AI
The Death of Best
A classic positioning play is to call yourself “the best X.”
From broad: “the best CRM”
To narrow: “the best time tracking software for freelance programmers”
But in all cases it involves the seeker being explicit about the solution they are in search of.
The rise of personalization—accelerated by AI—means there is no longer a global best*. Or even a need to start with a specific solution in mind.
Every shopper is now building a personal contextual layer that adds another filter to the selection process (whether deliberately or just through the use of algorithmic tools).
As a basic example, a user may search for “best car” but their contextual layer can understand what they really mean is “what is the best mid-priced car for a family with elementary school age kids…etc & so on” based on the accumulated understanding from prior queries and tasks.
For humans, your brand is a story.
For algorithms, your brand is a list of attributes to be matched against.
Two sides of the same coin. Same core, different package.
*there was never a global best
Ways To Think About AI: The Care Factor
All the terms used in / for AI are geared towards the brain: intelligence, learning, neural, thinking, etc. These are not terms of the heart.
Or, as Tom Webster wrote:
But this is the one thing you CAN and MUST do, no matter how much or how little you embrace AI: you must care. Claude cannot care. But you can care. You can ensure that the craft is evident, that the hand of the watchmaker is revealed in the workings of the watch, however it is made.
But care is not just about how you differentiate, it’s about how you deploy as well.
The constant of AI is the person choosing to post the content. Behind every sloppy email and sketchy article full of genAI tells, there’s a person who decided that was good enough to publish.
Taste + discernment + care
The old adage goes “every company is now a media company.”
The new approach is companies buying media companies, and OpenAI has joined the chat.
OpenAI has acquired popular tech industry talk show TBPN — Technology Business Programming Network — making this the AI giant’s first acquisition of a media company.
a daily live show that airs on YouTube and X for three hours, focusing on tech, business, AI, and defense.
The show has gained a cult following in Silicon Valley, a safe space where industry power players can speak candidly and be questioned by fellow insiders. The show has a reputation for being something of a Sports Center for the tech industry
Marketing 101 is to hang out where your audience already is.
Brands with bank accounts big enough want to own where their audience already hangs out.
ChatGPT ads are going well for OpenAI and soon more advertisers will have access.
Self-serve advertiser access is on track to launch in April
No word yet on if/how the premium minimums and pricing from the beta will apply to self-serve.
This exchange from Another Podcast highlights a great way to use LLMs:
Benedict: I’ve written this, is this what anybody else would say? Is this just saying what everyone knows, what everyone thinks? Then I won’t publish it.
And now, I just say ‘well, is this what ChatGPT would have said? In which case it’s generic and average and it’s saying what everyone knows.
Toni: And there’s actually no opinion to it.
Use average engines, get average results.
What is it that you think?
Perplexity has joining Team Anthropic in the AI Trust Wars ads front:
AI search startup Perplexity is distancing itself from ads amid fears users won’t trust chatbots with an agenda to upsell.
This is a departure from the Google playbook Perplexity seemed to be following. Though te door has already been left open for revisiting ads.
Apple built its rep on privacy. AI platforms are now trying to build their reps on trust.
“We are in the accuracy business, and the business is giving the truth, the right answers,”
People transact on trust.
via The Verge
I really like IBM’s thinking outlined in this Deep View post about tripling its entry-level hiring target this year.
“The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them … you need to be able to show the real value these individuals can bring now,”
“If I were a business owner, I would focus a lot on very strong people, not on fewer people,” Lastras told me. “Because I would want to scale my ability to experiment.”
If you need a goal for this year, this is a good place to start:
more exploration, more experimentation, more creation