Mike King: Please welcome James Cadwallader. 

James Cadwallader: Hi. Nice to meet you. Hey, Lily. How you doing? I’m James, co founder, CEO here at Profound. We’re based in Union Square, so we’re just around the corner. Yeah, definitely got some impostor syndrome, me here talking to so many smart people about the future of an industry that I’d argue you all know much better than I do. We’re a tech company. We launched back in August of last year. And I think, I’ll be really quick. I think this is one of the last or if not the last one of the day. Yeah. So, I’ll probably be able to whiz through this in like ten minutes. And I think it’s going to be pretty top level. I think there’s lots of really fantastic granular data there that you can chew on. But yeah, we’re building ProFound. We’re a tech company at our core. So, we’re a team that’s ex Uber, ex AMD, ex Microsoft, ex Datadog. And, we are approaching this like a tech play. Our view is that answer engines represent one of the biggest platform shifts in the history of the internet. And, I think all of this, I would be shocked if it’s not just the same stuff you’ve been hearing because it’s obvious that this stuff is so monumental. But, maybe there’ll be a bit of framing here that, I don’t know, helps solidify things a bit or it’ll be – there’ll be some interesting take outs at the end. Now, I’ve got you all very excited, obviously, with my British self deprecation.

So, today I want to talk about what we see coming which is the agentic internet. So, the way that we’re thinking about this is to an extent, and this is a framer, this is high level and we’ll kind of narrow in a little bit more. But the traditional search was a two sided marketplace. You had the consumer would go to that list of blue links, and they would discover what they want, they would interpret the information, and they would consume the information that they found contained there within. But, we’re now at this inflection point where humans no longer need to visit websites. And that’s kind of the crux of the whole thing. Right? Instead of browsing an index of blue links, we send an agent on our behalf. And more than just browsing that content, the agent will actually interpret and prepare the content and then feed it up to the end user on a silver platter and say, hey, here’s the answer. And sure, you know, there’s a PDF thing. That’s meant to be the user chewing. The agent will tell the user where the content came from. It will provide sources and citations. But, frankly, who cares where that content came from if it tastes good. I think our point is I’m not clicking those sources and citations. I don’t think people will long term. That’s just vibe based. Yeah. 

Search was this two sided marketplace where consumers visited brands directly. Answer engines steal the end user from the brand. And, I think that’s the kind of that’s the big point I’m trying to lead with here. And eventually, our take is that we will enter a zero click future and the consumer will only interact with the answer engine and it’s so hard to stay up to speed because obviously since I sent Mike my slides, there’s now been the ChatGPT integration with Shopify and that’s becoming clearer and clearer as we go. Every week, this becomes clearer, this thesis. And, agents will be the only visitors of websites or the primary visitors of websites is what we’re saying. And, I think Karpathy, who’s one of the godfathers of OpenAI and from Tesla, he’s got this fantastic line which you probably all saw doing the rounds on Twitter or LinkedIn where he says 99.9% of attention is about to be LLM attention. And for what it’s worth, I think we’re using LLM attention liberally here. We say answer engines instead of LLMs because I think when you’re talking about just the pre-trained LLM, I think that’s very different to the actual end product of ChatGPT, which now has system prompts, memory, personalization, a ton of retrieval. Through Profound, our platform, we’re seeing like sometimes 70, 80, 90% of commercial search will return via what is being referred to as grounding or what we would say as web retrieval.

