member of Big Tech could (at least in theory) get pushed out of the club at any time, Big Tech itself will continue to roll right along. And that gatekeepers gonna gate, whether those gatekeepers are the companies we’ve competed with for years, or some new player in the game.

As the saying goes, though, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

As I’ve discussed many times, your business probably depends on Google for a lot of your traffic and revenues. And Google clearly cares enough about the traffic Apple provides it that they’re willing to pay roughly $20 billion each year for the privilege of being the default search engine. The question then becomes: If Google loses Apple’s traffic, what happens to yours?

Again, the point isn’t whether this is likely. The point is that you’ve got to change the rules of the game. You’ve got to ensure you’re not dependent on any one Big Tech player for traffic and revenue

Why does that matter for your business? And what can you do about it? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

You might also enjoy this webinar I participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 18m 14s

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Welcome to Thinks Out Loud. I’m Tim Peter.

Apple’s WWDC conference was the other day and a TON of talk about Apple’s retrenchment around AI. Basically, almost everything that Apple has introduced around AI the last year has been, at best, wishful thinking if not outright bullshit. So, they’re now rethinking how they approach AI, who they partner with, and what the future of AI looks like on Apple devices.

One of Apple’s biggest partners of course is Google. And Google, of course, is arguably the biggest player in artificial intelligence. Which makes this as good a time as any to revisit the discussion around whether Apple might drop Google as its default search engine.

To recap, there’s a story going around that Apple may add artificial intelligence search engines to Safari as Google use drops. According to the story, Apple is exploring AI search engines like ChatGPT for Safari. This is all from Search Engine Journal. You may remember that Google pays Apple $20 billion to be the default in Safari on Macs and, more importantly, iPhones. So, this is, as I’ve said in the past, a BIG EFFING DEAL. It would dramatically reshape search competition.

Why is this a big deal? Why do you care? How does it potentially reshape what Big Tech means? And most importantly, why does this matter to you and to your business?

Let’s dive in and revisit “Is Apple Dropping Google and What That Means for Your Business.”

As Search Engine Journal’s headline probably reminds you, Google pays Apple something like $20 billion to be the default search engine in Safari and on iOS overall, on your iPhone and iPad’s operating system. You might also remember that the Department of Justice, the US Department of Justice, wants to prevent Google from paying anyone to be the default search engine as part of its proposed antitrust remedies.

Now to put this in context, $20 billion is a little bit less than Apple makes in profits most quarters. Or to put it another way, it’s essentially a full quarter’s worth of risk-free profit to Apple.

That is a big deal right there.

In part, this story feels a bit like a negotiating ploy on Apple’s part. For instance, Bloomberg has said that it’s Apple’s way of showing the Department of Justice they don’t need Google to pay them in hopes probably that the court will still allow Google to pay them. They want to make sure that they still get that full quarter worth of risk-free profit every single year. And that seems entirely plausible to me.

It also could be Apple presenting its asking price to one of the big AI players like ChatGPT or Proplexity. know, Apple could be saying, you want to get in front of our customers? You got to pay us. Remember, “gatekeepers gonna gate” even if it’s a gatekeeper like Apple charging another potential gatekeeper like ChatGPT or Perplexity. In other words, if the courts say that Google isn’t allowed to pay to be the default, Apple may be keeping its options open so that somebody else will pay to be the default.

And in any case, Apple apparently is going to add AI search as alternatives to Google regardless so that you can say, “You know what, I’d like to use ChatGPT or I’d like to use Perplexity instead of always using Google or Bing or Duck or one of the other ones.”

The question I think we need to start thinking about though is what if Apple doesn’t use AI as the alternative, but instead get ChatGPT or Perplexity to pay them the $20 billion? What does that mean to you?

As you’ve heard me mention many times before, any decline in Google’s business could lead to a huge decline in your business. Google accounts for a plurality, if not an outright majority, of many businesses’ traffic. When you think about organic search or paid search or local search and maps or metasearch in hospitality or product search in retail, those add up to a lot of traffic and a lot of revenue for most businesses. So much so that Google clearly wants to be the first choice on Apple. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be paying $20 billion a year to be there.

