Transitioning from the Attention Era to the Automation Era
We are at a major inflection point in our internet journey: transitioning from earning and packaging attention to selling summarization and automation.
Our key metric is moving from time-spent to time-saved.
The first era – the Attention Era – was marked by the creation of giant piles of content and connections, which platforms fostered, sifted through, and presented to you in the hope that you would spend more time with them. The attention platforms earned was then sold to advertisers. Rinse and repeat.
This new era – the Automation Era – is marked by platforms managing the content and connections for you, so you can spend your attention elsewhere.
Perplexity’s AI search can now buy products for you. OpenAI’s ChatGPT will read web pages for you. Apple’s Apple Intelligence will read your notifications. And Google’s Gmail will summarize long threads and emails.
One question raised is what will be automated and what will deserve attention? Product research, price comparison, and purchasing is something we’re happy to offload for most things. But what about reading social feeds? Or watching video?
It’s not crazy to imagine Netflix using AI to dynamically generate recap content of past seasons to catch you up before a premier. Do you want to catch up on Season 1 in 60 minutes, 30 minutes, or 30 seconds? (In many ways this already exists on YouTube, whose Shorts format clips and shotguns the most compelling moments of videos in a stream.)
For each of these domains – purchases, social networks, and streaming video – it’s apparent that what’s given attention and what’s automated will vary depending on the subject and the user. I’m happy to catch up on the 5 episodes of a random show my wife started without me with a dynamic summary, but would prefer to savor every moment of the rare show that’s right up my alley. Same goes for social: there are accounts I want to read front-to-back and others I’m happy to receive condensed.
Another question raised is what the automation era business model looks like? Will it default to subscription fees or will it monetize the decisions themselves? And how does that undermine the quality of the automation? Sadly, it’s not hard to imagine the market continuing to bifurcate along economic lines: those with money will be able to pay for automation while those without will have to sell their attention. Hopefully AI models continue towards commodification, costs to run them continue to drop, and builders develop the skills required to build creatively with AI enabling for accessible automation products for all.
Moving from the Attention Era to the Automation Era is a massive shift. It upsets so many of the ways the web works today.