“AI is a platform shift – much like web, social and mobile”.
A cracking interview with Matthew Prince, CEO of cybersecurity giant CloudFare. Available on BBC sounds – Radical with Amol Rajan. With thanks to John Cottrill for the recommendation.
If you didn’t know (I didn’t) Cloudflare provides network and security services for around a quarter of the entire internet. For complete transparency – they are not a client. But I have some capacity if they’re reading this.
Many in my network will know this already. I didn’t.
Highlights:
- AI is transitioning us from a search engine to an answers engine.
- It’s a platform change – think how web changed how we get information – then social – then mobile and apps. Each platform changed the interface for how we get information. AI is a similar platform change.
- Implications for brands, content creators, publishers and many businesses are enormous.
- Consider returns of the old search model – ten years ago, Google would crawl two pages of content to give you one visitor. Now it crawls 20 pages to give you one visitor. ChatGBT crawls 1500 pages for every visitor and
Anthropic – 40,000 to 1 - The benefit to users is we’re getting the answers more quickly – for brands, creators et al though – the returns on content creation are already getting smaller.
- We know that content is the fuel that makes AI run so as the world moves towards answer engines at pace – the business model for content creators / publishers has to change.
- The old measure of traffic -which, let’s face it was never about quality, will increasingly become redundant. There won’t be any traffic.
Many of the ‘solutions’ that people promote are technological based. Game AI in order to get brand inclusion in the AI returns. CloudFare on its part doesn’t let AI bots crawl its clients websites.
It seems to be that the golden goose is creating great – dare I say unique – content and putting a decent price on it. And restricting who can crawl it for free. Which will be tough for thousands of brands as their content is already free via Google.
Working through all of that is how brands will survive.
