The Great Unlock of Your Time & How the Sway of Brand is Changing

In this edition, we’ll debate the evolving sway of brand in purchase decisions. And we will challenge the expectation of AI freeing up our time.

Edition #34 of Implications.

• This edition explores forecasts and implications around: (1) the unlock of your precious time and attention - and what may transpire as a result, (2) the sway of brand in the AI era - an argument for and against the importance of brand, and (3) some surprises at the end, as always.

• If you’re new to IMPLICATIONS, here’s the rundown on what to expect. This ~monthly analysis is written for founders + investors I work with, colleagues, and a group of now ~40k subscribers. I aim for quality, density, and provocation vs. frequency and trendiness. We don’t cover news; we explore the implications of what’s happening. My goal is to ignite discussion, socialize edges that may someday become the center, and help you connect dots.

• If you missed the big annual analysis or more recent editions of Implications, check out recent analysis and archives here. A few recommendations based on reader engagement:

  • How might AI unleash an entirely different next generation of social apps, media and entertainment platforms, and other consumer-oriented experiences? Our entire future cannot be limited to an endless series of chats!

  • Modern tools that unlock 100x more cycles of ideation and concepting are making a profound impact on the creators who use them. Here are some thoughts on why the future of creativity is bright, albeit different.

  • There is much focus on how bad actors may use AI to trick us (fake media, cloned voices, extended context windows to socialize us for a long-game scam, etc), but how might AI ultimately save us?

Your most precious resource (and the ultimate gift) in the era of AI is your human time and attention.

“AI will free up so much time” is a common claim these days. But if you really think about the implications of being infused with superpowers to achieve more per minute, it gets a bit more complicated. Hear me out…

• As we reclaim more time, we’ll value it even more. This is somewhat paradoxical, but it’s important. In a world in which our energy and potential is compounded by the technologies we use, we will all be able to achieve more per minute. You’ll offload all sorts of tasks and explorations to agents, run countless automated tasks at once, and have logic-driven technology make decisions on your behalf while you sleep. As it becomes possible to do more every minute, a minute becomes more powerful. You might think this means that you’ll be more free with your newfound “spare time” minutes you reclaim. However, “Jevons Paradox” suggests the opposite. Jevons Paradox applies to circumstances where increased efficiency of a precious resource leads to a rise in the total consumption of that resource. In many situations, including the use and availability of semiconductors and chips for computation, and our own most personal computers (our brains), gains in efficiency do NOT lead to conservation. Instead, as these resources become more efficient, they become used even more than ever before. Perhaps, as our minutes become exponentially more powerful, we will want to do even more with them? My bet is that we end up wanting more minutes than ever before as the ROI of a minute goes up. In short, your minutes will become far more valuable to you (and to your employer, now that you are so much more capable).

• When minutes become more valuable, what cultural practices and norms might change? Given time is truly the most precious commodity (and will be reclaimed as well as grow in value), my bet is that we will spend our time with more intention on scarce things that AI and tech cannot do for us. For example, we will crave human-crafted experiences, like non-scalable chef creations, artistic journeys, and travel off the beaten path. Things that require time will become more valuable. I hope this trend ignites a new wave of small businesses that create such experiences as the labor markets shift to accommodate AI and the drastic cut in knowledge worker jobs. I also wonder how, in our personal lives, we will start spending our time differently as it becomes more valuable? Will we make more things by hand — or by mind — that could otherwise be automated, if only to infuse time (value) into these things?

• Undivided focus and your precious human time are among the most scarce and meaningful gifts you can give others in the AI era. Especially as algorithms becoming more sophisticated in competing for our attention, giving your time to a human will be a gift. I expect our culture to crave the exchange of undivided attention. Showing your hands during a zoom meeting, eye to eye contact at a table with your phone away, or voice memos and handwritten notes that demonstrate the time you gave to someone will have tremendous meaning. The sensation of giving someone your minutes will grow. Finally, I think the bar for entertainment goes up dramatically as we become more protective of our attention and look for brands to signal the types of deeply meaningful stories that deserve are ever precious time. This trend was certainly a driver for me to join A24, and I think it will play out as top-tier stories become further differentiated from the masses of content.

The sway of brand in the age of AI: What happens to “brand” when we outsource our purchase decisions?