So, we now think – this just framing, this concept of agent experience. We’re all very familiar with this concept of UX. You know, the overall experience of a person using and enjoying a website. This is a discipline in its own matter. But what if people aren’t using websites anymore? Operator from OpenAI, which is what this screen showed you. I should have put a label on that. But that’s operator from OpenAI will browse on our behalf. And I think, you know, I’ve got friends who work at the big models and the stuff that those guys are cooking behind the scenes that’s just around the corner is where our heads are at right now. Operator, computer use from Anthropic, this is here, it’s happening, period. So, agent experience is the intentional design of a digital environment to ensure that your content, your brand, your products are legible and actionable and they can be interfaced with via an agent. Again, I’m using agent maybe a little bit liberally here. That could just be a web, that could be a retrieval agent for intensive purposes, ChatGPT user agent, as we’re all familiar with. But if SEO, to sort of go there, this is it. This is the two slides articulate what I’m saying. If SEO is the art of ensuring that your stool was well placed in this marketplace for the end user, ax is just straight up understanding that you have an entirely customer. You have one VIP customer now, which is an agent. Agents are going to become first class citizens of the internet. Marketers, every brand on the planet, is going to need to learn how to understand they’re going to have to connect with consumers via agents. Again, it’s all very wide aperture. AX experts, maybe that’s not the term that sticks, but this new discipline is the idea of rethinking brand, product and content for the new end user. I think, Mike, that’s some of the stuff that we’ve spoken about. It’s like rethinking this discipline. Shopping is gonna be a huge push for us at Profound. We think shopping is inevitable. Agents won’t just provide answers to the end user. They will autonomously decide where best to shop. And then, they’ll transact on the user’s behalf as well.

I mean, Sam Altman, this is March. We’re talking. This is weeks old, this statement. If anyone wants it, it’s the most recent interview with Sam Altman on the Strathecary newsletter. He has some really interesting takes on this stuff and I’m pulling this from there. He talks about, hey, we’re not so sure about ads. What if we could do a 2% affiliate fee instead? What if we could just avoid this grubby world of advertising and instead, we’ll just send agents to transact and take a little 2% affiliate fee?  It’s interesting. And OpenAI, I mean, if you want a hot take while I’m standing here, this is unrehearsed, I personally think OpenAI are going to create a monopoly here. I think that’s super possible. I think memory will make that product the stickiest product in the history of software. It’s already sticky. I would never shift to Gemini or Grok right now because ChatGPT has all of my memory installed in there. 

So, this is the Adobe case study that everyone in the room, I’m sure, has seen. But, you know, 87% said they’re more likely to use AI for long or complex purchases. The x y axis that we’re always referring to is the do AI answers matter to my brand? On the x axis, you have high consideration.  Are you a high consideration purchase? Yes or no? Bam. Okay. High consideration, high up on the x axis. On the y axis, you have That’s one of those nightmare moments where you forget what’s on the y axis. Josh? Oh, the y axis, yeah, I guess is just cat. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, that was all off the top of the dome. Bear with me. I think, yeah, this moment of memory, I think is This is kind of the this is the damn busting moment is memory. For anyone that’s not using ChatGPT with memory right now, highly advise you go and try O3 in particular with memory turned on. It’s it’s this is it’s groundbreaking. It’s like it’s a whole new product. And, yeah. OpenAI have introduced this new sophisticated memory. The way that we believe this is working is this concept of a dream state which runs over historical conversation logs. So, you have your previous conversation logs, all of the conversations you’ve had with ChatGPT and then you have this dynamic LLM call that’s being run over and over and over again and creating, think of it like a dynamic system prompt that gets pushed into the system prompt to create your answer. 

It’s not just a rag call is my point. This is becoming a very sophisticated system. So, and I think this quote from ChatGPT underlines it perfectly. The more you use ChatGPT, the more useful it becomes. New conversations build upon what it already knows about you to make smoother, more tailored interactions over time. And yeah, I think ChatGPT will use these tools on the end user’s behalf. Proactive conversation. I think this will be the next big breakthrough of like push pull conversations, which is – this is absolutely inevitable. What does this mean for everyone in the room? It’s a push pull conversation. It’s that true walking Phoenix, her type moment. And yeah, this is another quote from April. So this is weeks old. The upload happens bit by bit. Soon, ChatGPT will proactively push things to you. That’s from Sam Altman himself. So you can imagine this happening. At the moment, ChatGPT just responds. What happens when it starts giving you suggestions that are based on context, location, and that personalization of memory? 

Advertising. I think it’s uncertain. I think there’s a hot take here that ChatGPT won’t integrate advertising. I think I stand by that. I think they have a corporate structure that makes it really finicky for them to introduce advertising. I think they have a very research heavy background. I think that would be very, very interesting for everyone in this room if billions of eyeballs have all migrated into one place, but you can’t access them through paid ads. Then all of a sudden, everyone in this room becomes pretty interesting. But, if they do do it, I think, don’t just think of it as advertising. I think it’s this combination of generative advertising plus the agentic internet, everything we just spoke through, plus memory creates this mind meltingly different environment where what happens when the agent comes back with a response, but then suggests something that’s perfectly tailored to that exact moment where you really wanted to maybe consider an alternative and gives it to you in that moment there.

