My Vision: How AI Changes the Internet in 6 Phases

AI brings info to humans; no need to surf the web.

Author

Jeremiah Owyang
July 27, 2024

Broken: We spend seven hours a day on the internet.
Fix: Let’s let AI Agents do the work.

My vision: Over the next few years, AI is going to significantly change the internet, impacting big tech, startups, product leaders, marketers, advertisers, media, customer care, e-commerce, and all of us.

  1. AI agents will autonomously handle laborious tasks for us, such as managing repetitive emails, filling out expense reports, booking travel, scheduling calls, doing internet research, and performing monotonous e-commerce tasks. It won’t be perfect, it will take time to refine.

  2. As a result, information will come to humans in just a few user interfaces where we can manage our agent workers, reducing the need to traverse websites. Can we reclaim some of those 7 hours?

  3. As AI Agents become the dominant entities on the internet, website owners will cater to them by offering Agent APIs that instantly provide information to our AI agents, rather than simulating a human click path as AI agents do today.

  4. Websites won't go away, but they will need to evolve. When humans visit websites, the content could be AI-generated and personalized to the individual user. The era of thousands of web pages is no longer needed.

  5. LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and other popular ones will centralize user behavior in one app, integrating e-commerce directly into the app so users can search, find, and purchase items seamlessly. I predict that happens in Q4 2024.

  6. Google Search, fearing disruption, will integrate "sponsored sentences" to maintain advertiser revenues, transparently merging them with generative AI search results, Perplexity and OpenAI’s new Search GPT will follow suit. At first you’ll hate it, then get used to it.

Nice. This week I was quoted in Fast Company for this vision:

“Blitzscaling Ventures general partner Jeremiah Owyang. “Users no longer need to use antiquated search methods to trudge through websites to find the answers they want. Instead, OpenAI’s generative AI search will bring the answers right to the user.”

Hey! Catch me live: I’m on a speaking tour to share this vision:

Footnote: Oh here’s where I got that stat: Fortune reports that Humans spend up to 7 hours a day on the internet, which could tally up to 17 years of our life.

On that note, I’m going to the gym right now to reclaim my time back, I’ve been committed to bench pressing 225# (100kg) as my working weight, I’m finally there.

Who’s with me? Let’s get our time back.