Tune out AI at your own cost

Spending a few hours to learn how to use AI agents will be worth it in the long run from many angles: reclaimed time and energy for what really matters; compounding productivity edge over those who don’t adapt; and the ability to trust a system to act on your behalf.

The scepticism and irritation that come from people hyping up AI all the time are valid because sometimes these messages are unrelatable or straight-up reflect AI psychosis. Their enthusiasm about particular features may be more about the entertainment and fascination value than the practical difference they make to our lives.

Problem: Online shopping is a tiring experience having to sift through the bombardment of ads, fake products and fake reviews.

Solution: AI agents to do the online shopping by your own prompt (with weighted criteria) and recommending just 3 options or so for the user to simply click and purchase, rather than having to browse themselves.

Thinking that if people start automating online shopping by getting AI agents to search for items within narrow specifications, this behaviour pattern would likely bleed across usage all over apps and online.

A shift from the attention economy to the intent economy. Advertisements might start missing the consumer entirely if so. Ad companies would not be so stupid not to realise that every ad is extracting less value and why it is so. This would increase revenue pressure on platforms.

What gets impacted heavily is our relationship with advertisements:

• Advertisements might get even more intrusive to achieve a higher number of impressions.
• A stronger shift to influencers to push products using personal credibility.
• Online platforms might start charging more to keep up with the loss of ad revenue.

I think people nowadays might have a greater preference for on-demand knowledge to cope with information overload. We might only like to hear about information we need to know for more immediate applications because we’re habitualised to receiving on-demand services—habits from our interactions with digital services.

What’s already happening is people are using AI to completely bypass websites. Think of how often you’re actually browsing Google recommendations compared to just reading off Google’s AI summary or directly asking an LLM itself. Hosting ads on websites is already not going to reach users unless there is real value to going to the source itself—likely because you can only interact with the items there.

If ad placement shifts heavier to influencers, then influencers would need to maintain identity and community even more than before and MUST feel more authentic and consistent. I think influencers that can achieve this would take up an even bigger slice of the pie, resulting in the top influencers being the few that eat almost everything. Then the problem comes from the desperation of the many others who cannot reach that...

I think there will be more influencer-related fraud, scams, or pushing of high revenue products through pyramid schemes than before.

Websites like Twitter and YouTube have limitations that prevent LLMs from extracting information directly even if you provide the link—partially explained by legal reasons for protecting licensing revenue.

Switching to video and audio content adds another layer of difficulty for text extraction, which kinda tells me that this is an invisible dependency on AI that people aren’t really talking about—businesses have to use AI to increase barriers to content extraction to counter AI.

AI agents that could coordinate different functions including transcription could bypass that altogether, and I think this is the direction that the masses are going to move towards because the path of least resistance triumphs everything.

What this means for someone who doesn’t keep up:

• A person who doesn’t keep up with using AI tools will be depleting their energy and time when looking for information and the total productivity loses out to those who do, even for daily tasks.
• We’re talking about many hours of time savings within a single month.
• More importantly, the energy drain that comes from that reduces capacity for more things you personally want to do instead. It could be redirected to creative/productive work or simply having more patience and time with your loved ones.

Not everyone needs to learn sophisticated AI skills because not everyone has ambitious personal projects. Fair enough. But that’s just for this moment without factoring what the future of work will look like.

Never mind the tourists; when those who are nose-deep in AI adoption and creating value for organisations say so, it probably isn’t just noise. There’s probably a paradigm shift that is unrelatable to most people until the underlying structures change. It begins like a fork in the river that starts with the trickle and ends with a transformed landscape and ecosystems in previously untouched zones.