Is AI changing the decison-making game?

In the past few years, I’ve watched my friends and I switch from using Google to look for recommendations and advice to using TikTok and Instagram. When I decide I want Italian for dinner somewhere near my apartment, I open Instagram reels and type in “best Italian in NYC”. When I want to buy a new pair of shoes, I open TikTok and type in “cute sneakers for fall”. But recently, I've found myself turning to ChatGPT, especially for more niche requests. A few weeks ago, I woke up with an intense craving for a biscuit breakfast sandwich, opened ChatGPT, typed in “where can I find the best egg sandwich on a biscuit that’s within a twenty-minute walk of me”. What I got was three cafe options; I looked up the first option, saw a delicious-looking photo, and half an hour later, I had a BEC on a biscuit in my hands. 

Since that day, I've been thinking about how purchasing decisions are going to evolve over the next couple of years. As everyone with internet access and eyes knows, the ease that AI is bringing to daily life is incredible. Writing essays, brainstorming ideas, pulling research– the possibilities are limitless and ever-growing. As I've shifted from social media to AI models to help me make purchasing decisions, it’s gotten me thinking about the effects of AI for advertisers. These models are trained on so much data from the internet, and I think that as the popularity of using these models for decision-making grows, it’ll be even more important for brands to monitor how they are showing up online. SEO is already important for consumers researching brands, but this is increasingly translating over into AI search optimization.

From a consumer side, it’ll be interesting to see the shift from trusting influencers who promote products/stores/restaurants/etc online, to trusting AI models on what to do. While there is still a large element of trust-building between consumers and influencers, as they must decide if they trust the internet personality’s opinions, trusting AI models comes with the simple fact that the systems are built to optimize answers based on their training data, and therefore, the element of trust is more implied. So, the already low-level decision-making involved in deciding if one trusts an influencer is even more diminished when using AI models. I took the first breakfast place the model suggested, typed it into maps, and left my house. I could see myself using this for purchasing decisions across other categories, with prompts like “give me links for the best-rated pointed-toe black kitten heels under $50”. 

At this point, it seems ChatGPT is most handy when one has a very clear vision of what they want, but I could see it becoming popular for more general requests as people grow more comfortable trusting the technology. If consumers turn to ChatGPT for prompts like “where should I go to buy affordable men's workshirts” or “what's the best protein shake for muscle gains”, it decreases the potential number of brands for consumers to consider in their decisions. Already, the typical consumer considers very little information about a brand before buying. With so much going on in a consumer's brain, purchasing decisions are already quite simplified to brand accessibility and memory availability, and as consumers increasingly rely on AI systems to aid decision-making, the decision simplifies further. 

I’m interested to see how these changes will affect where marketers spend their efforts. Influencer marketing has grown so much and helps not only to build brand trust, but also to increase awareness in the mind of the consumer. The more consumers see influencers promoting the product, the easier it’ll come to mind when they go to buy from the category. Using AI systems for purchasing decisions is, of course, different from social media/influencer marketing, as the consumer must consciously go to the AI model to ask it for advice, rather than organically coming across branded content on social media. That being said, I think as people become more comfortable integrating AI into their decision-making, we’ll see real impacts of purchasing decisions from these models, as we did with influencer marketing. I think it’ll be fun to see how brands deal with these evolutions, and what strategies emerge for gaining more awareness from AI models.