Generative AI Agents Are Powering A Wave Of Disruption And Most People Won't See It Coming
Bill Gates isn’t known for his hot takes, but he dropped a fireball this week. Generative AI could put Google and Amazon out of business. It’s a bold statement, and it’s difficult to see the market playing out that way. Most people agree that Generative AI tools will be disruptive, but that statement refers to disruption on another level.
It’s not the first time I have heard someone say that Generative AI would take down Google. In 2019, I attended a talk where the speaker made a similar case and said Google would no longer be the top name in search within 5 years. They went even further and said it was likely that Google would go under because of that disruption.
Generative AI was more mature than you probably remember in 2019. The original GPT and BERT had been out for about a year, and the underlying architecture was maturing rapidly. There was enough clarity for some to see the implications for search business models. Oddly enough, even though Google had BERT in 2018, it didn’t move to implement Generative AI tools until another company moved first.
The end of Google was a fringe hypothesis. I remember mentioning it on a video call with Demetrios Brinkmann in the Spring of 2020. We were preparing for my upcoming talk on the path to production and monetization for the MLOps Community. His response was stunned silence. The case was compelling enough to keep it in mind for the next 3 years.
Generative agents are the beginning of the cycle Bill Gates sees coming. This post will explain why Bill Gates is mostly right with this take and how the cycle will play out over the next 12-24 months. I’ve broken the post into multiple parts because it’s a long, somewhat dense read.
This article is focused on workflows, so you will take away enough information to develop more than just a product strategy. If you see the pattern of workflow impacts, you’ll be equipped to identify opportunities and design products in this category.
Gates is referring to a specific class of Generative AI products. For the next five years, agents or intelligent assistants will be among the most disruptive product categories. While the product isn’t new, models like GPT give them new capabilities and broader utility.
Amazon has already signaled it intends to go into generative search. Scanning through recent job postings reveals they’re hiring with a new vision for their internal search products. This vision includes integrating generative models and changing how people interact with Amazon Prime. Amazon’s vision extends to intelligent assistants for marketers. The marketing assistant product Amazon envisions will help people build video and image assets for ads.
At this stage, it’s unclear how Google will respond, but it’s hard to imagine Google’s leadership doesn’t see the implications of intelligent agents on its search business. The problem for Google is its current business model. Intelligent agents don’t easily lend themselves to an advertising business model. Let me explain why.