Another unfolding drama is the struggle for success by social commerce – that is, buying through social media platforms rather than traditional ecommerce sites. Marketers are excited but consumers are skeptical. This GoodFirms report takes an optimistic view but still finds that 89% of social commerce buyers had a problem of some sort.
Let’s look at some of the story lines we expect to track this year. One will be increasingly successful attacks on the once-invincible Tech Lords at Google, Meta, and Amazon. This ProPublic report offers new ammunition, finding that Google Display Network is exceptionally lax in blocking placements on sites that host fraud, porn, disinformation, and other bad things.
The tech world will see a continued shift towards self-service by business users, both in data access and application development. It’s a rare convergence of interest between business users, who want more control over their fate, and IT staff, who want to focus on other things. This Forrester report for Airtable highlights the problems, finding that large organizations use an average of 367 software apps and systems, and knowledge workers spend 30% of their time looking for data.
ChatGPT is hoping to grab another slice of your attention with Pulse, a now-in-limited-preview feature that will proactively deliver daily updates on information it thinks you’ll find useful. The new service is positioned as a personal assistant that will select contents “based on your chats, feedback, and connected apps like your calendar.” Forget about privacy; the real question is whether this becomes a news source that gives ChatGPT the ability to shape your opinions.