Back in February, what feels like 100 years ago in AI news, Microsoft made a bold statement when it launched a new version of its search engine, claiming it would change how billions of people do their internet exploring.

If Microsoft's claim is true, could that mean no more Googling? No more Googling would mean the end of a multi-billion-dollar digital ad industry as we know it. There'll be a new one to replace it, of course – but with what, and when? B2B marketers haven't even worked out how to manage life post-cookies yet.

Enter the new Microsoft Bing with artificial intelligence. It's still in its early days, but all the hype aside, it does feel like the start of a radical change in search, one that could have huge implications for the future of B2B marketing.

Here are a few key takeaways: 

• Bing’s chat feature is applied to its search algorithm—giving it access to live web data like news stories, transport schedules, and product pricing—making it more powerful, accurate and up-to-date than ChatGPT-4 (and it’s free to use).
• Signalling a big change to traditional search engine experience and marketing, Microsoft Bing search aims to use AI to provide a custom answer for whatever users are looking for within the page (so users may never need to leave the page or click on a blue link). 
• B2B marketers need to understand how well this AI tech can support their entire funnel, top to bottom, including sales enablement, which means adapting strategies to exploit the new capabilities of AI-powered search. 
• The first line of thought for B2B marketers: How will this affect the behaviour of my customer? How will they use this new kind of search? And how can we help them find what they’re looking for? 

But first, a quick backgrounder for the uninitiated

Let's start with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot built on the massive language model. You've no doubt heard of it and probably used it.

Experiencing ChatGPT for the first time was fun and inspiring; it brought abstract AI concepts to life. From day one, the potential use and intent for the technology were clear; AI language models like ChatGPT would become essential for various applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, automated translation and content creation tools—even search engines.

One of those search engines is Microsoft’s Bing; a bit of a red-headed stepchild in the tech world. But then, Microsoft announced it would be integrating OpenAI's software—GPT-4 specifically—directly into Bing, merging the little engine with the large AI language model. 

While this might seem like a minor product update, it's a major shift in how Bing functions and could represent a monumental (and swift) shift in how search works for everyone, including those in the B2B marketing space.

The end of 'traditional' search?

Search is the essential building block of internet activity. Any change to a search engine's functionality, no matter how seemingly small, could be a significant event for the millions of people who use the internet daily. 

Bing is nowhere near as popular as Google here in Australia or anywhere, with a market share of 4 per cent, compared to Google’s 94 per cent*. But new tech can capture the imagination and change that picture in the blink of an eye. Microsoft is banking on that by leveraging OpenAI technology to develop an entirely new type of search engine that is fundamentally different. 

So, how would an AI-powered search engine like Bing differ from using Google to search for information? 

Today, when we search on Google, we’re presented with a mix of ads, image results, and a featured snippet that attempts to answer our question. However, most of the results consist of links that send us to various websites, which Google thinks have the answers to our questions. 

Here’s the thing – the new Bing search engine aims to use AI to provide a custom answer for whatever users are looking for, within the page, without immediately directing users to external links. For most daily information searches, this would be an improved user experience.

But AI-Bing goes beyond mere aggregation and curation. 

The system can offer suggestions that reflect its judgement and opinions, introducing a new level of autonomy and agency previously unheard of in search. The resulting implications are far-reaching and extend beyond the domain of conventional search practices. The judgments applied, the visual representations presented and, most importantly, the absence of links all contribute to the deconstruction of the traditional idea of search. 

The 'un-Googling' of the search experience has begun

This is the beginning of an ‘un-Googling’ of the search experience. 

I’ve been using Microsoft Bing with GPT-4 chatbot since its launch. At first view, it pretty much looked like the regular Bing search engine home page. My initial thoughts were, how is this different to ChatGPT, or better than plain Bing? 

Bing’s new chat feature uses a testing version of the GPT-4 model, the latest version. Both chatbots have customisations built on the language model, such as different input methods and interface features. As chatbot experiences, they appear similar. But they’re not. 

