The digital advertising model — in which users are shown ads based on their interests — is as old as the internet itself, but AI could disrupt it too.
Perplexity’s CEO Anand Srinivas has said that ads of the future could be shown to AI agents, and users will never have to be subjected to them. “One thing I’ve been just hypothetically thinking about is like, how would it look like if the ads are at the level of agents, AI agents,” he said in an interview. “Like the user never sees an ad,” he added.
“So unlike Google, the different merchants are not competing for users attention — they’re competing for the AI agent’s attention. That’d be very interesting. Brands need to first get comfortable doing this — what does it even mean for you to like pay a certain dollar budget for agents that you’re bidding amongst each other for the agent’s attention. So the moment I say, hey, I’m going to go to Ranthambore for two nights, plan my schedule, do my bookings. And the moment on the back end the agent begins to do that, you will have five travel companies or platforms or airlines competing for the agent’s attention. And that whole advertising economy was probably bidding for the lowest price or whatever is the setting that I gave,” he explained.
“But all of that happens without me ever having the user — the human user — ever having to see an ad. And the interesting thing is the agent can spend a lot more compute power, so therefore it can still be aware that all these brands are advertising for my attention, and despite that benefit from the advertising revenue,” he added. “So that’d be pretty interesting to consider. And I would just want to stay away as a user from all of it.”
It’s a pretty novel idea. Platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity have become quite popular over the last few quarters, but apart from the paid versions, haven’t yet figured out a monetization strategy for their free users. Srinivas seemed to be suggesting somethin analogous to Google ads for AI platforms — like companies buy ads when users search for specific queries, companies could similarly buy “ads” with AI agents, who’ll decide which companies to include in their answers. It’s an interesting new paradigm, and if AI agents become more popular, could end up being the model of how digital advertising works in the AI era.