What Changed In AI And Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, And What Comes Next (Episode 478) Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce And Digital Strategy podcast

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What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478)

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2025 has not been a year of incremental change. We’re living through dramatic changes. Most marketers and e-commerce folks started the year “playing with AI.” Now we’re considering when it will replace everyday interactions with our customers.

This much change, this fast, requires us to take a moment and reflect on what we’ve learned in the last year, why it matters for our businesses, and what we need to do to deal with whatever comes next. That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Most importantly, I try to wrap up these lessons into an actionable framework you can use, today, and make sure your business gets the benefits of AI, not just the costs.

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What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) — Headlines and Show Notes

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Transcript: What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next

Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. As the year wraps up, I wanted to do something a little different than what I usually do. This is not a "best of" episode and it’s not about tools or trends or predictions. Instead, it’s about the ideas that kept coming up no matter what was going on in the headlines or the news all year long.

Because when I look back at 2025, we talked about AI, we talked about Google, we talked about content and SEO and brand and platforms and jobs and just a whole host of things. But underneath all of that, we were really talking about three big ideas:

Who decides?
What differentiates you?
And who controls the relationship with your customer.

So this episode is a recap of what changed this year, why it matters more than most people realize, and what I think you should do about it going into next year. This is episode 478 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

If you think back to the beginning of 2025, we were asking very simple questions about what AI was going to do for us. We were asking things like, “Can AI write a blog post? Can it write a headline? Can it create an image?"

Today, we’re already asking whether AI is going to replace the very concept of searching and “how soon AI will become your customer.” How soon the things that you will do will not be on behalf of the human, but on behalf of the artificial intelligence?

And the big idea here is that this has not been a year of incremental change. This has been a year of decoupling.

We’re seeing the decoupling of finding from clicking. We’re seeing the decoupling of discovery from awareness. And we’re seeing the decoupling of our brands and our websites from the people who traditionally have used them.

Now over the course of the last year, we’ve done 33 episodes of this show, and I’m going to try as best I can to synthesize those 33 episodes down into one actionable framework that you can use going forward. I’m going to cover a bunch of stuff. All of the realities that we’re seeing in terms of what’s happening with gatekeepers, why I think it’s ever more important that your brand is the prompt and in particular, why your digital reset is your core path forward in 2026.

So let’s start with “Gatekeepers gonna gate." You’ve heard me say this a gazillion times on this show. Earlier this year, we talked about all of the different ways that Big Tech gets between you and your customers and all of the things that they do to build that relationship. Not for you, but for themselves.

As you know, Big Tech isn’t here to help you find customers. Big Tech is here to help themselves find customers. They are here to keep customers within their ecosystem. Yes, they are dependent upon ads, so there will have to be clicks at some point in the process if they are going to make some money.

What’s also true is that for many years when we think about search or we think about social, we’ve been in a reality where some of those clicks, some of the time, were free. Increasingly, we’re entering a world where every meaningful click for your business may be paid from these folks.

In episode 467, we looked at the real story of zero-click search. And if Google provides an answer via an AI Overview or within Gemini, or ChatGPT provides an answer, or Claude provides an answer, or Perplexity provides an answer, your blue link, your organic search result doesn’t matter. That ship has sailed. Those days are gone.

The reality is that you aren’t competing with other brands anymore. You’re competing with the platform’s desire and need to keep the user. You’re competing with Big Tech itself.

Now, as you well know, that means that the cost of rented land is essentially going up. You’ve heard me say — you’ve heard lots of people over the years say — "don’t build your brand on rented land.” The reality now is that everything is becoming rented land.

We’re in a crazy new world and it’s just going to get crazier. We know that Google is already testing ad products. We know that ChatGPT has tested some and may again and we just should expect more of that.

We also know, as we discussed in episode 456 of the show, that we’re in a strange economy. Things might be tough in 2026. You can’t afford to pay a toll to Big Tech on every transaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 20 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 30 percent. It’s more expensive than you want to have to pay in an environment where you’re probably going to be competing for every last dollar and if every last penny.

And so the key question that I think we have to ask ourselves, regardless of which member of Big Tech we’re talking about, is if Google or Meta or ChatGPT or Amazon, whomever, Expedia, Booking.com, Yelp, Yext, OpenTable, right? Any of these folks. If they turned off your traffic tomorrow, would your business survive another day?

That’s the world we’re living in now and that’s the question you need to ask. If Google turned off your traffic tomorrow, how long could you survive?

To me, that was the aha moment of the year. And it’s why I’ve become so convinced that your brand is the prompt. In an AI world, the notion of generic search, the notion of unbranded search is dead.

If someone asked an AI for best hotel, the AI is going to choose the winner. You really don’t get a lot of say in that. If someone asked for a specific hotel, "Tim’s Hotel in Charleston," "Tim’s Hotel in Orlando," you are the only answer. That’s where you’re trying to get to.

We need to think about our brand as the insurance policy that sets us apart from everybody else. As I mentioned in episode 472, "brand isn’t everything; it’s the only thing." Your brand is the only thing an AI cannot replicate. It’s the only thing it can’t answer in place of you, right? When somebody asks for you by brand, aure, the AI might hallucinate, but that’s going to tell the customer pretty quickly that that’s not giving them the answer they’re looking for.

The other thing is your brand is a mental shortcut for your customers. It forces the AI to surface your business. That becomes even more important when we think about agentic AI, something I talked about in episodes 466, something I talked about in episode 470. We’ve moved from talking about chatbots to talking about agents. We’re entering a world where AI isn’t just software and programs that talk. They’re software that does. They’re software that acts.