The big difference is the deep integration of AI with Bing search. In contrast to ChatGPT, Microsoft's Bing chatbot isn't a standalone conversational AI service; it's an AI-enhanced search engine (running on OpenAI's GPT-4), allowing Bing to deliver more intricate, chat-like answers to user queries.

Bing's chat functionality is incorporated into its search algorithm, giving it access to real-time data such as news stories, transport timetables, and product pricing. Additionally, it's trained on diverse data to grasp language nuances better and generate more relevant responses. Altogether, this allows it to draw on a larger pool of knowledge and information when generating responses, making Bing more powerful and more accurate (and up-to-date) compared to ChatGPT.

The user experience is quite engaging, as users can interact with the Bing chatbot by posing follow-up questions and having a full conversation on a specific topic. Microsoft has described it as an "AI copilot for the web", highlighting its ability to facilitate a more intuitive and informative browsing experience.

You can see why this is exciting and could mark the end of ‘traditional’ search as we know it, where the search is replaced by chat and potentially stays with us through our browsing experience. 

So, what does it all mean for B2B marketers?

Late last year, we made predictions for 2023 and talked to our clients about their focus. Every CMO said they were under pressure to incorporate AI into their planning. With the new AI-powered Bing, Microsoft has potentially delivered a big chunk of the answer.

For marketers, AI integrated into search promises better targeting. OpenAI’s natural language processing capabilities and conversational structure could help Bing better understand customers’ specific needs and intent, and better target their advertiser’s content. The user experience for customers would also be far more engaging, efficient, and ultimately satisfying.

How the ad formats look, how they work and where they appear will be a big question for B2B marketers. At this point, there’s very little detail about advertising within the experience; but it won’t take Microsoft long to develop a search advertising product that marketers can incorporate into planning. Advertisers' immediate response to Bing’s layout was to raise concerns that search ads could generate lower revenue if the chatbot took up the top of search pages (without including ads). From the outset, Microsoft said they planned to create ad formats within the chatbot; they suggested that ads could expand to fill the top of the search page. Since then, the UX has developed, and now Microsoft's Edge browser is needed to use the Bing chat experience (there are workarounds for Chrome and Firefox). Edge moves the chat to a side panel, maintaining traditional search and page loads in the main window. As chat responses are annotated and linked to their source, the user can click and view the chat source in the main window without leaving the chat. 

This brings me to the topic of value exchange in the current search landscape. 

Snippets and links go

In a conventional search scenario, when we pose a question to Google (or Bing), it may provide a snippet or a list of links. Visiting a webpage could generate advertising revenue for its creator. However, in this new scenario, a chatbot directly answers the question using information from other sources, such as reporting and biased content. As a B2B marketer, if that’s your content, how are you getting your share of value (visits)?  

Ultimately, the content utilisation within a search engine relies on generating traffic for its creators. So, whether it's in the answer or chat, these alternative representations serve as a contextualised version of the traditional ten blue links, catering to the user's needs. The core measure of successful search advertising and what SEO looks like will come next. 

Perhaps there will be new incentives in SEO to generate more authoritative content that gets in? The goal from Microsoft will be to make everything annotated— everything linkable— whether inside a search, in the answer, or even in the chat session. 

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has described AI-powered Bing as a search alternative for the 50% of the time traditional search doesn’t deliver: “a powerful technology that can make search a better product without fundamentally changing how search gets permission to even exist as a product, which is other people’s content organised in useful ways so that users can find them.” 

He also said they would live and die by their ability to help publishers get their content to be seen by more people. None of that says the user will experience your B2B content on your B2B site.

For example, I asked Bing ‘chat’, ‘How AI-powered search could support ABM strategy’; as you can see in the screenshots below, as well as answering, it provides links to the references it has used as its source. Clicking those links loads the source website pages in the main window. As the chat continues, I’m introduced to new source pages I can choose to view or not.

