In today’s issue:

1. SearchGPT - Can it unseat Google for your search?

2. Google keeps cookies - remember when the company promised to make them obsolete?

3. Reduce time entering into Salesforce to nearly zero: New Outlook add-in gets your data to Salesforce effortlessly

4. Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant

5. News, Need-to-know, and Stats:

   • Meta’s new powerful Llamda AI

   • Musk’s humanoids

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OpenAI introduces SearchGPT

Big questions that many of us have had over the past year include, “How would Generative AI affect search”; and “will somebody dethrone Google as search engine of choice?”

Now we’re seeing some hints about what search might become and who might be the players.

First Microsoft started to integrate its CoPilot AI into Bing search. While that made some difference to the functionality, and perhaps even to the usefulness of Bing, it had little impact over Microsoft’s ability to take market share away from Google.

Google slowly started to integrate AI results into its search results. In some cases, it may have made a difference; but it’s been all over the place. Often it’s difficult to know whether you’re looking at an “AI result” or regular search — although Google is tweaking how it presents where the results come from. On some level, I even wondered whether it makes sense to differentiate between normal search and AI search. They both use advanced techniques.

Where they are different, though, is that AI can paraphrase in ways that normal search typically doesn’t do. It doesn’t send you to other pages. (Perhaps we’ll deal with anti-trust considerations of this in a later issue.). And AI hallucinates. Of course, web pages outright lie; so there’s give and take.

Last week, I wanted to give some advice to a friend in Delaware about how to get some help with his medical bills. Normally, I would have searched on Google to find my answers, but I wanted something more descriptive, not just a bunch of links. So using a carefully chosen set of prompts, I used ChatGPT instead. The result was a few pages of text with the answer I wanted along with sources and links where appropriate — much more salient than I got from Google.

And that was with plain ol’ ChatGPT-4o. This week’s announcement of SearchGPT changes the game altogether.

The SearchGPT prototype is a new search, according to OpenAI, with “features designed to combine the strength of our AI models with information from the web to give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.”

Unlike Google’s answers which often come at the expense of the people who put info on their websites, OpenAI has partnered with publishers to license the content and create the model.

There are still a lot of open questions about whether it will revolutionize search and who will become the search giant a few years from now. In the meantime, OpenAI has opened the product to only 10,000 people so far.

I’ll plan an update for a future issue.

Read the full article on Confirmed Achiever Blog.

Google keeps cookies

In its quest to keep regulators at bay and its users happy, Google announced in 2020 that it would eliminate browser cookies. Four years later and an entire pandemic in between, the company decided it wants to keep cookies in its browser, although it says you can more easily turn them off than before.

So it looks like we’ll continue to be hounded for a while by those annoying website popups used by the websites themselves to let you turn off cookies.

DuckDuckGo has been cackling for years that they are more private way to search the net than Google search; and have a more private browser than Chrome. Looks like it will stay that way.

And now Apple has jumped into the game, just recently launching hard hitting TV commercials suggesting that its Safari browser doesn’t spy on you like Chrome does.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts. Perhaps we’ll publish a few of the responses in a later edition of Confirmed Achiever.

Reduce time entering into Salesforce to nearly zero

Tired of entering data into Salesforce? Would you like to have your inbound emails entered for you with a couple clicks — and saving you valuable time every day?

You’re probably a good candidate for Confirmed Connect, an add-in to Microsoft Outlook that streamlines the entry of emails from Outlook to Salesforce, helps keep your Salesforce info up-to-date, and makes it easier for everybody on the team to align their daily activities to the needs of the organization.

This unique tool takes one-minute to install; five-minutes to set up — and saves every user hours every week. Plus, it’s inexpensive, making the payback one of the fastest paybacks on any tool you’ve ever implemented.

If you have a team of AT LEAST 10 people who can benefit from reducing the time and effort of keeping Salesforce up-to-date, schedule a personalized demo.

Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant

Specialty AI is one of the best places to get results when trying to make your days easier and more efficient. And shopping is one of the places that many of us are unfocused.

So Amazon introduced Rufus, their version of AI to help you with shopping. According to the company, you can ask Rufus specific questions that will help you cut to the chase when comparing products or looking for specific attributes. For instance, it offers examples to help you, like:

• “What’s the difference between gas and wood fired pizza ovens?”

•  “Should I get trail shoes or running shoes?”

•  “Compare OLED and QLED TVs.", and

• “Comfortable baseball gloves for a 9 year old beginner."

It may not help much for repeat or simple purchases; but it has a lot of potential for more complex products and for items that you’ve never purchased before.

Read Amazon’s blog description of Rufus.

Schedule like a Road Warrior; Manage your day like a Time Titan!

Confirmed helps you reclaim that time by offering you a better way to set up your meetings on the road — using A.I., of course.

• Meta’s new powerful Llama AI

• Musk’s humanoids

The last word

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David