Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

For years, tech titans have chased the holy grail of "the everything app." It turns out we already had one: Google Search. But a massive shift is underway. Google is moving from a model that directs users to your website to one that answers queries, manages tasks, and completes purchases entirely within its own ecosystem… and entirely within the Search box itself. Google’s I/O 2026 conference revealed a complete reimagining of the search experience. With the introduction of AI-powered Search ag

Last week, Big Tech reported its Q1 2026 earnings. Google achieved an all-time high for search queries and grew their revenue 22%. Amazon announced “Sponsored Prompts,” paid placements built directly into AI conversations. Meta raised its ad prices and increased revenue by 33%. If you heard those numbers and thought, “How on earth did we get here?” this episode is your answer. This is a Digital Reset Foundations episode: a conversation recorded in April that has become more useful, not less, n

Pundits spent the last year-plus predicting that AI would kill Big Tech. Big Tech’s Q1 2026 earnings suggest they might have missed that meeting. Google’s search queries hit an all-time high because of AI, not in spite of it — and their search ad revenues grew 19% as a result. Meta’s revenues grew 33% while the price per ad climbed 12%. Amazon introduced Sponsored Prompts, letting brands bid to appear inside prepackaged AI queries in Rufus. And Azure and Google Cloud grew 40% and 63% respective

The thesis behind Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech was simple: the companies that stop renting their customers from Big Tech and start building direct relationships, owned media, and a genuine brand signal will have more control over their growth — and pay less for it over time. One year after Digital Reset launched, the evidence is in. The thesis holds up. In fact, given how fast AI has reshaped content, discovery, and customer trust in the past twelve m

Your customers hate AI. The numbers are hard to ignore. A Quinnipiac University poll found that 55% of US adults believe AI will bring “more harm than good,” up from 44% just a year ago. Booking.com‘s research puts 26% of consumers in the “AI detractor” category, actively opposed to using it. NBC News found that nearly half of those surveyed hold a negative view of AI. This isn’t a niche concern. It’s a mainstream sentiment. And if you’re still planning to use AI to grow your business, it’s you

The cost of producing a 1,500-word article has collapsed to somewhere near zero. That’s the supply shock, one my friend Mark Schaefer has talked about for years. The more interesting question today — the one most marketing leaders haven’t priced correctly yet — is what that collapse does to everything else. When a factor of production goes free and infinite, value doesn’t disappear. It shifts. And in marketing today, it’s shifted somewhere most content strategies aren’t looking. Academic evide