And the way you want to think about that is that if Apple is important to Google, then Apple is important to you too.

Let’s talk about how important that is. Just back in the envelope for a moment, Google made $350 billion in revenue last year and just a bit over $100 billion in profits. They paid Apple something in the ballpark of $20 billion to be the search by default in Safari on Macs and iOS. Now that $20 billion is about 6% of their overall revenues, which means if we’re doing this in an ROI calculation way, they had about a 16.5:1 ROI. In other words, for every dollar Google paid Apple, they made $16.50 in profits, at most.

In reality, it was lower than that because it assumes that everyone who clicked on an ad, everyone who used Google clicked on an ad and it also ignores the ads “only” accounted for 54% of Google’s earnings. And for those of you listening to this, I hope you heard the air quotes around “only.” 54% is a huge amount of traffic and a huge segment of Google’s business. It’s just in this case, that would mean that Google’s ROI from their deal with Apple is smaller than a 16.5:1 return.

So if we take the fact that ads account for 54% of Google’s earnings, then the real ROI was no better than 54% of 16.5:1, or maybe 8.9:1. We’ll round up and call that 9:1. And there would be nothing wrong with an ROI.

But wait, there’s more.

Customers don’t click on an ad every time they use Google search. Assuming customers only click on an ad, maybe between a third to half of the time, and it could be more than that, it could be less than that, but it would make Google’s actual ROI probably more like three to one to maybe four and a half to one.

I think it’s probably lower than that. Again, that’s still not a terrible number though.

But if you flip it around, it could mean is that Apple could account for a huge share of Google’s revenues and a huge share of Google’s profits and a huge share of the traffic that they get that matters to them. And what it all demonstrates to you is how much Google needs that traffic. Remember, Google represents a healthy chunk of your traffic. And if Google needs that traffic, so do you.

Up until recently, the potential hit to your business from a decline in Google search was one of my major concerns. And it was a driving factor behind my upcoming book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Obviously, one of the things we have to remember is if that Apple share of that traffic goes away, that’s an even bigger problem for you because that will happen immediately.

So this remains something you need to think about.

What’s also true is that there’s another huge, highly related concern here. And that is, what is your brand experience? What do customers know about your brand if they don’t come to your website? Whether they, Apple, replace Google with Perplexity or ChatGPT, or something else happens, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

You may still have people who don’t experience your brand early in the process. Now you might think, “Yay, Google isn’t my biggest concern any longer.” That sounds good in the theory, except there’s a few issues that are big concerns that come from that.

One, you’d have to show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity’s answers for customers to find you.

Two, showing up in ChatGPT and Perplexity and other AI answer engines often don’t lead to clicks. The same is true for Google’s AI overviews, by the way, and in its AI mode that they’re testing with power users right now.

The third issue is that you’d also simply be trading one Big Tech gatekeeper for another.

And the fourth thing is that until one of those Big Tech wannabes won, whether it was Google, whether it was ChatGPT, whether it was Perplexity, your company could lose out on a lot of traffic and revenue.

Is that bad? Because it seems like it’s, you bad. The worst part is that it’s pretty likely we’re heading to that world one way or the other. It doesn’t matter if it’s zero-click search today—which we’re already seeing—or AI answer engines in the future, or AI agents in the future. We’re probably going to see fewer and fewer clicks.

My friend Stuart Butler talked about this brilliantly in his Destination Discourse podcast not long ago. And I think there’s a lot of merit in how we think about this.

The question we need to start thinking about, which is, what is brand experience if customers never come to your branded assets?

You know, “don’t build your brand on rented land” is great advice. It’s a key point in digital reset. We talk about how you do that. And I think that it still holds up. You know, the people who connect from your branded assets like website, email, SMS, and other CRM activities are going to be huge for your business for a long time to come.

My concern increasingly though, and the Apple story points to it and all this rest we’ve talked about points to it, is what happens if those branded assets don’t happen earlier in the process? Or worse, what if they don’t happen at all? I’ve argued, I still argue, that your website isn’t going away anytime soon. I think that’s going to be true for quite some time.

