It’s no secret—AI is the latest technological gold rush. This year, Microsoft is investing $80 billion to build AI-enabled data centers for training AI models and deploying AI-powered and cloud-based applications. And they’re not alone. Heralded as the next industrial revolution, AI is already transforming the way business is conducted, including the way we search, shop, and interact with digital commerce.
That’s why Pacvue was privileged to host a learning and networking event—”The Future of AI for Search Breakfast”—in the Seattle area on Friday, March 14th to explore the exciting implications of AI on search. We brought in two leading AI experts—Tarek Najm (Co-Founder & CTO, ProRata.ai) and Zhaohui Tang (Co-Founder & Board Director, Pacvue)—to shine a bright, strategic light on the AI-for-search landscape.
Here’s what we learned.
- AI-driven search is already here—whether you’re ready or not.
From streamlining workflows to automating customer support and advertising through agents, AI is currently transforming the way we run and optimize our most basic operations. Tarek relayed how Microsoft formerly relied on a team of 1,400 professionals to work on a single system. Now, they manage three systems with a team of 10. The biggest shift both speakers noticed in terms of AI-driven search, however, was the evolution of search from statistical to semantic.
- The next generation of search is powered by semantics, not keywords.
While we traditionally optimized our websites, social posts, e-commerce listings and more with keywords, the advent of AI has changed the search game.
“Keywords are dead.” — Bill Gross, inventor of keyword advertising.
Today, semantics drive the greatest visibility, as many users rely on generative AI tools like ChatGPT to answer the questions they’d formally pose to a search engine. More importantly, instead of clicking through to websites for their answers, they’re reading them in the search results pages themselves.
“Click-through rates for publisher sites have declined by 25% because of Google’s AI crawlers. Soon, most websites will block crawling.” — Tarek Najm (Co-Founder & CTO, ProRata.ai)
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the future of SEO will be shaped by:
- Semantics
- Rich media—especially video
- Agents
- Hyper-personalization, context, and first-principles thinking are the keys to search success.
In this brave new world of AI-powered search, brands need to adapt to be successful—or even solvent, in some cases. Instead of resisting these new AI advancements, it’s more productive and profitable to embrace them. To that point, Tarek repeated a famous Jenson Huang (CEO, NVIDIA) quote multiple times throughout the event: “AI will not replace you; someone who uses AI will replace you.” Both speakers advised attendees to shift their focus from keyword-based to context- and relevance-driven SEO while investing in rich media—particularly video—to make a significant and sustainable impact on their search performance.
“Content over keywords.” — Zhaohui Tang (Co-Founder & Board Director, Pacvue)
They also encouraged running novel experiments with AI—even prompting generative AI tools like ChatGPT to hallucinate. As Tarek demonstrated, this is an incredibly effective way to discover strategies, tactics, insights, perspectives, and more that you wouldn’t think to research or explore yourself. Of course, generative AI is still in its relative infancy, and challenges like data accuracy and content attribution persist, but it’s increasingly clear that the AI revolution is well underway and brands that lean into this technology can expect incredible search and business success.
If you’d like to learn more about how Pacvue is leading the charge of AI-powered commerce (including search), check out our award-winning platform here.
