Modern life will be rubbish if generative AI leaves you behind

Saturday, 17 May 2025

Damon Albarn, left, and Alex James of Blur, after their reformation and appearance at Glastonbury in 2009, more than a decade after their Britpop heyday.

Mike “MOD” O’Donnell is a professional director, writer and chair. He reckons Parklife is the best Blur album and best experienced on vinyl while drinking Pernicious Weed.

OPINION: Exactly 32 years ago this weekend, British indie rockers Blur released Modern Life Is Rubbish.

A cornerstone of the Britpop movement, the album blended jangly guitar pop with sharp social commentary. Critics loved it. Fans obsessed over it. And its yeasty rivalry with Oasis became the froth on top of 1990s culture. Blur revitalised British music—and gave voice to a generation feeling the whiplash of modernity.

Even their name captured the mood: as music, culture and economics were restructured by the arrival of the internet, everything did, in fact, become a blur.

And it still is — especially now, as generative AI (GAI) hurtles into the mainstream, not so much with a bang as with a whir of neural net humming. It’s been just over two years since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world, and the uptake has been, frankly, dizzying.

Salesforce reports 75% of adults in India use GAI every week. In Japan it’s 62%. In Australia, 49%. Even here in Aotearoa, local data suggests over a third of working adults have started using GAI tools, particularly in tech, creative industries and small business operations. And they're not just fiddling with poetry prompts. They're using it to write emails, generate ads, run their Xero accounts and even prep for tax season.

Most importantly, they’re using it to replace the web’s core utility: search.

Generative AI is sounding the death knell for traditional internet search technology, and much else about marketing besides.

Not scrolling through cat memes. Actual search. The bedrock of the modern internet.

GAI isn’t giving people blue links. It’s giving them answers. Solutions. Context. Recommendations. Personalised, complete, and click-free.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 80% of users now complete 40% of their searches without clicking on any links. That number is rising every month. The consequences for marketing? Profound.

For half a century, marketers have worked within a well-worn funnel: awareness → consideration → action. And their job has been to escort consumers through that funnel to the purchase point.

The modern online version was summarised by Boston Consulting Group as streaming, scrolling, searching, shopping. It assumed a consumer with time, curiosity and agency.

That world is collapsing and the assumptions evaporating.

As Kiwi advertising legend Matt Bale put it in his recent Substack post, the user journey is no longer about search - it’s about delegation. You won’t browse. Your AI will. User interface? Irrelevant. The buyer-seller dynamic? Obsolete. We’re entering the era of agent-to-agent commerce.

You’ll tell your AI — Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT — what you need. It will know your preferences, your quirks, your budget, your location.

It will liaise with the seller’s AI, compare specs, check reviews, calculate delivery, and present you with the best option. Not a dozen links. Just one tidy, vetted recommendation. Maybe two if it’s feeling chatty. But probably not.

This isn’t sci-fi. It’s already happening. ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot can already help users compare products in-platform.

Until recently, you still had to complete the purchase on a third-party site. But three weeks ago, OpenAI announced that soon you’ll be able to buy directly inside ChatGPT.

When AI “agents” emerge to sort your shopping needs, even the biggest billboards and cleverest marketing messages won’t matter any more, writes Mike O’Donnell.

That’s the thin end of a very big wedge.

And the wedge is already being hammered in here. A number of local e-commerce retailers, from Allbirds to Barkers to boutique craft brands, are already experimenting with AI-powered product descriptions, customer service chatbots and plug-and-play recommendation engines. But that’s the warm-up act.

The implications? Search engines will lose ad revenue and user engagement. SEO becomes irrelevant — the results aren’t ranked, they’re generated. Entire new ecosystems will form around AI assistants, plug-ins and commerce integrations.

In e-commerce, the AI era means there are now actually two customers, through the entire chain, the entire build supply side, the entire decision process and the entire purchase decisioning cycle.

But here’s the kicker. There are now two audiences to consider, but only one of those audiences is driven by human wants and needs and influences; the other will be machines.

So marketing becomes unrecognisable.

AI agents don’t care about billboards, influencers or mid-tier radio jingles. They’re immune to branding fluff. They’ll optimise for price, specs, delivery speed and machine-readable trust signals. They won’t feel loyalty—they’ll calculate it.

In other words, the battlefield shifts from emotional persuasion to structured product data, verified third-party content and algorithmic trust. And yes, to application programming interfaces (API endpoints).

If your product doesn’t speak machine — if it’s not in the right format, in the right registry, available via API — you don’t exist. Not to the algorithm. Not to the agent. Not to the buyer.

You are, quite literally, a blur.

And to quote the band: You’ve got no distance left to run.