AI makes Snapchat more playful
This week’s 5 stories include Snap’s integration of AI into its AR, Airbnb’s travel ambitions, some estimates of Google vs AI search, and how delivery continued to grow beyond the pandemic.
Snap has long had a focus on augmented reality, and it is now using AI to enhance its capabilities, again stealing a march on other platforms. Its new premium lenses offer animations that interact with the user - so rather than the famous ‘puppy’ ears and mouth, the AI ones are animations of a fox, a group of racoons, or bunches of flowers that interact with the users, a bit like having a cat invade your Teams call. More lenses will come every week, and users will be able to share with their contacts including ones not on the premium tier, to give them a sense of FOMO. Having a fun element always helps technology go mainstream, and this is a great example of using AI to improve the product.
Airbnb is also going all in on AI. Rather than launching a bot, what it is planning is a more comprehensive travel assistant to cover the entire trip from how to get there, where to stay, what to do, where to eat and so on, based on all the data they have on their customers. Their scale gives this a greater chance of succeeding, and builds on their current abilities to offer experiences, and see the interests of their guests and other similar people.
Some new estimates on the evolution of search from insights company SparkToro: They claim that Google searches in the US went up by over 20% last year (Google has claimed that AI Overviews and other enhancements make people search more, and Google has revealed that it processed more than 5 trillion searches in 2024). SparkToro also estimates that about 20% of US homes are visiting ChatGPT every month, while the other AI platforms each get less than 5% (although note that Google is starting to introduce Gemini into its main search). It also does some estimates to claim that Google gets over 370x as many queries as ChatGPT, but this is arguably more impressive as a stat for ChatGPT’s rapid growth! The evolution of search is fascinating at the moment, but this is not the full picture as it takes no account of searches on TikTok, Amazon and so on, which must also be huge.
Ad tech company Scope3, best known for auditing digital campaigns for sustainability, has created a new platform to allow agencies, publishers, and other tech companies to create media products that will leverage expert AI agents and custom algorithms to deliver more effective media buying for clients. Scope3 is also introducing Brand Standards, a tool that it claims will increase ad safety and suitability, allowing brands to create their own custom brand definitions that can be applied across their buying. I suspect that we will see a rush of similar tools and platforms emerge, but this is a good indication of the sorts of problems that technology is solving, and speed at which the industry is changing.
Much of the world went into lockdown five years ago, and Deliveroo’s latest results give us some indication about how some behaviours have changed since then. Deliveroo, a delivery platform that delivers from nearly 200,000 restaurants and stores in 10 markets including the UK, France, Singapore, and UAE. has just had its first ever profitable year. It has clearly benefitted from a growing willingness to stay home and have things delivered; average order size is now just over ￡25, and grocery is now over 1% of orders by value. It has also expanded into non-food areas, like DIY, health, beauty and pet care. It is also a retail media platform, now with a run rate of ￡113m in Q4 2024, compared to ￡￡77m a year before.