Marissa Mayer Pitches Ad-backed AI Chatbot Model

Marissa Mayer proposes a business model for AI chatbots funded by advertising, highlighting potential opportunities for monetization

Marissa Mayer possesses a wealth of knowledge regarding the potential and challenges of online advertising. She was the CEO of Yahoo for several years and played a critical role in the early days of Google Search.

Mayer is currently the CEO of Sunshine, her own company. Sunshine develops applications that facilitate efficient sharing of photos among groups, organizing contacts, and retrieving friends’ anniversaries.

Despite the fact that none of these applications have yet taken off, Mayer’s background warrants consideration of her perspective on online advertising.

At the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Mayer was questioned about how she anticipates advertisers will react as AI tools alter consumers’ expectations regarding the availability and presentation of information.

Her response: In order to provide consumers with the most accurate and comprehensive responses, advertisers will be required to disclose an unprecedented amount of data.

She cited the example of concert tickets from the early days of Google Search.

“Concert tickets were one of the classic examples we used to discuss how ads improve search.” The fact that an advertiser is willing to pay to appear in the search results when individuals are searching for concert tickets is actually a sign of quality.

Additionally, the searcher is content with this situation, as they are not interested in reading articles about the concert they wish to attend; they are interested in purchasing tickets.

Therefore, expectations are satisfactorily aligned between the advertiser and the searcher.

Mayer envisions that in the AI era, individuals inquire about tickets for a specific concert to determine the availability of seats, their location within the stadium, and the cost.

They desire that information to be synthesized in generative AI, as they perceive it to be. Therefore, advertisers must establish even closer partnerships with Google and other search engines to ensure that their products are effectively presented and integrated with the response.

During an interview with Max Child, Mayer was asked whether companies such as StubHub or Ticketmaster would be willing to provide Google with the necessary data to provide this level of detail.

She responded, “I believe that it is evident that a greater number of advertisers are providing full inventory information and a variety of other aspects and facets of the data. This trend is likely to persist.”

Despite the fact that Mayer was discussing search specifically, it is also an intriguing hypothetical business case for pure-play AI providers such as OpenAI and Perplexity.

For instance, advertisers may collaborate with these organizations to provide sponsored responses to particular queries, particularly when the responses are pertinent to the user’s inquiry.

As the costs of computing for AI continue to increase, AI companies will inevitably be compelled to pursue alternative revenue streams.