I Told Bloomberg: The Internet Is Getting a New Front Door | AI Shopping Revolution

Now up more than 1%. The Dow up 8/10 of a percent. The 10 year treasury yield at 4%, the 2 year yield at 3.49%. Deere and Company's weak forecast for the year ahead reinforces the difficulty in predicting a recovery in the US Foreign economy as uncertainty continues to swirl over the impact of tariffs and trade deals. Shares of Deere are more than 5% lower. For on demand news 24 hours a day. Subscribe to Bloomberg News now wherever you get your podcasts on. I'm Amy Morris. That's Bloomberg Business Flash now back to Bloomberg Intelligence with Christina Aquino and Paul Sweeney.

Amy Morris, thank you so much. We appreciate that. Christina Keynote. She's sitting in for Scarlet Fu. I'm Paul Sweeney. We're live here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. We are streaming live on YouTube as well. So check us out there. I tell you, just in the last year or two, this AI is crept into our vocabulary. I think before it was just big data and then before that it was just data. I don't know, but it's just everywhere. And I think it's, I'm being told it's also going to be part of our shopping experience as well as we head into the big shopping part of the year. I have no idea how that's going to work. Matt Britton, he does. He's the CEO of market research firm Suzy and he is the author of a book entitled Generation AI why Generation Alpha and the Age of AI Will Change Everything. Okay, that kind of gets at you. Matt, thanks so much for joining us here. AI shopping go. What's going to happen?

Well, you know, the Internet looks like it's about to have a new front door. For the last two decades, if we wanted to find out anything, whether it was for research or we were booking travel or we wanted to buy something, you know, the word Google has become a verb in our culture, but that is starting to shift. In fact, Google reported a 9% year over year decline in their classic link search. And in Q3 of 2025, at the same time, ChatGPT saw 1.8 billion weekly queries as of October 2025. And over 40% of those queries are search like in nature. So consumers are sort of acting with their fingers, so to speak, in terms of the sites that they're going to and they're going to these large language models. Now it should be stated that Google also has its own large language model called Gemini, which released an incredible version, Gemini 3 just this week. So I, I'm not saying that Google itself is in trouble, but the notion of going to a traditional search engine to find things at the beginning of your shopping journey, I don't think will ever look the same way again.

Yeah, Matt, I know exactly what you mean, because just yesterday I was searching in my chatgpt for more affordable dupes of this really expensive skincare product that I'm in the market for. So, yes, exactly what you're talking about. But, you know, for mine and Paul's generations, this is something that we're still kind of wrapping our heads around. Right. But you're talking about Generation Alphas. The generation do basically just very. This is innately something that they do. So talk to us about that sort of generational shift. How is that going to change the landscape of, I guess, kind of like consumer activity now that we do have this generation? That's just. This is just what they do, use AI for everything.

Absolutely. So I've spent my career, you know, I started my career in year 2000, and back then the new consumer was the millennial generation, which was the first generation to grow up with the Internet and household. And then 10 to 15 years later, the focus was on Gen Z, which of course is now known as a social media and iPhone generation, meaning that they never knew a world without social media. And the iPhone Gen Alpha, currently aged 0 to 15 years old, is going to be known as the AI generation. They are never going to know a world without AI, without a technology that you can interact with the same way that you interact with other people. So for them, if you think about it, they never will have lived through a world where you went to Google, right? And one day they may look at traditional search engines the way you and I look at rotary landlines, right? And for them, it's going to be just de facto behavior to go to a chat cbt to do research. And what's starting to happen is whether it's Perplexity or chatgpt, they are all now integrating commerce functionality into their platforms where now you can actually buy on these platforms as well.

So are brands ready for this? And I think I know the answer there.

Well, they're not. And they're trying to figure it out. And the reality is it's just moving so fast. You know, it's really hard to understand how to behave when you have a new large language model coming out each week. For years, these brands were focused on search engine optimization. How does your brand come up first when someone's searching in your category? Now the big term is geo which is essentially optimization for AI models. And brands right now are clamoring to be the first brand that pops up if someone searches for a luxury handbag under $300 for a teenage girl. Right. Every brand wants to be the first brand that ChatGPT recommends. And right now, frankly, it's kind of a black box and a mystery of how to get. But it's going to be, you know, companies that figure that out are going to suddenly find themselves in a very fortunate situation. It's going to create new winners and new losers very quickly.

Yeah, well, Matt, just kind of shifting your converse away a little bit from the AI factor here and just kind of in general, kind of some of the emerging trends in shopping at the moment you mentioned live shopping is something that is becoming more of a thing certainly for younger generations. That's to going kind of how they shop now. They shop on TikTok with creators kind of going live and telling them buy this product. It's kind of like the home shopping network but for, for this.

It's a new qvc.

Exactly.

New qvc.

Exactly. So yeah, tell us more about that.

So this year, for the first time ever, the average age of a first time mom in the US is Gen Z, which means the average age of, of a mom who's ahead, you know, head of their household and buying the Tide detergent and you know, Gillette shaving cream for the home. Grew up looking at their phone and when they are looking at their phone, they are not looking at content from traditional media networks, but instead content from creators and influencers, people who have built large followings on these platforms through really compelling social media content. For years these creators were kind of limited to earning money through awareness and impressions. But now they are moving further down the funnel and they are engaging in. What you definitely talked about is live shopping, whether it's on TikTok or an emerging platform called whatnot where they can actually use their audience, use their credibility and authenticity, authenticity in the space that she sell products. In some instances it's products that they actually have an equity stake in or they build on their own and other instances they're simply an agent earning commission on products that they sell. But I would expect to see more and more of this over time.

Who is or what is the alpha buyer?

Well, the alpha buyer is gen alpha and the alpha buyer is really skipping the funnel entirely. You know, they are essentially going down social video. They're focusing on creator trust. They want instant checkout. You know, you know, they have very low tolerance for any Friction in the buying process. So it's a completely new set of expectations that businesses really need to build around. Yeah.

And you know, I guess when you say that, they're kind of skipping the funnel. Exactly right. So this could potentially transform how people shop. Like, we may not need websites anywhere. People, people can just go on TikTok or whichever social media, like.

Absolutely, yeah.

Are you seeing companies, guys?

I mean, think about it. Think about what, what, what's been the last 10 years? It's like you make hears about something on TV or maybe you saw an ad on Facebook or Instagram and then maybe you go and Google and do more research and you go to Amazon and purchase it. Right. So you're going to a variety of different places, there's a variety of different media channels. But now you can do your research and you can interact and you can over time purchase on maybe just one platform. Right. And that's going to change the entire funnel and it's going to create, you know, the risk there is that you're going to have fewer and fewer companies control more and more of the market, which we've obviously seen with the Mag 7 over time. You know, obviously OpenAI is a new entrant in the space. You have other entrants like Claude, which is a large language model from Anthropic and of course Perplexity, as I mentioned. So there are some new players, but it's looking more and more like big tech is going to play a huge role in this shift. What does Amazon do? You know, I think that's one of the questions I have, because if you can buy over ChatGPT where it has context, what's going to happen with Amazon?

Matt, fascinating discussion. We really appreciate getting a few minutes of your time. Matt Britton, he's the CEO of market research firm Suzy and the author of the book Generation AI why Generation Alpha and the Age of AI Will Change Everything. And I think that just from my limited perspective, that title says a lot. And I don't doubt it. I don't doubt it. And it kind of goes back to Gene Munster, one of the smartest tech analysts out there, kind of said, hey, put AI in same category as electricity. I said, wow. And that's above, way above the importance of the Internet. This is Bloomberg.