I also think we need to ensure that our branded experiences deliver that they connect right out of the gate every time whenever someone does engage with them. It doesn’t mean that they have to purchase. It doesn’t mean that they have to opt into everything. But they do need to connect. They do need to feel some affinity for your brand.

We need to be thinking about how brand works when people interact with those messages and when they interact with those channels.

I recently heard somebody who put it best when he said, “We implemented demand marketing, which only addresses the 10% of the audience that is ready to buy. We need brand marketing for the remaining 90% to stay so that we stay top of mind until they are ready.”

Brand is the sum of every experience our customers have with our business. And that includes our website or our email or our SMS messages or our content or our social presence or in real life presence. And yes, the experiences they hear about from creators and influencers or in search and AI answer engines. We need to remember that it’s OK for customers to find us through some other source the first time they come across our name, anyway. You know, even Google thinks it’s worth paying $20 billion a year so that they show up on Apple the first time somebody, I don’t know, looks to search. You’d think Google would have that one covered already.

Where it becomes a problem for your business, is if you have to pay every time customers connect with you. So we have to think about how we build the brand every time we have one of those touch points.

Now in the interest of time, I’m not going to belabor the point of how you solve for that right now. I’m not going to ignore it. I just want to hit on it at a high level. You’ve heard me say this before.

First, focus on what won’t change. And we know that what won’t change is that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. And I will provide a bunch of links in the show notes for past episodes where I covered how you use those in detail. I will admit we also don’t want to go too deep into detail at the moment because you can read about it in the new book if you’d like. I just remember that you can learn a bunch of this from links on this episode. You don’t have to buy the book when it comes out, though I hope you want to. Just keep in mind that this is a rapidly evolving space.

Google and Apple are showing why it’s possible even for Big Tech companies to lose and to have new folks take their seat at the table. Your job is to make sure you succeed beyond Big Tech. Keep learning about the situation. Keep thinking about what does it mean when guests and customers connect to us.

Your job is to make sure you succeed beyond Big Tech. Your job is to keep thinking about what’s going to happen, how we continue to build a brand if people don’t connect with us the first time directly.

And that some of the ways that you can do that is to:

Apply those lessons, learn from them, and then share your learnings with your friends and family and fans and followers too. I know for sure I’d love to hear what you think and I bet they will also.

I’m confident you’re going to crush it and I can’t wait to see how you put this to work for your brand and business.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Let them know what you think too, as I just mentioned. Share what you’ve learned.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 460, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Thank you so much for listening today. I want you to know that this show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. Take care. We’ll talk to you soon.

The post Revisiting Is Apple Dropping Google? What Does That Mean For Your Business? appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Mary Meeker’s latest report is out and it’s all about artificial intelligence. It’s a brilliant report. But it’s missing why all of these changes matter for marketers and e-commerce/customer acquisition leaders.

That’s where this episode of the podcast comes in.

Tim asks:

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 19m 52s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

You know, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last, I don’t know, two or three or four years, you’re probably aware that AI is moving faster than anything we’ve ever seen before.

But underneath the hype, there’s a problem nobody’s talking about. Who’s going to pay for all of this? Like, where does the money come from? And most importantly, what happens to marketers when the bill comes due? That’s a really critical lesson that I think we need to think about as we go forward as marketing and customer acquisition folks.

This is episode 464 of The Big Show. Today we’re talking about how AI is eating the world, but who’s paying for dinner?

Let’s dive in.

So I’ve been reading the Mary Meeker report for the last 24 hours or so. Longtime listeners of the show and readers of the blog know how much I love Mary Meeker’s report. If you’re not familiar with Mary Meeker, she’s a venture capitalist. She’s been around for a long time. She was an early investor in Facebook. Super, super smart woman. Tremendously, tremendously smart team she’s put around herself. And I devour her report every single time it comes out.

It is a massive report this year. 340 pages almost entirely focused on artificial intelligence and what it means for the world today. Now, you know that this show literally started out as a place for me to think out loud. That’s where the title came from. This episode is going to be a little bit along those lines, in part because I’m going to be digesting this report for a couple of weeks. Again, this is a 340 page report. There’s a lot in there, some of which are not so relevant to marketers and e-commerce professionals, and some of which are very relevant.

