Recently, a friend was planning a business trip to a city I’ve visited countless times. He needed a recommendation for an informal meeting, like a lounge or hotel bar. I sent him a list of places I recommended, and a few minutes later, he replied and told me that he put my list into Chat GPT and asked it to help him choose.
It wasn’t that my man didn’t trust my recommendations. He’d already decided they were worth considering. What he wanted was help choosing among them. The challenge isn’t finding information anymore. Instead, it’s deciding what to do with all of it.
***
AI, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or whatever else is out there, doesn’t solve an information problem. It solves a choice problem.
Instead of asking us to sift through dozens of articles, reviews and opinions, it condenses them down into a single response. It gives us a place to begin, or increasingly, a place to stop.
According to a recent Pew Research Center study, nearly half of Americans now use AI chatbots, a dramatic increase in just two years. ChatGPT alone is now used by 44% of U.S. adults, making it by far the most widely used AI chatbot.
Subsequently, AI’s influence is expanding beyond chatbots and into the way we search for information. Google now places AI-generated summaries at the top of many search results, with 60% of Americans saying they read those summaries before scrolling down to traditional search results.
Pew also found that when Google’s AI Overview appeared in search results, users were almost half as likely to click on traditional search results as they were when no AI summary was present. Even more striking, only about one percent clicked on one of the source links included in the AI-generated response. For many people, the summary itself was enough. With information summarized at the top of the page, why would you need to look any further?
***
We trust what AI tells us. Pew found that only 6% of Americans who have encountered AI summaries say they trust the information “a lot.” Nearly half say they trust it only “some,” while 34% say they trust it “not too much.”
Frankly, I don’t know yet whether this is good or bad. I will also decide for myself. I won’t ask AI what it thinks about whether I should trust it.
Even as AI adoption accelerates, Americans remain conflicted about its long-term impact. Four in 10 believe AI will have a negative effect on society over the next two decades, while only 16% expect it to have a positive one. Nearly two-thirds say AI is advancing too quickly.
***
As we continue to work to move our most important audiences to a place of “understanding” more than “informing,” we are seeing that authority plays a key role in the results that AI algorithms choose to prioritize. AI prioritizes sources with “authority,” which means you are likely to see citations from the BBC, CNN or The New York Times (the three of which make up 31% of citations alone) in the summaries that AI generates, according to Pete Pachal, founder of The Media Copilot. You aren’t exactly trusting AI, but you are trusting the sources that it’s gathered.
***
The Gulf South has always been a relationship-driven place. We tend to trust people we’ve met, businesses we’ve worked with and recommendations from those we know.
Artificial intelligence, LLMs and AI agents aren’t likely to replace that. But it may increasingly shape the first impression that precedes those relationships. Those that show authority over a subject are more likely to get included in AI answers, which will likely lead to them being selected ahead of the rest.
That’s why trust, and the reputation that earns it, may matter more than ever.
Recently, a friend was planning a business trip to a city I’ve visited countless times. He needed a recommendation for an informal meeting, like a lounge or hotel bar. I sent him a list of places I recommended, and a few minutes later, he replied and told me that he put my list into Chat GPT and asked it to help him choose.
It wasn’t that my man didn’t trust my recommendations. He’d already decided they were worth considering. What he wanted was help choosing among them. The challenge isn’t finding information anymore. Instead, it’s deciding what to do with all of it.
***
AI, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or whatever else is out there, doesn’t solve an information problem. It solves a choice problem.
Instead of asking us to sift through dozens of articles, reviews and opinions, it condenses them down into a single response. It gives us a place to begin, or increasingly, a place to stop.
According to a recent Pew Research Center study, nearly half of Americans now use AI chatbots, a dramatic increase in just two years. ChatGPT alone is now used by 44% of U.S. adults, making it by far the most widely used AI chatbot.
Subsequently, AI’s influence is expanding beyond chatbots and into the way we search for information. Google now places AI-generated summaries at the top of many search results, with 60% of Americans saying they read those summaries before scrolling down to traditional search results.
Pew also found that when Google’s AI Overview appeared in search results, users were almost half as likely to click on traditional search results as they were when no AI summary was present. Even more striking, only about one percent clicked on one of the source links included in the AI-generated response. For many people, the summary itself was enough. With information summarized at the top of the page, why would you need to look any further?
***
We trust what AI tells us. Pew found that only 6% of Americans who have encountered AI summaries say they trust the information “a lot.” Nearly half say they trust it only “some,” while 34% say they trust it “not too much.”
Frankly, I don’t know yet whether this is good or bad. I will also decide for myself. I won’t ask AI what it thinks about whether I should trust it.
Even as AI adoption accelerates, Americans remain conflicted about its long-term impact. Four in 10 believe AI will have a negative effect on society over the next two decades, while only 16% expect it to have a positive one. Nearly two-thirds say AI is advancing too quickly.
***
As we continue to work to move our most important audiences to a place of “understanding” more than “informing,” we are seeing that authority plays a key role in the results that AI algorithms choose to prioritize. AI prioritizes sources with “authority,” which means you are likely to see citations from the BBC, CNN or The New York Times (the three of which make up 31% of citations alone) in the summaries that AI generates, according to Pete Pachal, founder of The Media Copilot. You aren’t exactly trusting AI, but you are trusting the sources that it’s gathered.
***
The Gulf South has always been a relationship-driven place. We tend to trust people we’ve met, businesses we’ve worked with and recommendations from those we know.
Artificial intelligence, LLMs and AI agents aren’t likely to replace that. But it may increasingly shape the first impression that precedes those relationships. Those that show authority over a subject are more likely to get included in AI answers, which will likely lead to them being selected ahead of the rest.
That’s why trust, and the reputation that earns it, may matter more than ever.
Marc Ehrhardt
President
The Ehrhardt Group