Observations · AI and Business Since 2022
Marketing and sales
Content production costs collapsed — copy, imagery, and by 2025 full video ads with sound (Veo 3, Sora 2). Meanwhile AI search (Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity) began replacing clicks with answers, breaking the SEO-to-traffic pipeline that funded two decades of content marketing.
What drove it
ChatGPT and GPT-4o for copy, Midjourney and Adobe Firefly for imagery, Veo 3 and Sora for video, Google AI Overviews and AI browsers for discovery, plus AI SDRs and CRM agents (Einstein GPT, Agentforce).
The evolution
2022
Copywriting was ChatGPT's first business use case — free, instant, infinite drafts.
- OpenAI launches ChatGPT — the generative AI era begins
It turned years of lab research into a mass-market product overnight and forced every major technology company to respond within weeks. Google declared an internal code red.
2023
Einstein GPT brought generative AI to CRM, Midjourney v5 and Firefly made campaign imagery near-free, and AI-powered Bing fired the first shot at search distribution.
- ChatGPT hits 100M users — fastest-growing consumer app in history
The statistic became the single most-cited proof that generative AI was a mainstream consumer phenomenon, not a tech-insider toy.
- Microsoft ships AI Bing, then puts Copilot inside Office
The first time an incumbent shipped frontier AI directly into products used by billions, and an open assault on Google's core business.
- The first enterprise wave: Salesforce, Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg
Regulated, brand-sensitive industries moved from curiosity to production deployments within four months of ChatGPT's launch.
- Midjourney v5 and Adobe Firefly make AI imagery photoreal — and commercial
AI image generation became simultaneously indistinguishable from photography and packaged for professional use.
- China answers: Baidu's Ernie Bot, Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen
It opened the parallel Chinese LLM race under a distinct regulatory regime, confirming generative AI as a US–China strategic competition.
2024
Google's AI Overviews began replacing clicks with answers, Sora previewed the end of production-cost video, and Agentforce pushed agents into the funnel.
- OpenAI previews Sora: text-to-video arrives
A step-change in generative video quality — AI was moving decisively beyond text and images into time-based media.
- Google puts AI Overviews on top of Search
The most consequential change to the web's front door in years, and Google's direct answer to AI-native search rivals.
- Salesforce launches Agentforce: enterprise software goes agentic
A major enterprise vendor pivoted its entire strategy from copilots that assist to agents that act.
2025
Veo 3 and Sora 2 made finished video ads promptable, while AI browsers (Atlas, Comet) threatened the mechanics of the ad-funded web.
- Operator: the year of agents begins
The industry narrative shifted from chatbots that answer to agents that act.
- Grok 3: brute-force compute reaches the frontier
A two-year-old startup reached the frontier through sheer compute scaling, validating the bigger-clusters-win thesis.
- Gemini 2.5 and Veo 3: Google returns to the front
After two years trailing OpenAI, Google led on both reasoning quality and generative media in the same season.
- MIT: 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots show no P&L impact
The '95% fail' statistic became the most-cited data point in the AI bubble debate.
- Sora 2 ships as a TikTok-style social app
AI video moved from demo to consumer social product, putting OpenAI in competition with TikTok and Meta for attention itself.
- The AI browser war: ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet
The browser — the gateway to the web's ad economy — became the new battleground for AI distribution.
2026
Gemini 3.5 across Search and YouTube made being citable by AI engines the new SEO.
- Google I/O 2026: Gemini 3.5 and Gemini Omni
Google's frontier stack — intelligence with action — pushed across consumer search, developer tools, and enterprise agents in one coordinated move.
- Premium publisher ad supply falls up to 41% as AI search bites
An ad request is a count of pages actually served, not a modelled estimate of clicks foregone, which makes this one of the cleaner available measurements of what AI-mediated search is doing to the open web. Prices rising on collapsing volume is a yield-led market: publishers are extracting more per impression precisely because there are fewer of them, which is not a durable position.
- Google AI Mode starts acting inside third-party apps
Search has spent twenty-five years as a referral layer: it told you where to go and you went there. Acting inside the destination collapses that step. The visit — the thing publishers, retailers and every content business monetise — becomes optional, and the surface that captures the intent is no longer the one that fulfils it.
Key sources
The papers, announcements, and reports that document this industry's shift. Each also lives in the Library.
What businesses do differently
Brands optimize to be cited by AI engines, not just ranked by Google. Creative teams shifted from production to direction and judgment. Outbound sales went AI-personalized at scale — which devalued mass personalization almost immediately.
What this means for founders and leaders
Assume your buyers ask an AI before they ever reach your site. Being the credible, citable source in your category now matters more than volume publishing. Distribution moats built on SEO arbitrage are melting.