2025 has not been a year of incremental change. We’re living through dramatic changes. Most marketers and e-commerce folks started the year “playing with AI.” Now we’re considering when it will replace everyday interactions with our customers. This much change, this fast, requires us to take a moment and reflect on what we’ve learned in the last year, why it matters for our businesses, and what we need to do to deal with whatever comes next. That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Most importantly, I try to wrap up these lessons into an actionable framework you can use, today, and make sure your business gets the benefits of AI, not just the costs. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467)Here We Go Again: Marketing in Another Bizarre Economy (Thinks Out Loud 456)In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472)The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466)Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470)Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449)Digital Reset: Build Customer Relationships Big Tech—and AI—Can’t Touch (Thinks Out Loud 458)Digital Reset is Here (Thinks Out Loud 461)Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473)AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you.Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer FocusStrategyTechnologyOperationsCultureData Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunesSubscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 19m 39s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. As the year wraps up, I wanted to do something a little different than what I usually do. This is not a "best of" episode and it’s not about tools or trends or predictions. Instead, it’s about the ideas that kept coming up no matter what was going on in the headlines or the news all year long. Because when I look back at 2025, we talked about AI, we talked about Google, we talked about content and SEO and brand and platforms and jobs and just a whole host of things. But underneath all of that, we were really talking about three big ideas: Who decides?What differentiates you?And who controls the relationship with your customer. So this episode is a recap of what changed this year, why it matters more than most people realize, and what I think you should do about it going into next year. This is episode 478 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. If you think back to the beginning of 2025, we were asking very simple questions about what AI was going to do for us. We were asking things like, “Can AI write a blog post? Can it write a headline? Can it create an image?" Today, we’re already asking whether AI is going to replace the very concept of searching and “how soon AI will become your customer.” How soon the things that you will do will not be on behalf of the human, but on behalf of the artificial intelligence? And the ...
Show More
Show Less
19 mins