The End of the Click: Living and Working in the Agentic Era

Introduction

hello everyone my name is choi um and today i'm going to speak about a massive shift that's going on on the internet right now uh hence the title the end of the click living and working the jet era so we'll get more into that um originally from the uk i'm chinese scottish uh living in

amsterdam for the last few years currently a co -founder um working in stealth but very happy to be here speaking about ai in the church today so i'm very excited thank you all right so let's get started again my name is choi uh title speech today is called end of the click and

let's start with just some hands up who here uses ai let's say every day okay i think that's nearly the whole room and keep your hands up if you think that you are now outsourcing part of your brain to ai i know i definitely am a lot of hands as well

From Browsing Tabs to Getting Instant Answers

and you're not the only ones let me take you on a short journey of how we used to search for things online so a couple of years ago if i wanted to learn something simple let's say like how to do a push -up i would google it right i'd open up a few tabs maybe i'd go onto a fitness blog maybe i'd sign up to a newsletter maybe i'd watch a video there was a relationship there

now I can ask the same question to AI and I get a whole training plan I get a perfect answer all there in the chatbot in front of me it's fantastic for the user and it hasn't stopped there it keeps getting more and more advanced small example last week I had to make a one pager

for a client I was in between meetings back to back I was very busy I thought let me just put in my 20 -page pitch deck into Claude and let it do it for me and it was good surprisingly good I barely had to make any changes and I know I'm not the only one I know a lot of us are using AI

for productivity and if you ask anyone at university these days if they're asking if they're using AI it's not are they using AI it's how they're getting away with it because it's no longer a supplement that they use on the side, it is their primary way of starting something.

Delegating Decisions to AI

Now what are all those three examples I've just told you have in common? So the push -up, the one -pager, the students, that original journey we take on the internet of browsing, searching, clicking is now changing and we're delegating those decisions to AI.

Agentic Commerce and the New Customer Journey

Now this is the beginning of something they're calling agentic commerce in which AI is reshaping the way the consumer journey works online starting with the browsing, the searching, the clicking and ultimately payments as well.

What I'm going to speak about today though is how this is already affecting everyone in this room but who's also feeling it the most.

Over

Who’s Hit Hardest: Publishers and the Click-Based Web

A Growing Sense of Fear Across Online Media

Over the last year, I've spent a lot of time speaking to many, many publishers. And when I talk about publishers, I'm not talking about book publishers. I'm talking about online magazines, online newspapers, online blogs, anyone who's an authority online. And when I speak to these people, there is one common feeling that they all share. And that is fear.

the reason being these are the people that have put in the time to make the internet what it is for all of us today they've spent countless years writing articles you can think of online newspapers online magazines this is the fundamental what the web is made of and traditionally they don't have any products that they sell the way they make money is they make money off a click a view, an ad on their web page.

The problem with AI changing the way we search is when I go on to ChatGPT and ask how to do a push -up, the six fitness blogs and magazines that used to get my human view and my money now are getting AI robot bots instead and that magazine is not making any revenue at all and they're losing website traffic and this is i'm sorry a little bit static there

Big, Mid-Sized, and Independent Publishers: Different Risks, Same Trend

um this is something that is happening across the industry so big publishers small publishers medium publishers they're all feeling this pain and they're seeing a analytics dashboard going down over the last 12 months and they have no idea how to stop it the big publishers the household names that we all know they're feeling feeling the pressure but you know they can afford expensive lawyers they might even be able to do a deal with openai or google themselves it's not

too worrying they're not going to go out of business i've spoken to mid -sized publishers so these are people that have done everything right they have a loyal brand following them they made sure to diversify their income early they're not just making money off ads they're also doing other things and yet still they're showing me dashboards in which they're losing 30 40 50 60 percent website traffic year on year and then we get to the small

publishers the independent bloggers people that write these articles online and they are simply dying there's no other way to put it I spoke to someone recently who is now working three jobs because the blog that she used to use to pay her bills is no longer getting any website traffic and she's not making any money there

and one conversation in particular stayed with me i spoke to a founder here in amsterdam he said i love ai i use it every day but i don't know what my role is anymore he lost 50 of his web website traffic last year he's been having this blog for 20 years when you used to search in chat sorry when you used to search in google things to do in amsterdam his website used to come up

now you're asking ai ai is giving you a great answer taking his content but not giving him the click not giving him the view and he wasn't angry he was just lost and this is something that's happening to all publishers

all magazines newspapers across the industry just the scale is different now this isn't just about publishers this is something that is happening to all of us just to give you a little bit more about

the statistics of what it looks like there are currently 900 million chat gbt users every single week there is about 1 .5 billion people using google's ai monthly and 44 percent of people who've tried any sort of AI model have now said it's their primary way of searching online.

