A new Bloomberg Intelligence (BI) survey has found that around 60% of respondents, between the ages of 16 and 34, believe ChatGPT results are better than Google search, a result that suggests adoption of the tool is poised to expand. Despite this, a vast majority said they weren’t willing to pay more than $10 a month for a subscription.
This should be on all brand and retailer’s radar as a shift away from traditional search engines will turn the entire online advertising industry on it’s head. And, setting aside paid search, how do you optimise your products for generative AI tools when you have no idea how they have been trained and how to include your products into this training data?
The use of generative AI tools is skewed toward 16-34 year olds vs. older age groups. The category with the highest adoption so far is for studies, followed by conversational interfaces, suggesting to us that the younger age group may help drive a permanent shift in how search is used online. Generating text and images is another popular use that’s likely to help boost spending around the use of personalised digital assistants. Though the percentages were lower for work-related research and computer coding, we believe that’s probably due to the lower adoption of generative AI among users 35 and older.
– Mandeep Singh, BI Senior Technology Analyst
Generative AI Search Quality vs. Google
Though 80% of the 650 participants in BI’s generative AI survey still prefer Google for search across form factors, including mobile and desktop, about 54% of the respondents felt the quality of ChatGPT results is better than Google. That could be partially due to the conversational and in-page paragraph summary for ChatGPT, which doesn’t require a user to click on links. BI believes it is also suggestive of the improved quality of responses driven by deep learning and increased personalized context for enhancing the search results.
About 93% of the participants in the BIoomberg Intelligence survey aren’t willing to pay more than $10 a month for a generative AI subscription, suggesting to us that a lower price with an ad-based model could help boost adoption. Only 1% of the respondents are willing to pay a subscription of $20 a month for ChatGPT, with about 12% amenable to $6-$10.
– Mandeep Singh, BI Senior Technology Analyst
IP, Safety Concerns Around Training Data
About 40% of respondents in the BI survey showed concern around generative AI’s use of information that could breach intellectual property rights. Still, a majority feels OK using such tools as long as they provide better results than traditional forms of search through Google and other websites. BI believes IP concerns may likely reduce over time since companies are likely to share more information about the training of their algorithms using proprietary vs. open-web data.
