Why Is Marketing Changing So Fast in the AI Era?

It used to be simple. An entrepreneur has a solution, a potential customer has a problem, and the two need to connect. That's the whole job. Go back far enough and this was almost mechanical: you had a phone book, you had a leaking faucet, you looked under 'plumber,' and you called one. That's it. If you lived in a slightly bigger town you'd see a handful of names listed, and you'd pick one because someone mentioned him, or because you vaguely recognized the name. You didn't research five plumbers. You didn't need to know anything about the other four. You just called someone and your faucet got fixed.

Then more plumbers showed up, each with different pitches, reviews, credentials, you name it. Suddenly there was a whole pit of options to sort through. So what happened? Marketing happened. And at some point marketing stopped being a tool and became its own business. It's still exactly that today: hip, happening, booming. You could almost call it marketing maxing, this constant scramble to figure out how do I get more customers.

But here's the thing. The whole obsession with 'how do I get customers' got blown so far out of proportion that we ended up manufacturing a stack of extra problems, which then needed their own solutions, which then needed their own marketing. It's cross-pollination all the way down. A lot of marketers need marketing themselves. They build a team, and now they've got departments and people whose entire job is solving problems for other people while their own problems pile up right next to them. It starts looking a bit like a pyramid scheme. It isn't one, and it's a natural byproduct of the world we built. I'm not saying it was nonsense that this system existed. I'm saying it's nonsense that it keeps existing the way it does.

This is where AI changes the equation. The lines are getting short again. You've got a problem you're dealing with, and now you can just talk to AI about it. Out of that conversation comes a clear problem statement, and from there a solution gets matched, fast, with almost none of the friction that built up over the last couple of decades.

Businesses are wiring themselves directly into AI models to be found this way. My own companies are already connected to AI models. AI discoverability still runs partly through Google, sure, but generally it's already Gemini, Claude, Grok, take your pick. Every one of these models can find the right business for you directly. The short line is back.

What that means practically: the layer of marketing that exists purely to help you get found is losing its reason to exist. It's not that marketing disappears, it's that the part of marketing built around discoverability gets absorbed by the model itself.

Once AI can match a problem to a solution directly, the only thing left for marketing to protect is a feeling: the feeling that people are still in control of their choice. There has to be an illusion of choice left standing. And underneath that, there's something people want regardless of whether they're a consumer or a business buying from another business. They want to belong somewhere.

That's what's left standing around marketing once the discovery function gets automated. It's branding. It's tone of voice. It's vision and core values. That's the part that actually matters going forward, and it's a completely different skill than 'how do I get found.'

I call this world building. I think it's going to be the most important term of the next few years: creating a world as a founder, as a business, that people actually want to belong to. Once you've built that world, and the line between 'they have a problem' and 'they know you have the solution' is already short because of AI, and on top of that you're putting a world on display that people want to be part of, they choose your solution. Not because you out-marketed everyone. Because you built somewhere worth belonging to.

Here's where I land on all this. I think soon, for most problems, there will only be three to five businesses that people can even find as having the solution. Everyone else effectively stops existing. That simple.

Used to be you could scroll through pages of Google results and dig up a hundred plumbers if you wanted to. Now you get three to five names surfaced to you, and the deciding factor isn't which one has the cheapest quote or the most reviews anymore. It's which one has built a world that actually feels real to the person looking, a world they want to be part of.

That's the shift. Not fewer problems needing solutions. Fewer visible providers, and a completely different reason for why one gets chosen over another.