Microsoft just made a huge play into AI for search that is going to have major consequences for marketers and business leaders.
Microsoft is reportedly incorporating OpenAI's GPT into its Bing search engine and investing up to $10 billion in OpenAI, which would give them a 49% stake in the company and values OpenAI at $29 billion.
The potential move is expected to prompt other companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google to make similar moves with AI technology that they have been developing.
Why It Matters
- Expect major disruptions to the search engine landscape. Today, Google dominates search. But ChatGPT-powered search from Bing could eat Google’s lunch, providing better, faster results. It could also disrupt traditional search practices and business models. If ChatGPT offers instant, accurate answers to queries without backlinks, how do you drive search traffic to your site? If there are no traditional search results, how does Google make money from ads?
- Search is just the beginning. Microsoft’s investment likely gives the company the ability to bake ChatGPT and other powerful AI from OpenAI into its other flagship products, like Word, Office, and Teams. Your entire corporate workflow could soon be AI-powered.
- Expect competitors to respond. The move will likely trigger Google and other major players to accelerate their AI plays across search and other products. What Big Tech companies choose to do with AI—and how fast they do it—is going to be the story of 2023. Watch upcoming earnings reports and analyses carefully for signals of their plans. Anywhere that language happens, you’ll see AI come into play.
- Third-party language tools will also adapt. These developments won’t necessarily obsolete the need for third-party writing tools. Companies like Jasper will likely build complementary capabilities to the native AI functions released by Big Tech firms.
- You’ll need to adapt, too. With the explosion of tools and capabilities coming, your tech stack is going to get really confusing, really fast. You need to take steps now to understand AI-powered technology. If you don’t, you won’t be able to solve your tech stack in an increasingly AI-driven business environment.
What to Do About It
“The faster that marketers and business leaders move to develop comprehension of AI, the easier their lives are going to be,” Paul Roetzer, Marketing AI Institute founder/CEO, tells me in Episode 29 of the Marketing AI Show podcast.
You have two choices:
Become an AI-powered company or become obsolete.
“You have to look at your business and say ‘How could someone disrupt us? How could they build a smarter version of what we have?” says Roetzer.
That requires deep thought about the future of your business over a longer period of time than just the next quarter. We currently build AI Roadmaps for companies as part of our consulting practice that look a minimum of three-to-five years out. And they all start by asking a simple but powerful question:
What does the smarter version of your company look like?
One of the best ways to figure that out is by taking our Piloting AI for Marketers course series, a series of 17 on-demand courses designed as a step-by-step learning journey for marketers and business leaders to increase productivity and performance with artificial intelligence.
The course series contains 7+ hours of learning, dozens of AI use cases and vendors, a collection of templates, course quizzes, a final exam, and a Professional Certificate upon completion.
After taking Piloting AI for Marketers, you’ll:
- Understand how to advance your career and transform your business with AI.
- Have 100+ use cases for AI in marketing—and learn how to identify and prioritize your own use cases.
- Discover 70+ AI vendors across different marketing categories that you can begin piloting today.
