THE 30-SECOND TAKE
AI is entering the physical world, and the race isn’t for the smartest model anymore. It’s for who owns your context. Apple just signed a multi-year deal to power Siri with Google’s Gemini while simultaneously racing to put AI in a wearable pin. The shift is clear: competitive advantage has moved from “who has the best AI” to “who has access to your life.”
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
The Hardware Push Changes Everything
Apple is making a fascinating bet. They’re purchasing AI capability from Google (via Gemini) while betting their brand will drive adoption of the hardware layer. This swings distribution dependency back in Apple’s favour even if Google provides the tech. It buys them bargaining power and time to develop their own AI if the play succeeds.
If users start adoping a wearable AI pin, it becomes obvioushow AI is taking a step into the real world, and this is goes beyond just the phone you carry around. If you’ve ever wondered how Google know so much about businesses in Google Maps, it’s because users share locations, review business, answer questions about the business and takes picture. Imagine what’s possible with an AI pin. It will not only bring AI to you, it will bring AI into the world, and all the data goes back to the tech giants, in this case Apple and possibly Google. This is where “a digital twin of the whole world” is actually becoming viable.
The implication goes deeper than just voice search. If the AI pin becomes mass adopted, brands that aren’t optimised for voice discovery become invisible. The consideration phase of traditional marketing funnels gets compressed to milliseconds when an AI assistant knows your preferences, location, calendar, and purchase history. Commerce becomes conversational.
ChatGPT Pulls From Google Shopping
Here’s something worth watching. ChatGPT is now pulling product recommendations from Google Shopping data. Why Google specifically? Three reasons. First, Google Shopping has the most comprehensive, standardised product feed data. Second, Amazon is actively blocking AI crawlers (their product data is a competitive moat they won’t share). Third, the Google-OpenAI relationship appears to be warming, with OpenAI reportedly paying Google for search API access.
The practical takeaway: Google Shopping feed optimisation is now also ChatGPT optimisation. Structured product data becomes a strategic asset, not just a technical requirement.
AI-First vs AI-Theatre
The split is becoming visible. About 45% of businesses aren’t seeing value from their AI investments. The difference isn’t whether you have AI. It’s whether AI is integrated with context, or whether it’s just bolted on for the demo.
AI-Theatre means impressive presentations and marketing claims. AI-First means the technology is woven into data infrastructure and decision-making. The gap is context integration, and that gap creates opportunity.
The Talent Wars Create a Different Opportunity
When even well-funded AI startups can lose their leadership team overnight (see: the Thinking Machines drama), established enterprises have zero chance of building AI teams through traditional hiring. This creates permanent demand for external expertise that can bridge AI capabilities and business reality. The consulting opportunity isn’t competing with AI talent. It’s serving the organisations the talent wars leave behind.
THE BIG QUESTION
“If the AI companies most invested in safety (Anthropic) are publicly hedging that their systems might be conscious, and the companies building AI hardware (Apple, OpenAI) are racing to own the physical touchpoints, what does this mean when the value stack is shifting from ‘what AI can do’ to ‘who AI is’ and ‘where AI lives’?”
Here’s my read.
If AI is becoming so contextually integrated that it de facto turns into something closer to its own entity (one that even the originating tech giants don’t fully control), then businesses face a positioning choice. You’re either on the input layer (helping influence what AI believes about you) or the output layer (helping users communicate with AI and assess what comes back).
The old question was: “How do I use AI to optimise X?”
The new question is: “How do I structure my business data so AI systems understand and represent me correctly?”
This isn’t future speculation. AI systems are already making consequential decisions about what exists, what’s trustworthy, and what gets attention. The misdirected AI overviews sending wrong customer complaints to businesses for six months aren’t edge cases. They’re the new normal.
YOUR MONDAY MOVE
Run an AI Identity Audit. Go to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Ask each: “What do you know about [your company name]?” Document what’s accurate, what’s wrong, what’s missing.
This is your baseline. If you don’t know what AI believes about your business, you can’t correct it.
QUOTABLE TAKE
With the onset of AIs going around the internet and summarising information for human users, we’re seeing the “hotels dot com” moment of the whole internet. Your website just dropped from being the paper to becoming a reference in the AI’s paper. Not only do you want to get referenced, you want to be the main source that the AI’s rewrite is built on.
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Pal Erik Waagbo 
