A recent McKinsey report estimates that widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy. This adoption would disrupt nearly all industry sectors and business operations, unlocking unprecedented improvements in customer operations and labor productivity. While the potential value of genAI is undisputed, many questions remain.
Each of these questions has profound implications for the way in which genAI should be deployed and the business value that it can ultimately create.
Along with these known unknowns lies other unknown unknowns. The McKinsey report describes how genAI “can help marketers achieve higher conversion and lower cost through search engine optimization (SEO) for marketing and sales technical components such as page titles, image tags, and URLs”. However, this sentiment presumes that internet search infrastructure will remain largely unchanged even as genAI disrupts huge sectors of the technological landscape.
It is more likely that widespread adoption of genAI will usher in a new era of internet search in which search results are generated by artificial agents. In such a world, the traditional methods of SEO would become mostly irrelevant, and businesses that don’t adapt to the new paradigm will risk losing valuable resources and customers. When adopting new technologies, business leaders must think beyond the constraints of a pre-genAI world and begin to consider the art of the possible.