A common debate I have with leaders in tech and consumer products is whether “brand” will be more or less important in the AI era. One side argues that popular opinions about brand — and the general sway of a brand — will become less important as so many of our purchase decisions are made by a hyper-personalized AI that knows our preferences and past purchases so deeply that we just trust it over the influence of any brand. The other side of the argument is that we will rely even further on brand because of the rapid commoditization of everything, and the fact that LLMs will present options in ways that make options appear so equivalent that “brand” may ultimately drive our choices even more. There is also a great case to be made that, as humans, our natural tendency when something becomes abundant is to seek scarcity and meaning-infused versions of everything, signified by brand. Let’s explore some of the edges and key technologies helping determine the future influence of brand and our buying behaviors…

• Buying Agents for consumers: What happens when we outsource our purchase decisions to AI? Transactional behavior will change dramatically in the age of AI. The first phase of this era is simply relying on ChatGPT answers, but I anticipate a world where agents that know us extremely well (including our dietary and fashion preferences, sizes, current closet and pantry inventory, etc) will become a very trusted if not default decision maker for our purchases. If you really think about it, why would you ever trust a company’s heavily biased product descriptions and determinations on what to merchandise to you when you can summon the knowledge of humanity coupled with a highly trained agent that is deeply attuned to your likes and interests to suggest the best options? Also, will you also depend on your agent to advise you not to buy? Perhaps budget-driven advise like, “do you really need another guitar when it will delay buying a house for another month?” Or data-driven guidance like, “this is a really bad time to buy a flight to Italy — better to wait until fall when it’s cheaper and less crowded.” Of course, these are just a few more of the many wild changes to be expected for the future of commerce.

• Consumer brand agents and support agents begin to blend. I have seen a growing number of startups and established marketing technology companies begin development of a new variety of agents that work on behalf of a brand to engage consumers and personalize shopping experiences. “Hi Scott, welcome to On Running, how can I help you? Are you looking for running shoes today or something else?” It is clear that we will soon be greeted by digital agents on every website we visit. Some will be audio-first experiences, some will remember our past history with the brand, while others will request access to our broader “memory” stored with an LLM like ChatGPT or perhaps a platform-agnostic player like Mem0, a company from my seed portfolio getting a lot of traction these days. But big questions loom: Will these consumer brand agents be connected to a company’s marketing stack? Will these agents also be designed to handle customer support inquiries? Will they only operate within a company’s website, or will they integrate into our general AI tools or perhaps even other brand’s websites via some form of partnership? Are they considered marketing or support tools? Does it even matter?

• Enterprise brand agents and sales agents begin to blend. I suspect we are VERY close to being greeted by an enterprise sales agent on every business-to-business services website we encounter. But one of the most exciting disruptions here could live within the procurement process itself, as a new breed of procurement agents (perhaps powered by market disrupters like Globality, a company I know well) take your order or request via a conversational form of an RFP, like “evaluate CRM options for teams of twenty, and propose the best value and solution for my company,” and then do all the research, run price and feature comparisons, perform reference checking, and perhaps even the negotiate on your behalf. Rather than search Google, ask peers in the industry, and consult industry analyst reports, you’ll start tasking agents to do all the research and make an objective recommendation. What are the implications? First of all, the industry of influencing LLMs for such activities is going to be massive (see next bullet point). This world will also give rise to specialty buying agents that are trusted and trained on a very structured and controlled dataset.

• Brands must be optimized for an era in which AI recommendations will outperform human discovery. The emerging field of “AI visibility” and tailor-made tools to either track your AI visibility (where and how AI mentions your brand) as well as optimizing your brand and content for AI are becoming an absolutely critical part of every marketing stack. I’ve gotten to know the leader of this market, a company called Profound, since their seed stage and their co-founder James and team have helped me understand some of the implications for brands in the age of AI and the criticality of boosting your product visibility within shopping-oriented queries in ChatGPT, among other mainstream LLMS.

• Ultimately, “meaning” and human-crafted story will be the ultimate differentiator. For the last few years, we’ve explored in IMPLICATIONS the concept of a “meaning economy” in a world of content abundance and zero-cost content creation. What is meaning? It is the story, the purpose, the myths behind the creators, brands, and objects themselves, and the differentiating brand value that results. When anything becomes commoditized or ubiquitous — whether it is shoes, a popular restaurant that becomes a chain or content that gets reproduced endlessly by some soulless AI app — consumers tend to crave a more scarce, special, and differentiated alternative. What makes something scarce and differentiated? Meaning. As I often remind teams getting excited about the use of new AI tools for creativity, the science of business is scaling, but the art of business is the things that don’t scale. In the meaning economy, the art part becomes increasingly critical. As artists spend less time doing mundane repetitive stuff (thanks to AI), they’ll have more time to explore more ideas, take more creative risk, and ultimately create better stories.

Ideas, Missives & Mentions

Finally, here’s a set of ideas and worthwhile mentions (and stuff I want to keep out of web-scraper reach) intended for those I work with (free for founders in my portfolio, and colleagues…ping me!) and a smaller group of subscribers. We’ll cover a few things that caught my eye and have stayed on my mind as an investor, technologist, and product leader including surprising trends in the gap between popular and highly rated content, a contrarian view on clunky incumbent enterprise software, thoughts on flexibility, and a few data provocations and graphs that remained on my mind. Subscriptions go toward organizations I support including the Museum of Modern Art. Thanks again for following along, and to those who have reached out with ideas and feedback.