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The future of AI customer service is at Pioneer
There’s only one place where CS leaders at the cutting edge will gather to explore the incredible opportunities presented by AI Agents: Pioneer.
Pioneer is a summit for AI customer service leaders to come together and discuss the trends and trajectory of AI and customer service. You’ll hear from innovators at Anthropic, Toast, Rocket Money, Boston Consulting Group, and more—plus a special guest keynote delivered by Gary Vaynerchuk.
You’ll also get the chance to meet the team behind Fin, the #1 AI Agent for customer service. The whole team will be on site, from Intercom’s PhD AI engineers, to product executives and leaders, and the solutions engineers deploying Fin in the market.
🗣️ Top Stories
If you work in marketing, product, or tech - and want to keep pace with the shifts AI is driving across search, software and strategy - here’s what you need to know this week.
📉 “Great Decoupling” re-examined: GSC swings tied to &num=100 -
We saw a major change from Google this week that hits the SEO world hard. The &num=100 parameter - which let users pull 100 results for a query - has been shut down. On the surface, it’s a headache for rank trackers. But the more interesting impact is the sudden drop in impressions many will have noticed in Google Search Console.
This not only puts “the great decoupling” into question, it also raises bigger doubts about the quality of the data teams have been relying on in their reports. SEO analyst Brodie Clark broke this down brilliantly in his piece earlier in the week.
Read the analysis.
Key takeout: If you’ve seen a drop in Google Search Console impressions this week, you’re not alone - and there’s no need to panic. The change comes from Google disabling the &num=100 parameter, which let you load 100 results per SERP. I don’t think this is aimed at rank trackers specifically, but more at AI crawlers. It won’t stop rivals scraping Google’s data altogether, but it does put another hurdle in their way.
🛠️ OpenAI and Jony Ive gear up for a hardware push -
9to5Mac reports that OpenAI and Apple's design legend Jony Ive have been poaching top Apple designers and engaging key suppliers to accelerate a hardware strategy. The collaboration suggests ambitions beyond software, with speculation ranging from AI-first consumer devices to enterprise hardware built around natural language interfaces.
Key takeout: There’s little doubt now that OpenAI is gearing up to launch a wave of wearable tech - devices aware of your movements, conversations and interactions. Yikes. On top of that, reports suggest an OpenAI browser is in the works, putting it head-to-head with Perplexity’s Comet and Google Chrome, which itself just rolled out a slate of new AI-driven features.
🔎 AI challenges Google’s search dominance -
The BBC reports a growing shift: people are bypassing Google for LLMs like ChatGPT. Weekly active users have doubled to 700m+ this year, and ~6% of desktop search already flows through LLMs. Users cite reduced “cognitive load” compared with juggling 10 links, though fact-checking remains essential. Google says queries are still growing, but Apple disclosed Safari searches fell for the first time in 20 years.
Meanwhile, brands are learning that LLMs cite established media, official sites, and rankings more than social chatter - and those referrals often convert better than traditional search clicks.
BBC report.
Key takeout: Every week there’s another headline about users preferring the generative AI experience over the traditional “10 blue links.” What’s different now is that these stories are breaking into the mainstream, not just the tech press. But let’s be clear: the “ChatGPT kills Google” narrative is way off.
If Google hadn’t poured billions and more than a decade into AI, maybe we’d be watching the beginning of its downfall. Instead, it’s still the dominant force in information discovery - and talk of it being toppled is wildly exaggerated.
Thanks to each and every one of you for subscribing and reading. Have a great week!
Andy
Obsero
AI Search Intelligence for the next era of discovery
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📖 What I’ve been reading this week in business, marketing & tech
👇 Tap-worthy reads worth your time.
✨ AI
🔍 Google & Search
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Finding out what it was like to work at Microsoft in the noughties
When you’ve been in search for over two decades, it’s a privilege to sit down with people who’ve been right at the heart of it.
A few weeks back I caught up with
Duane Forrester
, SEO Product Manager at Microsoft between 2007–2015, and one of the people who helped shape the way we think about search today. Our conversation spanned the early days of Bing, the rise of machine learning, and how today’s shift to AI search mirrors — and diverges from — past evolutions in the industry.
- 👉 What it was really like working at Bing during the 2000s/2010s - a time when Microsoft was fighting for relevance in a Google-dominated world.
- 👉 Why GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is more than just “good SEO” - and why the label matters less than the mindset shift behind it.
- 👉 How optimising for ChatGPT is fundamentally different to everything that came before - and what that means for brands, marketers, and the future of visibility.
The clip below takes us back to a pivotal moment in the search landscape: social platforms circling for ad revenue, the failed Yahoo–Microsoft merger, and what Duane’s actual mandate was inside Microsoft as an SEO product lead.
It’s a reminder that search has always been about more than rankings and clicks - it’s about how people discover, trust, and engage with information.
The full newsletter drops soon - and if AI Search + organic growth is your thing, this is one you won’t want to miss.