This shift is seismic and the behavior is not going anywhere it's here to stay.

1And because 44 % of people that use AI for the first time now make it their primary way, 60 % of Google searches are now ending without a click. Suddenly it's making sense why these publishers are suffering.

What’s Next: Bots, Payments, and a Rewired Internet

And again to bring it back to the wider thing that's happening right now we're also seeing that ai bots are going to probably exceed human traffic by 2027 which is next year that's the ceo of cloudflare said that about two weeks ago and ultimately where this is leading

AI-Driven Transactions Are Already Here

is again agentic commerce ai not help just helping us with searching and browsing but eventually payments as well and this is not something that's in the far distant future this is something that's happening right now in january this year alibaba updated their chatbot so users in china could

make purchases buy flights make transactions and during lunar new year there was 120 million purchases completed orders in six days with 1 .5 million of those being by people over the age of 60.

So genetic commerce is not something in the far off future that's happening right now. In the west we're a little bit further behind. OpenAI and ChatGPT launched their checkout

late last year but they killed in a few months because they found at least in the west people were comfortable using ChatGPT to find a product but they weren't quite ready to click by yet. So what does this shift tell us?

It tells us that that first 90 % of the user journey, the searching, the browsing, the recommendation, the clicking, is all being swallowed already by AI.

That last 10 % which is actually giving our money is the toughest bit to crack and there's all of the companies out there right now focusing on that and how that's going to happen.

The Hidden Foundation: Original Content Creators

but the thing i think is most important that i think is being underlooked is the fact that before an ai tells you what to buy before it recommends something it has to search and where does it get all that content from it gets it from the layer that's beneath all of it the original content creators on the web the publishers without original unique content these ai systems have nowhere to

to get this information and yet they're the ones feeling this the most negatively so i started this talk saying that i was part of the problem i was going to describe to you today and that you probably were as well because every time i delegate my decision making and searching to ai

to chat gpt i'm part of the reason that amsterdam founders lost 50 of his traffic last year and is likely to go out of business. And it's not just me, it's 900 million people every single week doing this.

A New Internet: Being Trusted and Readable by Machines

Now this isn't a guilt trip, this is just the reality and mechanics of what is happening right now. The old internet rewarded whoever got the click but suddenly this is being uprooted and turned on its head.

1The new internet is about who is readable by AI, who the machine trusts and And right now, the one the machine trusts the most are the ones suffering the most as well. And yes, publishers are the most prime example of this, but this is coming for everyone in this room,

everyone who is needing to be found online, anyone who has a business to be found online. You need to now change everything that you're doing.

A Note of Hope

And I understand that this speech has been very doom and gloom. I'm seeing a lot of depressed faces out there. And yeah, it is bad for publishers. But I want to end on a touch of hope and good news.

There are a few of us working on a solution for publishers, not only trying to make sure that they survive in this age of AI and getting it's great, but also thrive, make money and continue their business as well.

That's not what today's talk is about, but you're welcome to follow me online. I speak about this a lot and yeah, happy to answer some questions.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Troy. Stay here.

any questions or comments or uh i go to you first

Q&A: How to Stay Visible and Sustainable

um i have a question so back then yeah so the question is about search engine optimization and if we are moving into was it optimizing for sorry the second part of your question optimizing for chat engines

AEO/GEO: Optimizing for AI Answers

yeah i think that's a great question and there's a lot of debate about this online at the moment because there's a new thing now called AEO or GEO which is essentially AI SEO or AI search engine optimization how do I firstly show up within AI answers and secondly how do I boost my results so we're suddenly seeing a lot of companies

being funded in the space of AI visibility prompt watch being one in Amsterdam PKI recently raised about 30 million in Berlin and an even big one called profound and essentially these companies we have people asking that same question um you know how does how do i get found in chat gpt so these platforms show you visibility and the next step

is actually improving it but the funny thing is a lot of it comes back to traditional seo practices it comes back to are we writing enough blogs are we getting seen as an authority online a lot of the traditional things remain the same sorry you were there and then you

Is This Just Another Tech Transition?

