A 2024 conversation (podcast/video) between Kieran Flanagan (Zapier CMO) and Kip Wagner (HubSpot CMO) forecasting how forthcoming advances in large language models (notably 'GPT5') and AI copilots will transform marketing. They argue AI copilots will supplant traditional search for many queries, monetize largely through ads/affiliate-like models, create new audience segmentation and personalization opportunities, and shift marketers toward competing on ad spend and integration with copilot platforms.
Chapters
GPT5 is going to drop in the next 12 months and it's going to transform marketing forever. On this show, we are going to bring you into the future to show you what happens when GPT5 is launched.
And used by the world. GPT5 will be able to do a lot more. This technology, even with all of its current limitations, is far more useful than we thought.
We're going to tell you how you can monetize copilots and the customers. We're going to show you how AI can create brand new segments for marketing. We're going to show you why marketers will have their own personalization engines and the marketing skills of the future that will make you successful in this era. Hey guys, I'm Kieran Flanagan, the CMO over at Zapier and here as always with Kip Wagner, the CMO over at HubSpot. And we have got an incredible show for you today.
We have a very special episode because we're going to talk about the future. We're shining up the crystal ball and we're looking to the future in a world where search engines don't exist. Kieran, you have done a little bit of work that you want to walk everybody through today. You've done a kind of thought exercise of like, what if search engines aren't a part of our marketing strategy in the future? What the heck would we actually do? So many marketers rely on search, rely on paid search, so search engine optimization, all of those strategies to get customers and you're going to talk to us a little bit about like, what if you couldn't do that?
I am going to give you a glimpse of a hypothetical future. So I hopped into my marketing time machine. It is 2026. Do not argue with me on the date. Let's just imagine evolution happens much more rapidly than you think. So it's 2026. You, you and I have just come back from a vacation with our other halfs from Bordeaux. We've drunk a lot of good red wine. We've been really riffing on the future of marketing kit because what happened was GPT5, the reliability in that LLM and the reliability in ChatGPT because of that large language model got much more reliable. Which meant when you asked that 10,000 questions, it would for the most part be pretty accurate in giving you 10,000 answers. Even when there's subjectivity, it could bring you through that subjectivity and give you.
A pretty coherent answer.
This was the tipping point for when people gravitated from Google's traditional blue Link search engine to these kind of AI copilots. Now, what happened? Like Google initially wanted to try to integrate these AI features into its search engine. Actually, this is a real thing that happened. They released a press release recently. Remember you and I did an episode back in May. It was on search labs.
They were so blown away with what they were doing, Karen.
And now it turns out they faked the product marketing video and now they actually faked the search labs. Because what they're doing is they're using search labs to develop features and they want to integrate them into their core search engine. Why do they want to do that? Because they do not want to disrupt the AdWord, Ad Rep, the AdWords model, their Ad revenue model. But in this future, what happened was ChatGPT and these copilots got so good, they just had no other choice but to disrupt their own model. And now we live in a world where people primarily use AI chat to get search knowledge and they only really use Google search engine to clarify, to make sure that the ChatGPT is accurate. Right? And those blue links are a pain. And so in that world where we really don't use search engines and you don't really get search traffic in the same way you did, what actually happened to marketers? What do marketers do? And for this episode, we are going to give you the hypothetical future that you all may actually live in and what your marketing plan might look like in two to three years. And so I want to go into the very first thing and see what you think about this, Kip. Right?
So, okay, let's do it.
All right, so we have copilots, right? Like that's one thing we're getting, right? So you have Microsoft copilot, you have ChatGPT, you have all these different copilots, right? Now the interesting thing about these co pilots is when the large language models, when the LLMs all become very, very similar, which means the experience becomes very similar, it's really just a race to the bottom, right? It's a race to the bottom on price. And actually, if you look at a lot of the kind of PR and stuff coming from OpenAI and these kind of companies, they think the price of these models will come down over time, right? So they're able to red. And so when you think about how they monetize, I think they're going to monetize through these subscription packages which they have now, but I think they'll go down the Netflix model. What have these streaming services found out? They found out that there is very High churn when there's a lot of competition. And because of that they are starting to look like traditional TV stations where they have a mix of subscription packages and ads. And I think that's what we'll see in a lot of these co pilots will see these ads models. And so when you see these ads models, I think the only way marketers will be able to leverage co pilots to grow their business will not be through anything organic. And I can get into why I think that is it will actually be through ads, right? And I think ads will be deeply integrated into the experience. I take a little bit of the think about the experience we covered for search labs from Google. The AI itself was crafting the user interface on the fly, right? It was building apps, it was building all of these different things to answer the search, building carousels. I think what you will do is you'll hook your website, your, your technology into the platform and it will be able to like serve the ad, build the legion form, build a transaction flow, build a checkout, do it all within the ads copilot experience and be able to tell you like, okay, you captured X amount of traffic, you capture X amount of leads that cost you X amount of money and they converted at X amount of rate to X amount of customers. And the only thing you'll literally be able to do is either increase your spend to get more people like that or decrease your spend or try new audiences. So you'll primarily be fighting a battle against other brands on price. So yes, we'll get co pilots, but I don't think there's going to be a lot we're going to be able to do with them other than spend money through the ads which are optimized perfectly by AI. So that's my first thing is like get co pilots monetized through ads.
I have a very spicy, interesting take on this, Karen, which is, I think you're generally, I generally agree with you, but what this tells me is this is like affiliate marketing 2.0. It's like AI led affiliate marketing.
AI is the affiliate actually for everyone.
AI is the affiliate. Which is, which is kind of clever, right? For folks who aren't familiar with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing marketing is, hey, I go and work with different publishers, websites, businesses, and I offer some type of fee per lead, per customer, referral, per signup, whatever it is. And then we build these kind of custom campaigns and offers to try to generate those. And what we're essentially saying is AI in the future will do those affiliate campaigns in real time and they'll just be a bidding war across people who want to run those campaigns. And so part of this is like we want to give you a look at the future, but help you prepare for the future today. There are a lot of people there who don't understand affiliate marketing. Don't do much of affiliate marketing. It's probably a good time to start understanding, maybe making affiliate marketing a little bit part of your mix. Because as the search and discovery experience evolves and it becomes more organic, it becomes more integrated, what is now like a classic affiliate experience is going to be much closer to what that ad unit is going to look like and work like, which is like what you're arguing, Kieran, which I completely agree with. I think there's just some stepping stones you can take as a marketer today to get there.
Right. I think. I think the tough thing or the challenging thing in this world for a marketer is how much leverage they can get over competitors outside of just spending more money.
That's a problem.
I think my TLDR here is in the co pilot anyway and these kind of AI generated ads, it's primarily going to be a budget game because the AI is going to be able to understand how to perfectly craft the copy, perfectly craft the audience segmentation and the kind of whatever the checkout experience may be. And the that fact.
