Google’s Business Model & AI Crisis

Google has a problem. The type of advertising they invented, they came up with, the hyper-targeted advertising is now being rejected more and more by consumers. And when they try to move towards AI, they face significant constraints. We are all witnessing the AI revolution, but unfortunately, Google is not evolving.

When Google started, it was the best way to find an answer. In a panorama of dull search engines, searching according to the word frequency and things like that, Google was the freshest, the best way to find an answer.

The company that could have started the AI revolution, they refused to do it a while ago, and they are right now struggling to be part of it. The company is not even at the crossroad. The crossroad was when the employees of Google wrote the famous paper that sparked the generative AI revolution: “Attention is all you need”.

The thing is that if you look at the younger generations, most of them use a generative AI algorithm these days. And we can’t blame them. What they obtain is better. What they obtain is a straightforward answer that then savvy users can refine, reprompt, remake. And it’s also having a lot of problems when trying to move away from the traditional business model, relying on advertising, the type of advertising they invented, they came up with,

hyper-targeted advertising is now being rejected more and more by consumers and even companies who believe they want to have these consumer insights. They are realizing that they are not worthwhile, that they are not so important, and they don’t increase their revenue so much as they were expecting. The way Google treats users as raw material, it’s basically they amass,

They collect a huge amount of information about us, and then they resell this information to whoever wants to reach these type of, of profiles. Okay. What happens is that people don’t like to feel they are being auctioned all the time. Whenever you enter a website, your profile is being auctioned and the company who bids the highest, gets your, gets the opportunity to shoot you an ad.

Well, we feel like we are being hunted. We are constantly being targeted by a sniper. And this sniper is shooting the ad at us, and these ads that we are getting constantly force us to think, why am I getting this? The problem that we have right now is that Google is in search of an alternative. So an alternative business model, but they are not being able to find it.

The hope for Google is that the company should be able to manage a comeback with revolutionary products and mostly get rid of the old thought, the old business model relying only on advertising because the earlier they get rid of this idea of the big information collector of the web, they know everything about you,

The better, the less spooky for for, some users collect my information to give me something fruitful, something I can use, something that provides me with added value. That’s the important part. That’s what I would demand from a company like Google. I might be getting that from ChatGPT, from Claude, from Perplexity Pro, from LLMs that I’m able to configure that will learn from me, etc..

And I’m definitely going to get that from agentic platforms where I can train my own agents. But right now, I don’t see Google being the one that provides me with this type of services. And of course, I would be willing to pay for a service like that. I don’t know, we might be in front of the next Yahoo, the next the demise of an internet behemoth, or we might see that the company is able to revolutionize something or come up with new tricks, or new products that make search attractive again.