I have been watching the announced developments in AI over the last week or so from OpenAi, Microsoft and Google and while they all have aspects that blow my socks off, I still get the feeling we are going down a rabbit hole that gets narrower and narrower.

As our AI agents get to know us better, they are focussing too much.

The job of a good salesman or shop assistant is to listen to the problem you need solved and then present a curated list of products that may solve this problem. This often embraces the concepts of “you don’t know what you don’t know” and “we have solutions for problems you don’t even know you have.”

I can’t see anything in these announcements that is going to advance “discovery.” This is the concept that facilitates serendipitous product discovery.

How do you build discovery into an online store? But more importantly how do you train AI Agents to present this in the new world of AI Overviews.

Are we all condemned to doom scrolling social media to find out what we don’t know?