Yeah, so for the sake of the argument, when you, yes, a little context, but when you, for instance, the internet came about, you also had a lot of things that went out of business, you know, every place where you could get sort of information.

Speak up, because you're speaking this way and the people sit behind you, so they may not understand your question.

Yeah, so my point is when the internet came about, there was also a lot of things that got out of business, you know, things where you could get information like, I don't know, travel agencies or other places which you can now do online yourself so just to like think about is it really a bad thing that this happens or is it something that in the end we're going to see

like oh remember when we used to do this online yeah no you're right it's a great question and you're correct for us as consumers anyone using chat gbt me myself or claude or whatever my life has gone so much easier in terms of work at least i'm a lot more efficient what i was trying to kind of show is and you're right this is gonna there's gonna be a future where we thought why we'll be clicking around multiple tabs it was madness what i'm trying to say is the speed of this shift

is uprooting businesses that have built themselves on this traditional method and it's moving so fast that they don't have time to adapt so these traditional publishers that rely on this advertising and websites all of a sudden they're going to be our business but the ironic thing is it's their information that's fueling these ai bots as uh ai um systems as well so it's kind of

just a bit of a catch -22 thanks uh just a quick question sure yeah once again if it's okay with you i just want to go on that you're saying these businesses or ai doesn't have the answers to give So in that way they are protected as well, right?

Please repeat the question again. Okay, so I think I heard you say that, yes, the AI's, sorry, one more time, the question?

Yeah, so you're saying these businesses will go out of business. Yeah. And that their business is basically fueling the information to the AI, right, for them to be able to answer. Yeah.

Well, if these businesses don't exist anymore, more than AI doesn't find the answers, right? Yeah. So in that way, they are protected in a sense.

So I think it all comes down to quality information. Sure, so to summarize, since you're saying that, will publishers or people that make information online not be protected because AI needs them to have the answers, so they're not gonna shut down? Yeah, pretty much.

So I think that the big publishers are of course gonna stay around, But I think certainly for small and medium publishers that are losing website traffic, they will not be able to survive Surely there'll be enough content online that the AI models still give good answers but you will start to see a time where you're just seeing a lot of publishers drop off the face of the earth and maybe it becomes more of a Conglomerate as well, but I can't say for sure

mm -hmm so do you as a um company have influence on how you come up in the answers was the question yeah well that's uh again it's a tough one because it's we don't really understand exactly how the algorithms are working it's a bit of a black box there but i think what they are saying is the ai likes human written content how they judge it's human i don't exactly know that but also if you're an authority online you've been posting for a long time you get a bit of credibility as well so again these traditional seo practices come back into play as well i often see I see that highest ratings is one of the...

Can you repeat? So you said the highest ratings... Yeah, when people rate something very high, I know it's just a feed that puts it higher in the list. Exactly. So like reviews and things like that, if you get rated highly online, you're more likely to be shown in AI answers. Yeah, that's also something they're saying.

You, sir, had a question too.

Web3 as a Potential Piece of the Puzzle

We have been talking about Web3 for many years, right? And how do you see that related to the AI era? Could it be maybe a solution for a smaller publisher?

And when you're talking about Web3, what exactly do you mean? It's a government government, right? Every user or reader owns his own information.

