How AI is breaking the way we all do business

If you depend on your website and pay attention to the traffic you get from the search engines, you’ve probably noticed a decline over the last couple of years. A Pew Research Center report found those who get the AI summaries in their searches visited websites in the search results half as often.  And in May, Google started showing these to everyone by default, even if you have not opted in. There have been many other, similar reports. This trend will continue and has incredible implications for the future of everyone who does business. 

As if that wasn’t enough, AIs play by different rules when it comes to intellectual property. And all the benefits of AI could go away if we forced them to play by the rules the way they’ve been traditionally interpreted. Every business that involves teaching, explaining, and informing based on intellectual property is going to have to transform or wither and die. That includes PropLIBRARY, but we’ve worked out how to do that. 

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, how to not only address the challenges, but to turn them into opportunities for growth. And now I’m ready to talk about not only what we’re going to do, but why and how it impacts everybody else. Next week I’ll be announcing dates for a series of webinars to discuss it all. 

The massive changes to the way online business works and the way our society handles intellectual property impact the future in ways that are not obvious. Everyone obsesses over whether AI will change or destroy jobs. What’s easy to overlook is that AI is going to completely redefine how we do business. It will change many of the principles our society takes for granted, like those related to intellectual property. It will change how businesses get discovered, how they interact with their customers, what their customers need from businesses, and the exchange between customers and businesses. That pretty much covers everything business. Everything is going to change.

On the scale that AI is being implemented as we speak, it will change how the entire economy functions. The days of being able to start a business with a website and grow it over time may vanish. The reason is that search engines as we’ve known them for more than 20 years no longer exist.

Every search engine is moving as fast as they can to become a destination instead of a connector. They are not incentivized to connect their users to the sources they pillaged to create the answers they’ve given. What are they incentivized to do? Connect people to advertisers. In the future you’ll have to pay for every click you get. This will transform how you go about marketing, as well as everything else about websites. 

But it will also transform everything about teaching, explaining, and informing. And everything else business.

So when I say PropLIBRARY is transforming, I mean we’re doing paradigm-shifting changes in everything from business model, approach to marketing, product development, and how we plan to interact with customers and business partners. And to make our plan work we have to share exactly what we’re going to do. Which, for us is easy, because our business was basically built on over-sharing from the beginning.

Stay tuned. Next week we’ll announce dates and times for the webinars and how you can submit your questions in advance so we can make sure we address them.