Various signs indicate that as artificial intelligence clearly demonstrates its ability to lead human productivity to make leaps and bounds, and after more than a year of hype about AI, the US market has also begun to reflect seriously on which existing industries will be overturned by AI development.
As a manifestation of this kind of thinking, the US stock market experienced a "localized thunderstorm" just a few days ago due to the release of Sora - image material libraries Shutterstock, Adobe, and another player of "Wensheng Video", Google. Last Friday, the market value evaporated by more than $40 billion (equivalent to over 300 billion RMB). And the mapping between such thinking and the stock market is also becoming more and more common.
Is it really fake?! Gartner expects AI to steal traffic from search engines
In an insight report released this week, well-known American consulting firm Gartner made a bold prediction: by 2026, traditional search engine traffic will decrease by 25%, as AI chatbots and other virtual assistants will seize this market share.
Alan Antin, Senior Technology Analyst at Gartner, explains that generative artificial intelligence solutions are replacing user queries that may have previously been executed in traditional search engines. As AI deepens into every aspect of enterprises, it will force them to rethink their marketing channel strategies.
It is worth mentioning that Gartner also anticipated in December last year that brand traffic from search engines would decrease by 50% by 2028, naturally due to "consumers accepting AI driven generative search.".
Of course, today this speculation can still be described as "bold", mainly because we have not yet seen significant changes in the traditional search engine market brought about by AI chatbots. According to Statcounter's data, although Google's market share decreased between January 2023 and January 2024, it only decreased from 93% to 91.5%. Meanwhile, the early adoption of GPT-4 by Microsoft BING only increased from 3% to 3.5%.
(Source: Statcounter)
Similarweb's data also shows that the number of visits to Google's website is still steadily increasing.
For Google, whose search (advertising, bidding ranking) business accounts for 55% of revenue, a decrease in traffic from traditional search engines is naturally not a good thing. But Google is not a "replacement" here, and even the founder and promoter of the AI wave itself. During last week's Spring Festival, Google just released the "Next Generation AI Big Model" Gemini 1.5, which has surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo in many aspects.
While looking forward to search engine traffic, Gartner also evaluated the impact of generative AI on search engines - a large number of AI generated content will flow to the Internet, forcing search engine algorithms to pay more attention to the quality, authority and credibility of content.
The cost of becoming an AI is not just for listed companies
If the business of listed companies is still affected by AI, it is still a matter that needs to be watched and waited for. It has become a new normal for European and American listed companies for workers to be taken away from their jobs by AI.
It is not difficult to find from the reports of Caixin News Agency in the past few months that although there have been continuous layoffs in European and American listed companies in recent years, the number of companies mentioning "job losses caused by the application of artificial intelligence" in their announcements is becoming more and more frequent.
The most typical case is at the end of January this year, logistics giant UPS announced the layoffs of 12000 people. The company has clearly stated that the automation brought by AI can replace many positions, so even if the economy improves and logistics demand rebounds in the future, these positions will not return. The language learning software Duolingo announced a 10% layoff in January this year, and the company now relies more on AI to generate learning content and evaluate whether user submitted translations are correct.
Impressively, Freya, a major manufacturer of car seats and electronic systems, also mentioned the benefits of using generative AI in its announcement of 10000 layoffs over the next five years on Monday.
(Source: FORVIA Annual Report)
Unlike the past wave of automation, generative artificial intelligence can not only accelerate the speed of daily work, but also make predictions by identifying data patterns, possessing the ability to create content and synthesize ideas - which is exactly what hundreds of millions of workers around the world do in front of their computers every day.
Therefore, for all listed companies and every worker around the world, it is time to think deeply: in the wave of AI rolling forward, will you be a beneficiary or a cost?