In summary.
At some point an ai assistant will replace 80% of the functionality/apps offered by iOS & android - it will finally become the new OS (as we all knew from watching her).
This is bad for Google as google’s main feature is search. Ai assistants will replace search and kill the main revenue stream which is ad clicks.
Google’s secret plan is to eventually canabilize it’s pixel phone with an ‘agent first’ device to try to beat Apple, MS & OpenAI with a horizontal offering that is significantly better than the fragmented world of ChatGPT &iOS & azure.
But it’s worth remembering and I think the article fails to point this out. Agents will still ‘recommend’ things, you ask them to book you a flight - they still have to recommend a couple of options out of many - the agents need to decide and ultimately that decision is the same as choosing who to place at the top of the search results page - whoever wins the agent wars will win a significant proportion of Google search revenue as referral fees AND a significant proportion of IOS App Store revenue.
Does no-one remember the 1992 Robin Williams film - Toys?
This has been coming for a lonnng time. Question is when there are two armies operating on the same principle do we reach some kind of nash equilibrium?
Would also be awesome if there was an MMORPG version where you could wander the wasteland and come across real people...