The Upfronts Versus The Chatbots

May 16

Talk about counter programming.

As the big TV networks and streaming giants spent this past week rolling out celebrities, announcing new series and hinting at nifty ad-targeting tools during what were essentially fancy sales pitches, the biggest companies on the planet are gearing up for a battle for the ages that may determine the future of the internet - and even how society shares information and knowledge going forward.

While you were trying to rush from Amazon's upfront to Disney's, Google was hosting its I/O event, where it tried to show the world that it is read for the next generation of AI-driven search, even as the company appeared to have been caught flat-footed by ChatGPT in late 2022.

Alex Heath of The Verge wrote that Google and Open AI are on a "collision course", while comparing the former's approach to a Star Trek computer, and the latter's to that of the Scarlett Johansson-voiced AI bot from the movie “Her”.

Meanwhile, Apple is aiming to revamp Siri as it suddenly plays catch up in the AI space, while Meta is pushing its own Llama across what it calls the “Fediverse”.

The ramifications from this arms race are potentially massive - touching every aspect of business and even society - or not. In terms of media and advertising, there is the question of Google's ad dominance, which could be upended by AI-driven conversational search. Not to mention how we find and discover digital publications, TV shows, products - it could all be remarkably different, depending upon how quickly humans adapt to this stuff.

For instance, Google introduced features that help people automatically summarize dozens of emails, or 1500 pages of text at a time. Imagine what this kind of tech could do with audience targeting data, a pool of different creative iterations, or a TV programming guide.

But there is so much coming at consumers at once here - who knows how quickly they'll take to all this stuff. Maybe we need an AI bundle?

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