AI Turned Discovery Into A Lottery. Advertising Wins The Decision

InnovationAI Turned Discovery Into A Lottery. Advertising Wins The DecisionByVibhor Kapoor,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 09, 2026, 08:15am EDTVibhor Kapoor is the Chief Business Officer at AdRoll, an AI-powered advertising technology company. getty​For decades, the buyer journey has followed a path in which awareness led to consideration, consideration to intent and intent to purchase. With the right mix of content, SEO and media, brands could influence each step with reasonable predictability. ​Now, AI has completely reshaped discovery, making it probabilistic. Instead of a structured path, the buyer journey resembles a lottery, where each interaction is a fresh draw and outcomes are far less predictable than marketers are used to. ​From Linear Funnel To Probabilistic Discovery​Traditional discovery was rooted in ranking. Search engines returned ordered lists, and brands competed for position. Strong SEO and content created consistency, and consistency created control.​AI systems operate differently. They generate answers, not lists, assembling responses dynamically based on probability, context and patterns across vast datasets. For brands, this introduces a fundamental shift. Showing up is no longer about holding a position; it’s about being selected in a given moment.​Each query becomes a new draw. The same question can produce different answers, and different brands can surface from one interaction to the next. Discovery is no longer repeatable in the way marketers have relied on for years.​At scale, this shift is already undeniable. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT alone has grown to roughly 900 million weekly active users. As AI systems increasingly become the primary source for information, visibility is no longer guaranteed.​Improving The Odds By Brand Building ​In this lottery system, brand st...