But…

I want to talk about her key finding as it matters to you today, which is that AI adoption has outpaced the internet, mobile, and even cloud adoption curves. ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly users in just 17 months. That is faster than any technology we’ve ever seen.

So AI is not some future thing. You know that. It’s here. It’s now. It’s beginning to become baked into the customer journey.

What’s also true is that those numbers require some clarification. First, adoption is not constant by age group. Sam Altman, who is OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said this, he said,

“a gross simplification is older people use ChatGPT as like a Google replacement. People in their 20s and 30s, use it like a life advisor.”

That’s a big difference. That’s a huge deal in terms of how customers use these tools.

The second key thing that you want to take away is that adoption might not be as broad as you might think. People who listen to the show, people who I interact with on social media and the like, we’re all fairly early adopters. So I think we think people have really taken this too hard. And it’s not that they haven’t. Again, adoption has been huge.

But today they’re spending maybe 18 minutes per day on ChatGPT by “USA active users.” Now that’s up from roughly seven minutes per day in less than two years.

Side note, the Meeker report doesn’t show exact numbers, just ranges in 10 minute increments. The current number is definitely a bit below 20 minutes per day, but it’s getting close to there. And the earlier number was definitely more than five minutes per day, but far fewer than 10. So, you know, seven. Also, “active users” isn’t clearly defined in the report, so we’re not 100% sure how they mean or what they mean by active users.

Another chart in the report shows that the average session duration is a little over two minutes and that the average user has about seven to eight sessions per day, roughly double what it was less than two years ago. So again, tremendous growth. These are impressive numbers. My favorite stat that they show is that the Meeker report shows that searches for the term “AI agent” have grown almost 1,100% since January of 2024. So in less than 18 months, it’s grown almost 1,100%. That is genuinely remarkable. What is also true is that

A.) It looks like those searches may have plateaued as of maybe February this year.

Don’t get me wrong, one-tenth of 1% of 96 billion is still a pretty good-sized number. It’s also not everybody is searching for AI agents all the time. That’s a big deal. Also note, they’re searching on Google, right? Keep that in mind. We’re going to come back to it.

With no disrespect to Mary Meeker, far from it, I think she is brilliant. Part of her job is selling the world on the things she and her company have invested in, right? More than a few of her company’s investments are AI companies. So, you know, you can forgive her if she was to give you a glass half full look at the world. And again, I don’t think she’s wrong that this is a big deal. Because by any measure, AI adoption is already big and it’s getting bigger.

What it hasn’t yet done is taken over for Big Tech companies. And there’s a reason for that. And the reason is that the costs of AI are starting to show.

There’s a telling quote in the presentation from Microsoft’s vice chair and president, Brad Smith. He said,

“like electricity and other general purpose technologies in the past, AI and cloud data centers represent the next stage of industrialization.”

In other words, data centers, the cloud, and AI are just a cost of doing business, kind of like the internet was once upon a time. Meeker herself writes, “The world’s biggest tech companies,” — which quick aside, she calls “hyperscalers” and the rest of us call “Big Tech.” Anyway, she continues by saying that “…the world’s biggest tech companies are spending tens of billions of dollars annually, not just to gather data, but to learn from it, reason with it, and monetize it in real time.”

“It’s still about data,” she continues, “but now the advantage goes to those who can trade on it faster, personalize it deepest, and deploy it widest.” I might add, again, to those who can monetize it.

What I find really interesting is that according to her research, Big Tech has increased their capital and R&D spending roughly 20-plus percent per year for the last 10 years or so. But they’ve seen their cloud computing revenues increase roughly 37% per year during the same period. And I’m gonna come back to this in a moment.

There’s this paradox she points out called Jevons Paradox. They note it was first proposed back in 1865. Jevon was an economist.

Anyway, it states that, “the technological advancements that improve resource efficiency actually lead to increased overall usage of those resources.” So in short, “costs fall, performance rises and usage grows all in tandem.” So as your costs fall, usage grows, which raises your costs.

They conclude by stating “this trend is repeating itself with AI.”

By the way, the people doing this a lot, are folks like OpenAI and Big Tech.