For B2B marketers specifically, ads and search are just one part of the equation. The real deciding factor will come down to how well AI tech can support the entire funnel, top to bottom, including sales enablement. Undoubtedly, it will be more complicated for our clients—and for us — and the extent of the impact will depend on the specific use case. It will also depend on how well we adapt our strategies to take advantage of the new capabilities. 

When this takes hold, more of the customer’s answers will be in the engine, on the search page, not hidden behind a link to the seller’s website. There will be far fewer, sometimes no, external links. Marketers will want their brand-owned content to be the source that the AI uses. How will this be created and served? By more artificial intelligence?

I say ‘when this takes hold’ because this is a more compelling search experience than we have today, so realistically, we’ll end up with some version of this; we’re just not sure what that version will be.

How could this un-Googling unfold?

Circling back to the start of this article. The ‘no more Googling’ question concerns the market, investors, and the public. The current developments in AI-powered search may threaten Google’s fundamental business model and the broader economy. Even Bing’s adoption of AI in search could undermine a significant ad revenue stream for Microsoft. 

Microsoft views the adoption of AI in search as a significant opportunity for growth and aims to establish Bing as a household name in this space; they can grow their market share first and work on the finer details of monetising it later. Given Microsoft has such a tiny share of the total addressable search industry market, getting their revenue from numerous other sources instead, they’re not as reliant on search advertising revenue as Google. 

In other words, Microsoft has little to lose and billions to gain. 

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, stated recently that every 1 per increase in Bing’s market share could generate an additional $2 billion in advertising revenue, which means AI-powered Bing could be their best opportunity to erode Google’s dominance in the search industry, and do it with limited downside risk. 

What new things can we expect? Again, from Satya Nadella, “We’re going to move fast; every day, we want to bring out new things.” 

Microsoft plans to add AI capabilities to its other products, starting with its productivity apps, including Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Users will be able to generate text with simple prompts, like Viva Sales, which recently added a feature for writing sales emails. Microsoft Teams will integrate AI to take meeting notes during conference calls. 

Unsurprisingly, a lot of this will be AI-assisted writing. Still, PowerPoint could integrate OpenAI’s Dall-E—a text-to-image generator to help with visuals—and Excel could have a built-in chatbot to analyse data and generate visualisations. OpenAI may be the means for breathing life back into Cortana, Microsoft’s voice assistant. 

If all that isn’t enough, Microsoft proposes to let companies create their custom chatbots (versions of ChatGPT) and AI-powered apps built on the Azure OpenAI service. 

Meanwhile, back at Google, and their AI platform got off to a bad start; their latest experimental AI-powered chatbot ‘Bard’ launched a day before Bing but made a factual error in an ad that cost Google over $100 billion in market value. 

It’s little wonder Microsoft is moving fast and has a first-mover advantage. Still, I wouldn’t discount Google yet. 

Get your head around it, play around with it

Integrating OpenAI with Bing promises a whole new search world of improved accuracy and relevancy of search results, particularly for more complex and nuanced search queries. 

But we’ve still got a way to go. 

Only last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said you shouldn’t be using the technology for anything serious. And I haven’t said anything about the inaccuracy of the AI responses, or some of the weird and wonderful things reporters and testers have experienced. 

Regardless, no matter which search engine ends up winning this race, the larger point here is it’s all happening so fast, and the implications are significant and far-reaching. 

As a B2B marketer, I suggest using Bing daily, comparing your experience with Google search and seeing where you spend more time. Start to think and challenge your agencies to consider how this technology could be incorporated into your marketing and the business. Our first line of thought should be: How will this affect the behaviour of my customer? How will they use this new kind of search? And how can we help them find what they’re looking for? The answers should dictate the tech we use and how we use it.

How we search—this basic habit in our daily lives—is undergoing a revolution; not just because of how much better a user experience it would be (and putting aside all the concerns about sources, accuracy, and ad models), but because the user may never need to leave the page; never click on a blue link. 

If we can find a way to use this new tech to support our customers and their journey, then we’ve already won the hardest part of the battle in the potential ‘un-Googling’ of B2B marketing.
 

*StatCounter March 2023 (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/australia)