No, it's a fantastic question. I'm not going to lie and say I'm a Web3 expert. I'm sure there are solutions being made right now in which you can integrate that.

but I'm not the expert there unfortunately any expert around okay we leave that to a next time we keep the question thank you any more questions I

Are Publishers Already Going Bankrupt?

didn't see you first have you ever met any small or any publishers who has actually gone bankrupted because of the AI and if yes what happened with them

eventually at the moment um i've spoken to people that are on the i'd say cusp of being bankrupt i mentioned a founder that's working multiple jobs and the blog has become her kind of side hustle when it used to be her main hustle and also the amsterdam founder as well who's considering

shutting down his site i've also spoke to people that have you know told me they were very lucky to sell their site before this happened i haven't actually spoke to anyone whose um businesses died yet but that might be just because they're no longer active for me see you first normally

What Small and Mid-Sized Publishers Traditionally Did

the medium -sized publishers and the small -sized publishers did they normally take some particular niche or what exactly was their role traditionally so what was the role of the small medium publishers

is traditionally more niche or was it more niche well you it kind of really depends you get some niche sites that talk about you know everything to do with padel or tennis but then you get new sites that literally talk about the financial news the weather all sorts of things so depending who you are it's very very broad the loyal customers which they had and the traffic which

they had was all their loyal customers which they already had and like why did people click on their site yeah sometimes there's a loyal following from a particular brand that people like their writing style or just the kind of content they're creating um and what we're seeing now actually is

because ai is still taking a lot of um these website traffic a lot of people that would go onto a site but click away they're never even getting the source of the magazine reference them anymore but the people that with high intent that would end up they're still getting there

Can Publishers Pivot to Selling Information?

um if that makes sense just one last question is it possible for them to pivot themselves into a whatever information they were writing about they've become an information dealer of sorts so now they are selling the information not user information but the information they used to research not to these big organizations yeah it's a great question and it's kind of what

some of these big organizations are doing if they're big enough to make a deal with open ai or google something like that but usually this is reserved for the top five percent and the whole argument right now is all these ai scrapers are taking the information anyway so you might get

lucky and make a deal but these ai bots are scraping everything there's something called robots .txt that people put on their websites to stop AI bots and the studies have shown that the AI scrapers a lot of the time just scrape the

content anyway and a great analogy that's been made about that it's like saying it's like putting a stick on your front lawn saying robots don't come in and trying to stop a burglar that way they can just walk straight past and

Monetizing AI Scrapers vs. Blocking Them

yeah get you a new sleep yes i just scanned your qr code and i'm looking at your linkedin page and it says you're co -founder of the next generation of publisher monetization yes what is your object what you want to achieve what's your strategy for doing so no that's a

that's a great question and what we're trying to do is the problem today that i've outlined is yeah a very serious one and it's industry -wide this is not a niche problem it is a in fact devastating for many publishers out there and even the biggest of them all

are looking into a solution there the current solutions that have been offered to publishers number one blocking the bots from coming but the problem with that is then you're not going to be found online either so it kind of goes both ways yes you want the ais to scrape you so you're actually being found online in one of the biggest new ways of being found online but at the same

time they're taking your content for free and you're losing website traffic so we are building a way in which publishers can monetize those ai scrapers and actually create a new revenue stream and we're creating a new advertising channel for advertisers as well and you can book a meeting

Dead Internet Theory, AI Slop, and Content Quality

with me if you want to find out more okay any more questions yes yeah i was uh wondering about like the theory i think it's called the dead internet theory where um the amount of ai generated content on the internet goes up and the amount of original content basically goes down like you said so eventually the whole internet will be ai like yeah um is that something you think will happen

given how you know the publishers and yeah no that's a great question he asked about dead internet theory so it's very relevant because you're probably seeing if you're on any social media instagram linkedin or the ai slop right so before it was a lot more you had to have some ability to write online and put a decent piece of content out there now with the level of ai models anyone can put out content that looks legit at first and we will see more and more ai slop and And this could definitely be a future that we see.

I'm hoping it's not the case. I'm hoping that we can stop that from happening. But I'm sure it's going to come close.

Any other questions? Yes.

We have a legal issue of the copyright. Is there still a huge debate outside? Is there a legal debate in terms of what, sorry? Copyright. Copyright. Yeah.

Yeah, there's massive copyright issues. I think, I don't know the exact numbers, but i know that anthropic was recently sued a massive amount of money for scraping a lot of different content illegally after saying that they would not do that type of thing and you see the

same with uh facebook and meta as well so all the ai companies just out there stealing maybe they get a hundred million a couple hundred million in a lawsuit but they're making billions so for them it doesn't matter and i think publishers have to look out for themselves others if not thank you

Conclusion

Thank you, Troy. Thank you.

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