Will the AI chatbots eat into Google’s lucrative business?

How will the rise of the next big thing-the artificial intelligence (AI) reshape the technology industry? Will AI affect Google’s supremacy as a search engine? Nothing lasts forever, particularly in technology, finds an in-depth report by Sunny Sharma Artificial intelligence, which can create novel content from text to audio to images to user prompts, is already making an impact and has fuelled fears it could replace a number of jobs. Google raked in $54.48 billion in advertising revenue in the most recent quarter, representing 78.9% of its gross sales. Search ads were the biggest driver by far. Until recently you might have used Google to search for an answer to that question. But now you have another option: to ask an AI-powered chatbot, which lets you gather information from the internet through typed conversations. ChatGPT, the leading example, can write essays, explain complex concepts, answer trivia questions and suggest menus or holiday destinations. By the end of January 2023, two months after its launch, it was being used by more than 100million people, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, noted The Economist, a British weekly. Google introduced its search engine in 1998, powered by its signature PageRank algorithm, which measured each website’s importance by the ways other sites linked to it. It quickly became the dominant search tool. Google has spent decades indexing the web, and the breadth of queries it can field is unmatched. In recent years, Google has taken steps to help users conduct searches in new ways, including through the lens of their smartphone camera and with image and text combined. It uses large language models to understand users’ queries and has also incorporated the technology into its “featured snippets,” which spotlight key information on search results pages. Worried, Google and Microsoft are going head-to-head on the future of search, leveraging the technology behind artificial intelligence chatbots. Google has already announced that it is testing Bard, a competitor to the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT that has quickly become a sensation, and will be rolling it out to the public in the coming weeks. Microsoft, which has just integrated ChatGPT into its search engine, Bing, certainly hopes so. Could this be a Schumpeterian moment in which incumbents are toppled and rivals seize the initiative? The answer depends on moral choices, monetisation and monopoly economics. But a hugely valuable prize—to become the new front door to the internet—may be up for grabs.