The Future of Digital Is Defined by the Human-AI Relationship | Behind the Numbers

Marcus Johnson (0:00)

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Hey gang, it's Monday, September 28th. Stephanie, Yory and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, EMARKETER Podcast made possible by Atmosphere TV. I'm Marcus and join me for today's conversation. I have two folks, living in New York, our VP of Insights, Stephanie Paterik.

Stephanie Paterik (0:35)

It's awesome to be here, good to see you, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson (0:37)

Good to see you too, thanks for joining and living in New Jersey, our principal analyst and head of our advertising media and tech desks, Yory Wurmser.

Yory Wurmser (0:46)

Hey Marcus, how are you doing today?

Marcus Johnson (0:47)

Hey fella, very good, how are we?

Yory Wurmser (0:49)

Good, good.

Marcus Johnson (0:50)

Very nice, very nice. Anyway, today's facts.

Who is the best selling fiction author of all time? Two answers would be correct because they're kind of tied for first, but who do you think? Any guesses?

Yory Wurmser (1:13)

I would go with, I'd go with JK Rowling.

Marcus Johnson (1:19)

Oh, solid guess.

Yory Wurmser (1:21)

John Grisham?

Marcus Johnson (1:22)

No, I'll give you a hint. It's not a mystery who this person is.

Fiction writer, Agatha Christie.

Yory Wurmser (1:32)

Oh.

Marcus Johnson (1:33)

Shocked me. According to the Guinness World Records, Agatha Christie is officially recognized as the best selling fiction writer, author of all time, selling upwards of two billion copies worldwide. Only Shakespeare has a claim at perhaps selling more, according to the UNESCO Index Translate, Translationum. That's not a word. Her works have been translated into at least 103 different languages, outranking every other individual writer in history.

Her masterpiece, a 1939 masterpiece, and then there were none, which I just started. That's why I was curious about, about her. Has sold over 100 million copies, making it officially the best selling mystery novel in human history, one of the top single selling books of all time.

Have you read some Christie? Have we? Christie people?

Yory Wurmser (2:30)

Yeah. My family are big fans. I have three daughters and they all went through a Christie phase.

Marcus Johnson (2:39)

Okay. I'm in it. I'm starting it, at least. Stephanie?

Stephanie Paterik (2:43)

I haven't. I haven't read a lot of books in the mystery genre, and now I think I have to. I'm going to add it to my back to school fall reading list.

Marcus Johnson (2:55)

She's got a lot to choose from. She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections of crime fiction, plus six additional romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, bringing her total number of published books to 86 That will be one book for every year of her life.

Yory Wurmser (3:16)

Incredible.

Marcus Johnson (3:16)

She lived till she was 85 Remarkable. Yeah. What a national treasure. Anyway, she's from England. Anyway, today's real topic, the future of digital.

Remember to check out the takeaways we have for you at the end of the episode. They're new, but they're going to be at the end of every episode. So you guys can remember what the hell we talked about. So they will be there. Let's start with, we just hosted our future of digital events at City Winery in New York. The, we think second event. We hope, I hope second event because otherwise I wasn't invited to the others. We also published some accompanying research looking at a number of things. You guys write how AI is changing consumer behavior, marketing and the path to purchase, where established advantages persist across the digital economy, and how marketers should act on AI now. But we want to talk about a few of the most interesting pieces of data and learnings from this research.

Stephanie, I'll start with you. What's one data point that best tells the story of AI consumer adoption so far?

Stephanie Paterik (4:28)

Yeah, well, this project is so interesting and it's my first time working on the future of Digital Report. I think Yory's got a couple under his belt and it's a months long project really bringing together the perspectives of about 20 analysts across the different industries we cover and coming up with a unified view of what the next year and beyond is going to look like. So we really focused on the timeframe of 2027 to about 2030 And very quickly, it became clear that AI could not be a footnote in this one.

And we really wanted to take a deep look at how it's affecting all of digital marketing. For me, what really became a North Star was looking at consumer usage and habits. Because I think that if we look at the history of how new technology comes out, how revolutions happen, usually the tech comes first, the consumer or the user comes second. And then brands and dollars and investments follow. And so a long way of getting to a data point. I think something really interesting is that ChatGPT reached one billion weekly users in August of 2026 And we find that out of US internet users, 52% are using a generative AI platform, a chat bot, at least monthly, and 40% are using it weekly. So from that I take, you know, now that's not a lot compared to how much time I spend scrolling social, or maybe even streaming, you know, Netflix.