How AI and ChatGPT are revolutionising the Internet, e-commerce and the future nature of work
William Burton
Entrepreneurial CEO & Non-Executive Director | Skilled in Resolving Complex Challenges and Maximising Business Potential, especially in the Travel & Hospitality and Education & Training sectors
How AI and ChatGPT are revolutionising the Internet, e-commerce and the future nature of work
?AI has suddenly come of age. Recently I was introduced to Jasper, an AI app that will write advertising, blog and other copy for you, allowing you to reduce your dependence on expensive expert copywriters, and to generate blog content for SEO and social media posts incredibly quickly and cheaply.
?I am also now being offered AI chatbots, almost on a daily basis, that will truly engage with clients on my website as if they were interacting with a real person – far slicker than anything previously available, and possibly finally reducing the demand for external contact centre support.
?But it is ChatGPT that has fired everyone’s imagination and finally signalled that AI is coming of age. In essence it does what Google ought to do, and to some extent did do when it was first launched. In Google’s rush to exploit its virtual monopoly on search it has increasingly put sponsored content, often only semi-relevant to your search, on page one of the search results - crowding out what you were really looking for. Like so many companies, Google has become so focused on exploiting its dominant market position for short term commercial gain, that it has been sowing the seeds for its own future demise by doing things that actively diminish the value of its products to customers.
?You can see Meta/Facebook do exactly the same thing every day, pushing unsolicited sponsored content in place of posts from people or companies users have actually chosen to follow, and deliberately putting up barriers to its advertisers communicating with the thousands of followers they have so expensively acquired. When a marginally better alternative social media platform emerges, users and advertisers alike will abandon Facebook with huge relish.
?So what Microsoft Bing has very sensibly done is attack Google exactly where it was most vulnerable. Bing was the underdog compared to the dominant Google. So they came up with a truly radical plan: “Let’s give users the search results they actually want, instead of the ones that advertisers pay us the most to promote.” Suddenly the mighty Google doesn’t look quite so unassailable, as it has no choice but follow, but unless they can think of something really clever this will undermine their present day super-profits on paid search.
?But ChatGPT is far more than that. By using AI Microsoft have done the search job very noticeably better than Google does, producing a much more personalised experience rather than purely a listing. And this will change the face of search forever. Moreover the nature of SEO will also change, as AI sees through all the ridiculous fake blogs and backlinks Google have forced everyone to create in order for its mysterious and ever-changing algorithms to rank our content in ‘natural search’, and hence be able to avoid having to pay Google to appear on its search pages.
领英推荐
?And the consumer reaction – and immediate impact on Google’s share price - has shown that unless Google change their approach and follow Microsoft, consumers will switch in droves to Microsoft’s superior Bing search engine. A whole new internet landscape overnight that none of us are used to. Maybe ‘To Google’ could even one day end up being an archaic verb.
?But there is far more to this AI revolution. If you can write – and even check copy without copywriters, and search for changes in documents or errors without administrators or lawyers – or possibly correct code without expert computer coders, then whole swathes of work and sources of employment that we have all become used to will disappear.
?And in my own company, saying that we intend to use AI to speed up certain online search and match operations has stopped being a future aspiration, and suddenly become a present day imperative, as AI search, copywriting and chatbots will all most assuredly become ‘currency’ very shortly.
?I will stop now and let some of this sink in. But it is a theme we will all be returning to repeatedly over the months and years ahead…..
?