📍THE news that needs your attention

To wrap up this (other) crazy month in AI, actually, two news to combine.

• OpenAI’s first developer conference - Among new models and developer products announced at DevDay GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, DallE 3 API but most of all, GPTs (AI Agents).

• Google is in talks to invest in AI startup Character. ai - Founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.ai allows people to chat with virtual versions of celebrities or anime characters, while creating their own chatbots and AI assistants. This investment is Google’s response to Open AI’s launch of its GPT models.

 

The short of it:

👋 Say hello to your new buddy, GPT (also known as AI agent), because he is here to stay!

Source: About Open AI (🔗 Here) and about Google (🔗 Here).

👩🏻‍💻 A few of my fact-based thoughts (in no particular order)

• My favorite definition of an AI agent - A software that uses AI to pursue a specific goal. It does this by breaking down the goal into tasks, tracking its progress, and interacting with digital resources and other agents when needed (🔗 Here).

   

• Tech v/s Usage - If the recent melodrama surrounding OpenAI has demonstrated anything, it's that the 'AI war to win the internet' will be decided by a balance between two pillars: Technology and Usage. On the backend, it's a true technological battle. On the front end, users will determine the winner. Meanwhile, marketers are witnessing a major revolution in their field, one they can either lead or be overwhelmed by.

   

• Open AI saved by personal branding? Sam Altman, OpenAI's charismatic leader, demonstrated in just a few days that he has an active, massive, and loyal following of developers ready to support him wherever he goes, who love him. Sam Altman is the standout personal brand behind OpenAI’s success (🔗 Here) and during this melodrama, his personal brand probably saved the company.

   

• The end of the browser? From a marketing perspective, what we’ve been witnessing since Nov. 2022 is a Seach v/s Chat war. However, the real battle has deeper roots: it could signify the end of browsers as a gateway to the internet and the emergence of GPTs as their replacement.

   

• AI agents will dramatically impact marketing - As AI Agents will become the primary means for making most purchases, they will inevitably compel marketers to devise new strategies to influence them (🔗 Here). Beyond this, marketers will need to learn how to guide brands in reshaping their marketing strategies around AI agents. These agents will transform not only how we market to our customers but also how brands must market themselves.

   

• From a market of multitudes of niches to a market of multitudes of AI agent persons? In the book that elucidated internet business model, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated 'how the era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place, something new is emerging: a market of multitudes.' The ‘market of multitudes’ referred to the market of niches. Today, we're entering a market of a multitude of AI agents, which might essentially represent a merger between an individual and their most significant topic of interest also known as… a personal brand.

🤕 While Open AI is thriving, is Google sleeping?

• Google still leads - Initially, despite all the speculation, Google does not seem to be challenged in its monopoly at all. As Danny Goodwin points out, 'Any impact of ChatGPT on Google's search dominance is overblown at this point, given that ChatGPT only accounts for 2% of Google's monthly traffic’ (🔗 Here).

   

• Google is fighting back - Google is actively countering competition by enhancing Google SGE with new features and through various strategic acquisitions and investments. Since May 2023, Google SGE has indeed undergone almost monthly improvements (🔗 Here). Additionally, Google is responding through major and significant acquisitions. Its recent substantial investment in CharacterAI is particularly noteworthy, as it positions Google to effectively respond to the threat posed by GPTs in the realm of AI agents (🔗 Here).

But…

• What about the overall search experience? Despite the improvements in SGE, the overall search experience is becoming increasingly confusing for users. This trend has been noted even by former Google employees, who have observed similar issues in the latest evolutions of sub-products like Google Maps (🔗 Here).

   

• Google (and SEOs) accused of having ruined the Internet… - In its primary business domain, Search, Google is facing significant challenges and has even been accused of ‘ruining the Internet’. A recent post from The Verge that went viral caused a stir in the SEO community (🔗 Here). The impact was so pronounced that Danny Sullivan, who seldom blogs, felt compelled to provide a detailed response and justification (🔗 Here).

   

• Google Gemini, not for now… - During The OpenAI Dev days, the company unveiled ChatGPT Vision, marking a shift towards multimodality for ChatGPT. According to tech researchers, this development offers tremendous capabilities (🔗 Here). In what might be a coincidence or a sign of strategic concern, Google has delayed the release of Gemini, its purported next-generation multimodal Large Model, which was expected a few days ago (🔗 Here).

