Generative AI: The Beginning of the End for Search?
Alright, let’s cut to the chase. Generative AI – the tech darling on everyone’s lips – is being hailed as the bringer of doom for industries and job categories. To be honest, I’ve heard the same song played for countless tech innovations. The truth? Not every job’s going to bite the dust tomorrow. Anyone who’s been around the tech block knows that even the most promising tech has to slog through the infamous “Trough of Disillusionment” before it can earn its place in our long-term tech landscape. But hold your horses, here’s a twist: there’s one sector that might witness a swift technological mortality.
From the Internet Age to the Data Economy
Remember the Internet Age, folks? Yeah, it wasn’t that long ago. That era was fueled by Search. Think of Google in ’98 and its less successful contemporaries – Lycos, Altavista, and good old Ask Jeeves. Regardless of their fates, they demonstrated that Search was the killer app that ushered everyone into daily internet use. But I’m about to deliver some bad news to our trusted Search: its days are numbered.
Search was our magic portal to the world’s information – our own personal knowledge amplifier. Looking for hotels in Barcelona, finding local movie times, or researching historical dates for a term paper, we turned to Search. With the rise of platforms like Kayak, we could even consolidate results from parallel searches. But let’s be real, Search was always just about information retrieval.
Generative AI: The Future of Automation
Now enter Generative AI, which carries us beyond mere retrieval. It lets us both search and execute actions. Forget about searching for hotels in Barcelona, now we can command our digital assistants to find and book a hotel based on our preferences. We can reserve a movie ticket and arrange our rideshare, all in one go. Search no more, let automation do the grunt work.
Before you get too excited, the examples I provided aren’t here just yet. But they’re coming soon, trust me. Generative AI’s already mature enough to handle tasks post-search. It’s already creating dinner plans based on what’s in your fridge, for instance.
Soon enough, companies will release integrations for purchasing, scheduling, approvals, and whatnot, linking Generative AI to our bank accounts, calendars, and personal data. With these connections, we unlock the full potential of AI as our own personal assistant.
We’ll look back and chuckle at how we used to manually sift through search results, read the information, make decisions, and take actions that we could have automated. Sure, it’ll take a few years before we have robots cooking dinner in every home (bring on the Jetsons!), but many of our digital tasks like booking trips or ordering goods for delivery can be automated with fewer hurdles.
Is Search Dead?
As much as I’d love a catchy headline like “Search is Dead,” I won’t go that far. The reason? Not all data sets are accessible to Generative AI tools. With the growing recognition of the value of data, owners are likely to set up paywalls or create business models around data usage.
This monetization push will result in data gaps, creating fragmentation in the industry as new data access and licensing partnerships emerge. We’re probably heading towards a phase of free search and paid prompt-based automation.
However, let’s not forget that automation is the “killer app” of the Data Economy, and it’ll find a way to balance the books. Just like Google did with search, the next tech giant will monetize prompt-based automation in a way that promotes mass adoption. But buckle up, it’s going to happen faster.
Make no mistake, the end of Search is coming, but we’re just at the beginning of an exciting new era.
