Even if there’s a bubble that pops, generative AI is changing behavior, and that’s what strategic marketing and communications people need to observe
Much of the discussion of generative AI centers on the tactical improvement it can make to marketing and communications. Most of that is focused on output – that AI can help conceive ideas, produce content and distribute it faster or better.
All of these have the potential to help market communications, but I think it misses a far more strategic concept: how generative AI is changing behavior.
Jono Alderson does an excellent job of summarizing this in a long piece published in Search Engine Land titled The new marketing war isn’t for clicks – it’s for memory.
Here are a few of the salient points:
“We’re entering a fundamentally different paradigm; where intelligent systems mediate how people discover, evaluate, and interact with brands. Whether it’s an LLM summarizing answers, an AI assistant making recommendations, or a multi-modal agent facilitating purchases, the new digital experience isn’t about users browsing websites. It’s about systems making decisions.”
Those systems behave differently from people:
“They don’t search with discrete keywords. They don’t follow funnels. They don’t click.
They see differently. They reason differently. They decide differently.”
Practically, this means that, as Zachary Cohen and Seema Amble wrote for a16Z, traditional search was built on links, whereas queries answered by AI are built on languages.
So what? Alderson continues:
“Today, users aren’t just exploring the web. Increasingly, they’re letting systems do it for them.”
What does that mean?
“Instead of scanning search results or comparing reviews, people are beginning to delegate discovery and decision-making to intermediaries: LLMs, smart assistants, summarizing interfaces. These systems take a question, evaluate the landscape, and offer a single output – an answer, a product, a decision.”
In other words, generative AI is a much more passive activity. People may become conditioned just to accept what they’ve been told. This isn’t new, but an extension of concerns going back to the dawn of the web.
Generative AI is extending algorithmic conditioning
Instead of opening up a newspaper and being exposed to a range of possible stories, algorithms have been curating information for more than 20 years. They demonstrably strive to provide more of what you want to keep you engaged. There are adults today who do not know any other way and Generative AI is building on that behavioral conditioning.
Traditional search is (or was) an explicit expression of need. Google would present a long list of search results in a short time. We’d filter through the results to satisfy our curiosity.
By contrast, generative AI provides what it proposes is the answer. It does so with confidence, even when it’s measurably incorrect as much as 60% of the time. This is happening at a time when just 31% of the American public does not trust the news, according to Gallup.
The concern I have isn’t just that generative AI may get it wrong, it’s that these systems are conditioning people to just accept the answer as fact. I worry it will temper our curiosity.
The practical implication in B2B marketing and comms
That’s an ethereal hypothesis, but it may have tangible implications for B2B marketing and communications. If generative AI replaces curiosity with passive acceptance, it’s adding to an equation already weighted with negative variables: distrust, brand prejudice and avoidance of sales conversations.
The opportunity to shape perception, attract the right audience and convince prospective buyers to give your solution or service a look is already happening long before they begin to recognize a problem they want to solve. Generative AI is poised to reinforce it.
Critical thinkers will point out that AI tools currently serve a small fraction of the traditional search audience today. They are not wrong. Yet Google too was once in this spot, but it’s dominant today because it provided a better and faster way to find what you need.
If we put the concerns over the integrity of information provided by generative AI aside for a moment, it’s doing the same thing now. People will always opt for convenience. Convivence shows up in quarterly margins. People openly admit they’ll put their deeply held values, even their identity, aside for convenience.
There’s a ton of money pouring into generative AI right now. Even if there’s a bubble that pops, the AI has already made its mark. It’s going to change behavior, and that’s what strategic marketing and communications people need to observe.
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Image credit: Google Gemini