If you look at OpenAI’s various actions over the last bunch of months, they’ve been super busy:

Now these all could signal bold ambitions for OpenAI becoming the next Big Tech player, connecting customers across a variety of applications and platforms.

I think it also kind of signals their current reality, which is that they don’t have any way of recouping the billions of dollars they’ve already spent in developing their products. According to reports, they generated $3.7 billion in revenue in 2024 and lost $5 billion. That’s a neat trick. They’re on track for apparently $9.2 billion in annualized revenue in 2025… against the $64 billion they’ve already raised in funding. And that’s before you consider the fact that open source is coming.

This feels a little to me like the dot-com bubble where some companies invested in “the internet,” but not in things that they could actually make money; for products for customers and in the products and services that they offered. You know, when you think about OpenAI, they’re kind of selling “the internet…” but not the things on top of the internet that actually make money.

And I think there’s an implication for all of us in marketing and customer acquisition, which is if you’re building your marketing workflows or you’re building your go-to-market strategy solely around ChatGPT or GPT APIs, you may be betting on a shaky foundation. I’ll admit, I’ve kind of come 180º on this. I originally thought they were the biggest threat to Big Tech, and they may still be. They may find a way to turn this into a lot of revenue really quick.

But if you contrast what OpenAI is doing with Google or Microsoft or Amazon or Apple, our old friends in Big Tech, they’re using AI to enhance existing high margin businesses like ads or cloud computing or hardware. They have integrated monetization paths. They don’t have to make AI pay for itself directly. They own the ecosystem. They own the platforms. And they own the distribution of how they put this in front of customers.

For example, we think about Microsoft Copilot and its deep integration with Microsoft Office. I know they call it 365, but come on, it’s Office. And Azure, their cloud computing platform.

Amazon is using AI to empower how quickly it gets orders to you, how it improves its ads, and how it improves its shopping user experience. Again, growing the business they already make a lot of money off of.

Google’s AI overviews and AI mode enhance the search monetization as well as, again, their cloud computing platform.

And Apple’s on-device AI could reinforce their dominance in selling hardware where they make a boatload of money.

The key differentiator is that Big Tech is integrating AI into already highly profitable and diversified businesses with huge user bases and a ton of different monetization options. AI is enhancing these existing revenue and profit engines rather than being the sole engine for revenue generation that OpenAI has got.

And again, I think that’s got a broad implication for those of us in marketing and e-commerce and customer acquisition because the smart money isn’t just on cool AI, it’s on embedding AI into some sort of scalable profitable ecosystem. We have to think about how are we using these tools in a way that benefits our customers and our businesses.

So I think we need to really think about how we’re putting AI to work for real. And I’ve got five quick recommendations.

Now all of this said, I do want to say we are clearly in a period of breathtaking innovation. I mean, we have seen so much change in the way AI is shaping the way that our customers interact with our businesses and that in the way that our businesses respond.

But it creates a certain degree of uncertainty. So we need to keep learning and we need to remain flexible.

If I could leave you with one last thought though, is OpenAI may have built the rocket, they may have built the vehicle, but the companies who are gonna make money on this are the ones that are selling tickets, who are connecting with customers, and who own the fuel supply.

You need to think beyond the rocket. You need to think beyond the tool. You need to think about the system you’re building because the marketers who will win in this next era aren’t just using AI. They’re thinking about how it shapes their business — and structuring their business around how it helps their customers.

The future of marketing and e-commerce won’t just be about using AI, but about intelligently investing in the right tools and using those solutions that are built to support sustainable business models. I think it’s really critical we make sure we distinguish between the two. And if you do a good job of that, you’ll succeed no matter what happens to any of the players.

I can’t wait to see what you do.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Be sure to let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 464, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

By the way, if you’re looking for something new to read, something cool to read, the talks about Big Tech and how you can build your business beyond Big Tech, I’d love to suggest the number one new e-commerce book on Amazon.com Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. Please pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Now before I go, I just want to say thanks so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back next week with a new episode and I can’t wait to talk about all the other cool stuff that’s going on in the world.

Until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post AI Is Eating the World, But Who’s Paying for Dinner? (Thinks Out Loud 464) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.