• Will Google be able to keep its browser dominance? This one is a big deal. Google is under scrutiny from justice authorities regarding its deal with Apple during the antitrust trial. This trial has revealed the extent to which Google relies on browsers to maintain Search as the 'gateway to the internet.' As Sundar Pichai noted, 'We realized early on that browsers are critical to how people navigate and use the web.'

   

  Google paid $26.3 billion to be the default search engine on various browsers, platforms, and devices, with the largest portion going to Apple. Google’s flagship product, Search, generated $146 billion in 2021, meaning that Google spent approximately 18% of its search revenue on these deals. What implications could AI agents have for browsers, potentially signaling their decline?

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• ‘AI Agent’: a burgeoning marketing term? So many different words and expressions are used to qualify this AI Agent: Autonomous agent, Custom Agent, GPTs, Copilot, or virtual agent. To name just a few. With this diversity, isn’t there a unique opportunity for you to coin your own term? AI and AI agents are at the forefront of a new era of the internet, a fresh ‘AI Real Estate’ landscape where every position is for grabs. The race is only beginning. Have you considered what your unique position could be?

   

• … loads of new marketing opportunities - Every new term in marketing opens the door to millions of business opportunities. Seth Godin often recounts his experience during the early years of the internet when he overlooked its potential success and missed the chance to purchase valuable domain names (like business.com, which was available for just a few dollars). Let's learn from this lesson!

   

  Once you've identified the ideal purpose for your AI Agent (based on your primary interest or need of your customers), have you considered securing a domain name that aligns with your chosen GPTs, or any other AI agent, and your main topic? This is important both in the context of an AI marketing space (where there's already an OpenAI GPT marketplace) and for your website.

   

• It’s not about Chat v/s Search anymore - It’s about zero-click marketing and thus, personal branding. This will be a full topic for another edition of this newsletter but right now, think of this: the way we seek information will fundamentally change. Imagine not using a browser to search for answers, but instead directly chatting with an AI agent about a specific topic. Once you enter the chat, you're likely to remain engaged, typing (not clicking) the names of people or brands mentioned in your AI bot's responses. For marketers, this represents the future of the job: figuring out how to ensure that your name or your brand's name appears in those AI agent conversations.

  Digital Marketing will no longer focus primarily on clicks; instead, it will be about being known in whatever you want to be known for - by the AI agent.

• Tasks v/s goals - AI agents differ from conversational AI by focusing on goals rather than tasks. When you're engaging with ChatGPT, you're confined to the chat interface. You have to keep providing prompts to achieve your desired outcome, which is often referred to as a 'chain of prompts.' In contrast, with an AI agent, you define a goal instead of a task. The agent then determines the necessary tasks to achieve this goal and works on your behalf. This approach allows for the breakdown of tasks into subtasks and enables progress tracking, ultimately leading to the accomplishment of the set goal. For marketers, isn't this the ideal tool? After all, isn't defining SMART goals the most critical part of our job, with the rest of the strategy revolving around tactics and elements?

• AI Agent as your brand ambassador - With AI Agent, once you’ve established your goal to achieve, the Agent will take “initiatives" on your behalf. It continues to operate for you even when you are not actively engaged in conversation with it. The Agent will also notify you about new findings that align with your goals and may interest you. GPTs can serve as exceptional ambassadors for your brand, whether through sharing specific types of content you want to disseminate (keep reading to understand why GPTs are the new blogs) or by acting as a digital identity that works on your behalf. This woman already created her digital twin (🔗 Here)!

   

• AI Agents are the new platform - AI agents will be the new marketing platform. You’ll have the capability to construct and integrate all of today’s leading marketing elements and tactics around it: content creation, topic clusters, blogs, and influencer marketing, but with a different approach to distribution.

• GPT for communities - This also implies that once you develop a GPT, it becomes a powerful tool for your community to utilize. It also means that what’s coming next is multiagents, aka, GPTs and bots that talk to each other. It’s digital teamwork on steroids (🔗 Here).

🎯 THE insight from LinkedIn

This post from Bill Gates - AI is about to completely change how we use computers. 

