Welcome back to another edition of my weekly logbook; where I take you into the realm of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Artificial Intelligence.
Today’s edition is going to be a news-style post where I bring some of the latest developments in these fields. I’m not going to write another long-form introduction so let’s get things going:
Open AI Wants to Build its own ‘Search Engine’:
Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Sam Altman and the team at Open AI is planning to launch their own search engine, in the hopes of dethroning Google’s native platform. The key phrase was ‘artificial intelligence-powered search products‘ which leads to two conclusions:
- There’s more than one product launch which is an exciting development for AI & Tech enthusiasts
- The search platform might be similar to Perplexity but wider in scope. Perplexity has a very specific target audience; which includes people who want to research a particular topic. If Open AI launches their own native search platform, it would be more similar to Google or Bing, which encompasses virtually kinds of search.
CEO Sam Altman later clarified the news on X stating:
“Not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love! feels like magic to me.“
The news and the subsequent post were so potent that it initially led to a stock plummet for Alphabet (Google’s holding company) which later recovered.
Altman and Open AI are expected to formally announce this exciting new product in a launch on Monday at 10pm ET. Based on the cryptic posts, this is going to be a BIG new development but let’s wait and see what Altman & co have in store for us.
A Week of Pivots & Adjustments:
The past two weeks have been really fast-paced for me. While I was freelancing since 2020, I finally found myself in a fresh new environment as I started a new job at Accident Support Services. It is a good feeling using empathy and tapping into my customer service roots to support people who have just gone through a collision.
However, it changed my entire calendar all of a sudden. I haven’t mentioned this previously but apart from my new job and the freelance services that I provide to Javy Coffee Co, I’m also in the middle of a Marketing Accelerator which I plan to use as a way to start my marketing career here in Canada. I had built a solid routine where I was reading, exercising, and working on the accelerator while doing my job, but in the past week, I scrambled to immediately adjust and pivot my priorities.
Let’s talk about the secret art of ‘Pivots‘ by the way. This is Business Basics and I’m excited to teach you about this term today, in this segment.
In business, a pivot happens when a company and its leadership rethink their priorities and ultimately their business strategy. A lot of times, people think a pivot leads to a restructuring of the entire organization, which is true as well. However, in most cases, when companies pivot, they change only a few aspects of their strategy.
An example of a pivot would be a company blocking off Print & TV Advertising and instead moving to a digital-first approach in their marketing. Another example would be a company going remote-first for their employees in the hopes of cutting overheads and increasing employee morale, and efficiency.
While researching about pivots, I also came to know about the ‘Pivot Pyramid’, introduced by Selcuk Atli,CEO & Co-Founder at Bunch. Atli’s Pivot Pyramid has five parts namely:
- Customers
- Problems
- Solution
- Tech
- Growth
The key idea of this pivot pyramid is that a company pivots only for these segments. They pivot if they find a new customer-base to target, or if they face a new set of problems, or if they find a unique new way to solve said problems, or they gain or innovate their own tech, and lastly, if they find new avenues to grow.
I don’t want to leave you hanging so, to improve your practical understanding of ‘Business Pivoting’, here’s a list of famous pivoting moments in history by Forbes.
Till Next Time:
And this is it for this week’s edition — I hope to see you in the next one where we talk more about Marketing, Business, & Artificial Intelligence.
A new week is upon us and together with you guys, I will make the most of it. See what I did there — I’ve believed that our motivations depend a lot on our perception of said motivations. If I say, ‘I hope to’, or ‘I want to’, that indicates I’m not a 100% sure everything will fall into place.
However, just by phrasing it as ‘I will make the most of’, I’m pre-programming my mind to ignore any possibilities of failure. I’m telling myself that I will 100% succeed in the coming week, and throwing all doubt and uncertainty into the toilet.
The next time you’re trying to motivate yourself, try to limit your mind’s perception of failure by changing your phrasing, just like I did.
Godspeed!