In 2008, I argued that mobile wasn't media — it was infrastructure. The industry spent a decade trying to "do mobile" as a channel before understanding it was the substrate everything else ran on. AI is following the exact same pattern.
Every brand has an "AI strategy." Most of them are wrong, because they're treating a paradigm as a placement.
AI is not a channel. It's the new operating system for how customers discover, evaluate, and buy. You don't buy media on an operating system. You build for it.
The Channel Fallacy
When mobile arrived, media buyers asked: "What's the CPM on mobile?" Strategists asked: "What's our mobile content strategy?" Agencies created mobile divisions. All of this was the wrong question dressed in reasonable language.
The right question was: "How does mobile change everything about how people interact with information, commerce, and each other?" That question didn't produce a media plan. It produced a transformation roadmap.
AI demands the same reframe. Stop asking "what's our AI content strategy" and start asking "how does AI change the relationship between our brand and our customer?"