Assistant Intelligence is coming to everything

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What is this newsletter? It's about marketing, consumer behaviour, AI and will always include useful marketing chart. We're getting this out about once a week. The 'in summary' section enables you to scan the main points less than 60 seconds.

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In summary:

• Engagement farming is ruining social media but it may be worth trying it anyway.

• Assistant Intelligence is coming to a doctor near you.

• Chart of the week. The data is in: people are asking Google less questions, but that makes it even more valuable to marketers.

The latest form of engagement farming is ruining social media

If you've been on X , Instagram, TikTok , or LinkedIn recently you've no doubt been shown the latest iteration of engagement farming content which feels both valuable and worthless at the same time.

You know the kind - content from somone who appears successful has made a post that's been liked and shared tens of thousands of times - it must be valuable right? Often these posts promise a shortcut to incredible riches if you just follow them and reply with a single word (examples below).

This is just the latest way to game social media algorithms which, upon seeing all the attention these posts receive then give the post even more visibility by amplifying it to even more people.

Each platform has its own flavour - Twitter and LinkedIn algorithm's appear to be focusing on following and commenting on posts, while Instagram's CEO Adam Mosseri said in late May their focus is on the sharing metric above nearly all else: “More important than watch time or like and comment counts is send rates".

Mosseri went on to explain that essentially humans sharing content with other humans is more valuable than almost any other metric. The unspoken, but obvious, goal also is maintaining and growing Instagram usage by amplifying content that gets humans to share links to its content on and off-platform.

Should you be engagement farming? It depends on your brand and your goals

Engagement farming has been around for a long time but the latest execution, especially on professional platform seems to be particularly obvious. This version of engagement farming will likely be shown the door by upcoming algorithm changes, and replaced quickly with another version of it.

For now however, depending on your brand it could be an effective way to get brand and follower growth for a relatively small amount, compared to a straight investment in advertising.

Of course if you don't want to hop on to this particular bandwagon wait it out and see if the next algorithm 'hack' is more your brand's style.

The era of Assistant Intelligence is really here

In our article last week we said that "What's fast becoming obvious is getting AI usage into the hands of billions of people in order for the LLMs to use and learn from their behaviour, is worth far more (currently) than resricting access or keeping them behind a paywall....With helpful Assistant Intelligence built in by default it will surely limit the desire or need for most people to look beyond the tools already included in their device(s)."

And since then Marques Brownlee has released an excellent video discussing a Wired Magazine article discussing how Assistant Intelligence is not going to be a standalone product, and instead will simply become something built into your device.

And Assistant Intelligence isn't just coming to your phone Limbic's CEO Ross Harper, gave a wonderful interview this week on the Danny in the Valley podcast about how AI will enhance doctors, not replace them.

At CXA the team have recently been discussing for a while now which option they'd take if given one of the following choices to provide adviice and guidance through a medical process and clinical treatment.

The conclusion each of us reached independantly was we'd rather have all of the human doctor's knowledge and experience working together with everything an AI has learnt about the relevant clinical information, working together to solve the problem, rather than one or the other.

Reflecting further, one member of our team went a step further an said they felt it was almost irresponsible to select a human only option if given the chance to have AI's vast knowledge base providing assistance. They felt the medical community would put enough safeguards in place to ensure AI accuracy, something Ross Harper explained wonderfully in the Danny in the Valley podcast.

Chart: Search Engines are being asked less, which makes platforms like Google all the more valuable

Over the last 24 years people have changed where they're asking questions as new platforms and options have become available, and in many respects this unsurprising.

Also unsurprising is that LLMs are being used to answer questions by consumers. However what the chart below doesn't answer is whether more questions are being asked overall or to what extent LLMs are cutting search engine's lunches.

The concern for all businesses should be the lack of information that LLMs provide for this data, and what to do about it.

We argue that infact it makes resources like Google Trends, Answer the public, and if we may be so bold, reports like ours, which pull back the curtain on customer behaviour, and the questions and information customers seek online even more valuable.

Facebook, now Meta, has had the better part of 15 years to release a Google Trends competitor, and given it hasn't happened yet we can pretty safely assume it isn't going to happen.

So as Q&A becomes more of a diaspora it is worth considering where insights about online customer behaviour is going to come from, and how it is going to be revealed, in order to inform content strategies, marketing strategies, PR and product development strategies and even social media and short form video content.

Brands can wing it, but given the commitment (money and time) effective content, video and social media strategies take it sure it nice to know there's an audience ready and willing to consume the content - and ultimately buy the products or services - before committing to production.

Until next week....