Human Nature, Unleashed!

Thank you for that post Conor Grennan. In a comment, Eric Fraser makes a great point -as someone who TRIED to use Coq, I can say that the learning curve is steep. On the other hand, the typical hashtag#genAI hashtag#chatbot hashtag#UI short-circuits all kinds of hard-to-learn tools and bring their capabilities within the reach of any human being who can express their goals. The only limit then (well, assuming the AI does a reasonably good job) is what humans can imagine, which is where things can get wild (or "odd"), as wild as human nature.

That's where Conor Grennan 's perspective is spot on: GPT chatbots are unleashing human nature! Whatever drives people can be translated, one way or another, into prompts. And the "odd" uses that emerge and get amplified are an expression of what people want, liberated from the technical complexities that once prevented them from embracing their aspirations.

Think AI is a productivity game-changer for your business?

You might be missing the iceberg ahead.

Follow up from the timely HBR article I commented on recently.

A Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agency decided recently to invest heavily in hashtag#AI, and more specifically Generative AI such ChatGPT, to increase its productivity. Deploying such tools could reduce their personnel cost by 50% or more, automate smart link building and speed up delivery of ad copies by up to an order of magnitude. Such productivity improvements would qualify as disruptive if it were not for two big issues.

• One is competitive, as all their competitors and even their customers are beginning to adopt the same set of tools, which does not necessarily negate the need for such tools but instead makes them table stakes with downward pricing pressure.

• The other one is an even bigger iceberg threatening the SEM Titanic: as search engines are morphing into answer engines, the notion of “ranking high” in the search results may no longer be relevant unless a website is providing answers to questions or the search engine -be it Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com, Perplexity or now even searchGPT, uses the website’s content to formulate an answer. What remains is Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC), which will also likely be transformed dramatically in form and content.

The big search engines have had a few hiccups in their progressive mutation into answer engines, but these are to be expected. Every query, unless there is a clear shopping intent, is now treated as a form of question that demands an answer. And the large ecosystem of SEO and SEM agencies that has flourished over more than two decades is rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. They will soon remember fondly the little battles they had to fight each time Google or another search engine changed their algorithm. The coming disruption is going to be unprecedented and it will arrive fast.

By focusing on the tactical productivity gains afforded by AI, companies across many industries, believe that they are surfing a wave of increased profitability, just like our SEM agency. However significant the gains, they don’t matter if (1) everyone in the industry can capture them, and (2) an even bigger wave of disruption may profoundly affect the nature of the industry or even eliminate it.