I’ve been rather critical about the AI craze, urging caution. And that’s appropriate. A lot of people have gone WAY overboard in their enthusiasm.
That doesn’t mean AI isn’t valuable. And it is here to stay. It’s time to, as the song goes, “accentuate the positive.”
The fact is, with AI, we are in the midst of the greatest revolution in advertising in more than 20 years. The last huge change was, of course, the rise of the Internet as a business tool, including the development of online stores. That made for a dramatic shift to say the least. Now half of all advertising dollars are spent online. Walmart used to be the world’s biggest retailer. Now of course, it is Amazon.
Now we have AI. It’s been coming for years. Did you know Google themselves were pioneers in AI and made one of the major breakthroughs, “transformers?” Google Translate was probably the first major public application of AI.
Now, any company whose business is affected by the Internet, had best pay close attention. Things are changing RAPIDLY. It’s dramatically affecting how people find things online. This is a danger and an opportunity. A danger if you aren’t on top of it, but a big opportunity for sure if you are. Unquestionably many businesses – many of your competitors – are NOT going to have their eye on the ball, giving you the chance to grab a larger share of the market.
So how do you take advantage of it? It is rapidly changing, and no one knows how things are going to settle out. But there is a lot we do know. Here are the key points, in no particular order:
1. AI – artificial intelligence – is not “intelligence.” It is still just software. Very smart software, but it is still just software. That means you can can’t just turn things over to AIs and trust all will be well. They make mistakes, they can get things horribly wrong. It is always going to take a hands on element to make your marketing work.
2. AI is dramatically changing how people look for things online. Organic search was long the gold standard because people trusted it. People don’t trust it as highly as they did. At the same time, people have continued to get more and more impatient with having to wait or spend time sifting through answers or rephrase queries. This is a strong-point of AIs. You need to show up in AI prompts and searches. While a lot of the long-standing methods of organic search optimization also apply to AI searches, there are additional things that have risen in importance, including “schema” and hands-on curated directories like Clutch.
3. It also means more businesses need to use paid ads or use them more heavily. At the same time, Google now has several AI driven ad modes which are improving ad performance.
4. Google isn’t going away. They have FOUR separate AI initiatives going: AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini (their own AI), and AI driven Google Ads optimization. So while the buzz is all AI, the vast majority of the action remains Google. Don’t neglect it.
5. As I said, things are rapidly changing, and almost weekly there are new tools for tracking and dealing with AI factors. So pay close attention.
Perhaps in a while things will settle down and you can relax. For now, it is nowhere close to business as usual.