Battle lines are being drawn in the new artificial intelligence-powered search struggle between Microsoft and Google, and how that spills over into commerce will make waves.
Microsoft’s most recent investment in OpenAI, the company behind buzzworthy chatbot ChatGPT, is commanding headlines lately as Microsoft attempts to crash the internet search sector that Google has owned for 20 years. How that story ends is anyone’s guess, although few believe Microsoft can compete with Google’s datasets, payments tools, and search dominance.
As PYMNTS reported on Jan. 24, “Companies see the promise in the technology’s ability to transform customer service, but also worry about the limitations of ChatGPT,” citing Wall Street Journal coverage.
Read: ChatGPT Gets Mixed Customer Service Reviews From Retailers and Brands
Where this all gets more interesting is potential commercial applications of artificial intelligence (AI) for Google, which wasted no time picking up the ChatGPT gauntlet with its Bard conversational AI service.
In a Monday (Feb. 6) blog post, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai teased future uses of Bard for commerce, saying, “Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.”
With Google’s full-court press on Google Pay and the Google Wallet, it’s hard to imagine that the tech titan won’t find ways to connect its AI efforts to its payments tools. Search is the ideal setting for this, and Google already has years of experience doing exactly that.
As Google explained in a December blog post about how payment methods are already served alongside search results: “If you have enabled the ‘AutoFill’ feature on the Google Chrome browser or your Android device, Google Pay may also present you with the option of automatically filling your saved Payment Method,” adding that “If you choose to participate in GPC Services, Google may present your available and eligible Payment Methods to you at the time of a transaction and may pass your Payment Method details to Google Payment Corp. for it to charge/debit your Payment Method for the GPC Services.”
While much of that has to do with third-party payment methods with which “Google has no involvement,” it shows that the link is already established. If — more like when — Bard becomes widely available and starts powering more searches, bridging a consumer’s Google Pay or Google Wallet to results isn’t a revenue stream the search giant is likely to leave untapped.
Read: Alphabet Sees Google as ‘Core Part’ of Everyday Commerce
This future was hinted at during Alphabet’s fourth-quarter 2022 earnings call on Feb. 2, as Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler told analysts and investors, “We’re on a multiyear mission to make Google a core part of shopping journeys for consumers — and in a valuable place for merchants to connect with users.”
That mission includes consumer experiences with a “more visual, immersive, browsable source,” with the keywords, in this case, being “immersive” and “browsable.”
On that call, Pichai said “[AI] is a powerful enabler for businesses and organizations of all sizes,” further indicating that a strategy connecting Bard and buying is in the works at some level.
In his Bard blog, Pichai noted Google’s previous work in AI tools such as BERT and more recently, MUM, adding that “Now, our newest AI technologies — like LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen and MusicLM — are building on this, creating entirely new ways to engage with information, from language and images to video and audio. We’re working to bring these latest AI advancements into our products, starting with Search.”
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