Or one step further, B2A. If you have B2B, B2C advertising, what happens when you can advertise two agents as an interesting side point operator from OpenAI actually already considers advertising that it sees, is what we’re seeing, which is very interesting. So, AX has arrived. The first role of AX is to pay attention to how agents are interacting with your brand across all channels. So, I guess this is where my company steps in, Profound. Using AI, so using Gen AI, we study the patterns and behaviors across data sets and then use these insights to inform and create new content with principles. So, these are just some of the things that we’ve been learning so far. Mike’s prompt was like come with some actionable things. Think, yeah, I’ll whiz through these very quickly. 

We’ve, so at Profound, our platform, our website is tryprofound[.]com. We look at all of the, so we essentially help brands understand and control how they show up in answer engines. So, we’re looking at hundreds of millions of data points. Every week we send inordinate amounts of prompts and understand how these answer engines work. We see that agents don’t care about traffic when they’re going to visit sites. They don’t care if the authority of a site doesn’t matter. They also don’t seem to care about backlinks, which is pretty interesting. We see this super frequently. They don’t care if you’ve loads of backlinks. All they care about is the information on the page. Agents mostly don’t interact with JavaScript, bar operator maybe. Also don’t, remember they don’t interact with images on the page. So, that’s pretty interesting. I’m talking about retrieval crawlers here. I’m not rendering JavaScript predominantly. They love structured data. So, of course, serve it up to them with LLMs.txt. Someone’s probably done a session on LLMs.txt today, I’d imagine. 

We’re seeing the semantic URLs. Everyone will probably have a little laugh to themselves here because I’m 20 years too late to the game here. But semantic URLs do seem to really matter to agentic crawling in how you get pulled into answer engines. And, they pay a ton of attention to metadata. So, we’re seeing the agents effectively will go and do the pre-reading in the metadata to decide how they want to answer that question. They’re kind of lazy, as you’d expect, to save compute. So, when I sent Mike these slides, this was true. It’s actually maybe since the introduction of o3 become less true, which is interesting. What we’ve been seeing is, I’ll go back and forth, but we see that comparative listicles. This is across 177 million web sources that are being spat back by answer engines. We see comparative listicles being pulled through super frequently. But, you know, and the reason when you think about it is logical. Why would this agent, if you ask it best running sneaker, it doesn’t want to go to Adidas and Nike and go and visit those sites and run the inference. It will just instead go to a comparison site and cheat. Lazy agents. But, what we’re seeing now is o 3 is doing the hard work. o 3 is doing so much web retrieval. It’s the future. It’s mind blowing to us what’s happening there.

So, This is one of our customers. We’ve seen them. They increase their citation share and then their visibility goes up. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Citation goes up, visibility goes up. Agents like shiny new things. This is my slides getting scuffed up here. Okay, what this does say is newness is very important. So, ensuring the content is very new seems to be preferred. This also says agents like social media. This is what that slide was meant to say. So, yeah. Yeah, we see Reddit of course getting pulled in a bunch, but there’s a bunch. We see YouTube getting pulled in a bunch. We work with a major consumer electronics company. You definitely all know this brand. And even with brand direct queries in ChatGPT, we’re seeing it run at YouTube and go to the brand’s owned YouTube channels, which is pretty cool. 

But yeah, this is just the beginning. I think the bad news is that SEO will likely become an antiquated function just as an output of search becoming an antiquated function over time. But I think everyone in this room, I really really mean this, it’s so obvious to me and I think Mike, this is some of the stuff that we’ve spoken about. Everybody in this room has this kind of like once in a century opportunity to own what might well be one of the most important functions in the future of marketing. So, I think that’s pretty rad. So yeah, at Profound, we believe that AX will become the most important function of marketing and we’re building technology. We’re not an agency. We’re here to build a platform for everyone in this room to use to help you and your teams and your clients and brands navigate and win this new agentic internet. So, track your AI visibility, find out what matters most, build your strategies as you have done, understand the details. Yeah. And thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it.