“We always overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term impact of things. This is exactly what is happening with AI today. In the long term, your business model is therefore fundamentally threatened. In the short term, you will have to adapt your business model.
As Director of Strategy at CI&T, a specialist in digital transformation, Ross Sleight has been monitoring Artificial Intelligence for several years. He advises clients on how to leverage technology to significantly improve their processes, particularly in marketing and communications.
In this interview with Ashley NorrisRoss:
- Explains how AI will change the nature of research.
- Explains how these innovations will challenge publishers and technology companies.
- Advises media companies on how to experiment with AI.
- Predicts how AI regulation could unfold and what impact it will have on media companies.
What is your interest in AI?
We are working on two aspects of AI. The first is that AI is used within our own teams. So our own software delivery teams are using AI to improve their efficiency and productivity.
The second aspect is that we study how AI can fundamentally affect the experience of our clients’ end users. This is where we start to look at the principles of personalization and the ability to create greater impact through different uses of AI. This typically involves the marketing/communications area, the customer operations area, and the product development area. In all of these areas, AI can create meaningful differences in end-user experiences through our customers’ products and services.
What has surprised you most about the development of AI over the past 18 months?
The last 18 months have seen the launch of innovations like ChatGPT and Bard to the public, which have been enthusiastically adopted by consumers and businesses.
You have this mass adoption of AI among the public. At the same time, companies are considering how AI can change the way they accomplish their current tasks.
The speed of adoption is enormous. And then, in addition, the quality of the models which are starting to develop. There will be a huge amount of computing power available, so AI will become more and more sophisticated.
How is AI disrupting business models?
The announcement of Gemini by Google is an example of how research will fundamentally change. In this business model, Google displays a certain number of search results, which are then monetized through pay-per-click advertisements. As a user, you browse through several different search results to find what you’re looking for, essentially generating more pay-per-click advertising.
As Google begins to integrate Gemini, this will allow you to focus on creating pages or page elements within the search experience. This will then lead to fewer second-order actions. Additionally, users won’t head to many other different sites like they do now.
Users will have multiple options in the Google stack from the information provided and generated. This means they will stay on the search page longer, meaning search advertising, even if included in Gemini, might not work in the same way.
So, the search advertising market will evolve as people’s behavior evolves.
The continued integration of AI into technology platform stacks will mean we fundamentally question the interfaces that work today. For example, a travel site that asks you to say where you want to go and when you want to go there in order to provide you with a list of options will disappear. Instead, there will be open-ended questions about what kind of place you want to go. The AI will find these places, then an agent will find the best deals available for you and book them for you.
Business models rooted in the premise that web pages are static or dynamic, are hierarchically generated and nested, and contain advertising will begin to disappear as we move toward an interface that is much more about asking questions in natural language .
If publishers have perfected their online strategies and created businesses based on advertising and affiliation, are their business models fundamentally threatened? Can they modify their models to incorporate AI and be even more successful?
We always overestimate the short term impact and underestimate the long term impact of things. This is exactly what is happening with AI today. In the long term, your business model is therefore fundamentally threatened. In the short term, you will have to adapt your business model. The last 20 years of your work in digital transformation is just the last 20 years. Your job to survive the next 20 years will not be the same. You must transform yourself again. You will have to adapt, because behavior changes will happen, interface changes will happen, business model changes will happen.
So you need to go to your CFO and your board and say, “I need money to study how AI will impact my business, I need to start experimenting with this.” I have to figure out how to create a business that will fundamentally adapt to the behavioral changes that people will make by asking open-ended questions and being fed information that is relevant to them rather than going and looking for things directly online.”
So, is your economic model under threat today? Probably not. Is it threatened in five or ten years? Absolutely. Unless you start doing something. So start experimenting, start understanding what the effects are on your daily activity. Also have some scenarios that allow you to say if we think this interface will be X, then we have the opportunity to create a Y experience from that.
Where will AI regulation come from? Are we facing a repeat of GDPR, with Europe leading the way? Or will US tech giants agree on how AI should be governed?
I think it’s really tricky, because no regulation can be imposed by one party. A government or organization might say, “This is what we want to happen within our borders and our coasts.” But that doesn’t mean that whatever China does or America chooses to do, it will be any different. So there needs to be an agreed set of guidelines on this.
In a commercial world, these codes of conduct are always under pressure from shareholder expectations for value creation. I am therefore less convinced that self-regulation is the way to go in this area. I think it takes a combination of both. But, ultimately, we need to build on the work already underway and understand the impact businesses will have on the process.
We don’t want to experience the same situation we experienced with social media, where we let things play out. If we don’t anticipate the problems that AI will pose in the future in terms of the social and economic implications of the technology, we don’t really care about our world as a whole.
Will China care about the social implications of AI in the same way as the Americans or the EU? We already see the Internet divided into different areas. The European Internet is very different from the American Internet in terms of regulations. This is obviously very different from what is happening in China and Russia. We are going to see some fragmentation. But ultimately we need an agreement that models should only be made public to do X, Y, and Z, and that we should not allow them to be released publicly unless they have the potential to increase and help humans.
*Watch Ross’ interview here.
Meeting of media creators – live
We would like to see you at our next live events in Spain and Portugal
Mx3 Barcelona focuses directly on media innovation, with an emphasis on creator-led, mainstream and B2B media operating within and across media verticals. It takes place on March 12 and 13.
Click here to find out more.
The FIPP World Media Congress, which we produce under license from FIPP, will take place June 4-6 in Cascais, Portugal. The flagship global event in the world of magazine media will be the 46th edition since its launch in Paris in 1925.
Click here to find out more
To read the full takeaways from our December Mx3 AI event held in Hoxton, London, download the MX3 AI report.