When an AI agent is shopping for your customer, your emotional branding may not work, but your authority does. The data you have about your customer, the data that helps you talk to what your customer’s needs are, does. Your content becomes so much more important, not just in terms of being distinct, though that’s important.

But it makes it important that your content actually answers the questions your customers have. In episode 449, I talked about the death of content marketing. And I said, know, AI will only kill content if your content is generic.

If an AI can write your content, maybe you don’t need to publish that content unless it’s answering a very specific question. Your content has to be a 24x7x365 salesperson and a 24x7x365 customer service rep. It has to answer the questions your customer has and many of those questions have to be about your values:

What do you stand for?
What sets you apart?
What is your specific point of view?

When we think about the digital reset and how that plays into that — and obviously this is something I talked about in episode 458, 461, 473 — your digital reset is the core of my new book and it’s something I spent the back half of the year talking about.

What you want to remember is that your reset isn’t about ignoring AI. It isn’t even about ignoring gatekeepers. It’s about bypassing them. It’s about thinking beyond them every chance you get.

And we’ve talked about this many, many, many times that what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to have content, customer experience, and data that allows you to connect with your customers directly.

So I’m actually going to flip these on their head for a moment because first we want to talk about data. If you don’t have a direct line to your customers, whether it’s email, whether it’s SMS, whether it’s snail mail to your customer, if you can’t talk to them directly, you don’t own your business. A gatekeeper does.

You also need to own the experience. If your website, if your app, if however your customer is connecting with you isn’t distinct and isn’t easy for them to use and doesn’t solve their problem, you’re never going to give them a reason to come back. They’re not going to remember you. Your site isn’t a brochure. It isn’t content just for content sake. It’s a utility. It solves a problem.

And it might be that the AI is what interacts with that site. But at a certain point, they may come to your site and the site needs to be something that’s so useful they’ll want to come back again or at least direct their AI to it the next time that they have a problem that you can solve.

You also want to make sure that it’s designed to capture data from the customer and give them a good reason to want to give you their data and continue the conversation. Hugely important.

You want to give them a reason to come to you that an AI cannot summarize in a paragraph. And of course, all of this has to do with owning trust. In an age of AI fakes, a deep fakes, of AI slop, humanity, the thing that sets you apart, is a premium product. It’s a thing that your customers will remember. You need to be not just known, you need to be loved. You don’t just need to be found, you need to be sought out. That’s crucial.

You’ve got to share your face. You’ve got to share your values. You have to tell them the why behind the what. Because that’s going to be crucial for customers saying not just, "help me find a thing," but “Help me find your thing. Help me find you."

It’s really about focusing on fundamentals, building a deep, meaningful, lasting relationship with your customers. As I said in episode 455, AI can’t save you from a bad strategy. This isn’t about looking for the ChatGPT prompt of the week. It’s about looking for how to make your customers’ lives better. It’s the only strategy that is truly future-proof.

Think of your favorite brands, ever. The brands you know and trust and love more than anything else. You don’t have to go ask an AI to help you find something like that. You already know them. You might tell your agent, go there, go get this for me from the people who I like. But you don’t have to ask the AI what the answer to the question is. You know the answer to the question. That’s what you want your customers to do with your brand too.

So 2025 was the year that we realized the era of SEO and social as we knew it is, if not over, certainly coming to an end. What takes its place is an era of brand autonomy, an era of brand differentiation and brand distinction and brands that customers ask for by name. Your brand is the prompt.

And I think there’s really three immediate actions as you go into 2026.

First, take a look at all of the places where you rely upon rented land today. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google, it doesn’t matter if it’s Meta, it doesn’t matter if it’s TikTok, it doesn’t matter if it’s LinkedIn. If one of them were to change their algorithm tomorrow, how long would your business survive? You need to understand how vulnerable you are so that you can start to take the actions necessary to reduce the risk to your brand.

The next is that you need to focus your brand on being remembered, not just found. What are the things that set you apart in terms of your values, in terms of your face, in terms of your voice, in terms of your utility that genuinely differentiate you from anybody else in the marketplace?

You also need to think about your owned assets in detail. Are you investing in your email list? Are you investing in your SMS communications? Are you investing in ways to contact your customer directly and making them want to contact you directly? This isn’t about, you know, "hey, let’s scam them into giving us data they don’t want to give us." It’s about being a place they can’t wait to give us data that they want to talk to.

Invest in those and so that you can grow a connection with your customers over the long run.

We know that gatekeepers are gonna gate it’s what they do But they can only put those gates in front of people who don’t have direct relationships with their customers. It is time for you to stop being somebody on the wrong side of the gate. It’s time for you to be a destination unto yourself. It is time for you to be the brand that is the prompt. And if you do that all throughout 2026, I’m confident you’re going to do just fine.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? And let them know what you think, too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 478, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And as always, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, something that goes deeper into this topic, I would love to suggest Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. It dives into today’s topic in even greater detail. Please pick up a copy, share it with your friends, and l let me know what you think once you’ve read it. I would genuinely appreciate hearing from you.

Finally, thank you so much for listening, not just today, but all year long. This show, I’ve said this many, times, but this show simply would not happen without you.

We’re going to take the next two weeks off for the holidays. I hope you all have a fantastic holiday season. We will post some of the best of the pod over the next couple of weeks for you to revisit some topics you might remember. But until then, I hope you have a wonderful holiday. hope you please, please, please be well. Please be safe and as always, be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

The post What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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