AI: The Next Frontier in the Auction of Influence.

Many moons ago, when social media was in its relative infancy, I tried to turn a digital content provider on to the potential of ‘discovery purchasing’ as a means to monetize their content.

At the time, Amazon, a place people went to buy (not browse), had been making overtures towards a fledgling Pinterest (a place people go to be inspired). Amazon knew that if you could connect the point of inspiration (discovery) to the point of purchase, you could monetize a new and sizeable latent market.

Then Instagram, a photo-sharing app, was acquired by Facebook, an advertising company, and that potential now seems obvious.

AI strikes me as another technology whose web application looks obvious in reverse.

The internet has been auctioning influence since its inception. It’s only the medium that changes. First, it was domain names, then it was search rankings, then it was community, and now it’s ‘intelligence’.

• The Web: Make sure people go to nuts dotcom to get nuts.
• Search Engines: Make sure people find us when they want nuts.
• Social Media: Make sure people think of us when they think of nuts.
• AI: Make sure that nuts dotcom is the answer to any nut-related questions.

Open AI’s recent partnerships with content providers like the Financial Times remind me of my early career. Print providers got into trouble not because people didn’t want to read anymore, but because they struggled to translate their established influence (measured in advertising dollars) to the new medium quickly enough.

AI, in this context, is just the new medium all companies must prepare for.

Through open API integrations, every company can now create their own version of intelligence using proprietary data. And on open applications like ChatGPT, the battle for rankings via search engine optimization will likely become a battle for citations through AI optimization. Paid ads and sponsored links will still exist for those without the necessary data troves required for organic clout.

Sometimes it can be difficult for businesses to cut through the noise when a disruptive technology emerges with so many use cases.

And so it can be useful to think of AI as a tool of influence, as much as it is a tool of information.

When you look at in in these terms; it becomes easier to answer some of the basic questions that apply to all businesses.

• What are we trying to achieve?
• How can this help us do it?
• What happens if we don’t do it?