The short of it:

Sources: Check Bill Gates’ full post (🔗 Here).

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• AI Agent as a (marketing) tool - Do you recall how, a few years ago, creating tools for your website was a highly effective content strategy? Brands like Zillow, Animal Z, and Moz (with its Moz Bar) are prime examples. So many other B2C or B2B brands developed these tools which were seen as alternatives to gated content for collecting email addresses or gathering some customer data. Now, AI agents are being viewed similarly. However, they offer additional capabilities: they can take action, be updated with the content you provide, and proactively engage by suggesting, summarizing, and updating based on your interests (🔗 Here).

   

• GPTs could also be a blog (soon) - My bold prediction 😉 is that GPTs could potentially replace traditional blogs. The details of how would you start with this could fill an entire newsletter (I'm brimming with ideas right now). But for now, consider this: just as influencers have risen to prominence using a blog as their website's homepage, in the future, anyone with a particular interest could create a one-page website centered around a bot. This bot could represent a digital version of the individual, or function as a top-notch 'AI Assistant,' 'Sage,' 'Researcher,' etc. – the possibilities are endless.

   

• Niche Blog? GPTs represent the AI equivalent of niche blogs but with some incredible additions, supercharged by Generative AI. These are niche blogs to which you can assign a specific purpose (a set of instructions) and endow with additional knowledge – not only your own, in any format (visual, written, audio, PDF, etc.), but also insights from your competitors (mm…). Imagine a niche blog that can also actually take action! GPTs are blogs supercharged by AI.

   

• Are GPTs the new App Store? Not sure. Will you become a millionaire if your GPTs rank #1 on the OpenAI marketplace? Probably not. And that’s ok (🔗 Here). But should you leverage a new form of content or service on your website to augment the generous amount of content you already offer? (🔗 Here). Consider using them as your personal assistant to help accomplish various tasks.

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: AI Agents (GPTs) are the new blog!

🤗 1 tactic (from me):

GO create your own GPT. Right now!!

🛠 Your AI Agent toolbox

• Alternative to GPTs - You need a ChatGPT plus subscription to create your own GPTs but currently, all new subscribers are placed on a waiting list. My friend Spencer Crandall (🔗 Here) made a great demo of how to create an AI Agent with another similar CustomerGPT. ai (🔗 Here).

   

• GPTs Collection - Already a GPTs Directory or marketplace - from OpenAI. The already famous GPTs marketplace… As of today, it boasts precisely 20 305 GPTs. Check it out (🔗 Here).

   

• 14 main categories for GPTs - The Rundown already categorized GPTs and came up with 17 categories from image generation, to food, design, finance to social media (🔗 Here).

   

   

• THE best guide to create your GPT- Simon Willison's blog is an absolute gem. He was the one who uncovered details about Google's moat several months ago, a topic I discussed in a previous issue of this newsletter (🔗 Here). Now, he offers what I consider to be the best content for creating your own GPT models, along with some excellent examples of his work (🔗 Here).

   

• GPTs for SEO & content marketing - This great post from Search Engine Land will show you how to create your own custom GPT and how to use it now, in SEO, to determine E-E-A-T (🔗 Here). Aleyda Solis’ GPTs have the same purpose and they’re both a hit (🔗 Here).

   

• One of my favorite GPTs for Design - OK… I’m biased. This one has been developed by my friend. Interesting, isn’t it? Don’t you think what I just did (recommending you, especially the GPTs developed by my friend/community) is exactly how those GPTs will spread and work for your marketing 😉 ? This ChatGPT collage bot 2 was created by my friend Frank Prendergast (🔗 Here). It enables you to create vintage-style collages like this one 😍.

🤓 THE content that is worth listening to:

This fantastic episode of Mark Schaefer's podcast where he interviews Paul Roetzer, the CEO and founder of the AI Marketing Institute.

👉 The Marketing Companion - Interview of Paul Roetzer (🔗 Here).

🤓 New Digital Course: SGE for Content Strategists

How to optimize your content strategy for the future of Search?

The integration of Generative AI into Search is one of Google's biggest updates. Content strategists must be prepared to adapt their content marketing for SGE. I created a full training in 7 steps to reframe your content strategy to Google SGE.