Half of B2B buyers now start in ChatGPT, not Google
ChatGPT Go Plan launches | Make.com unveils “Maia” AI agent | Meta rolls out free AI tools for advertisers | Cursor 2.0 launches with enhanced AI coding features
Welcome to issue #78 of FutureBrief. Three times a week I share practical insights on AI & automation trends, tools, and tutorials for business leaders. If you need support on your technological journey, join our community and get access to group chat, Q&As, workshops, and templates.
Today’s Brief
(🤖 AI) ChatGPT Go Plan launches at $4.50/month with GPT‑5 access. SMBs can now get power comparable with Plus tier at roughly a quarter of the price, making “every employee gets an AI assistant” a real option instead of a luxury line item.
(⚙️ Automation) Make.com unveils “Maia” AI agent for conversational workflow building. This enables non‑technical teams to describe automations in plain language and let Maia design scenarios, shrinking the gap between “idea in Slack” and running automation workflow.
(🎨 Ads) Meta rolls out free AI tools for advertisers. AI dubbing, persona‑based image generation and virtual try‑on features are now available at no extra cost, putting enterprise‑grade creative tools directly into small teams’ hands.
(🔗 AI Dev) Cursor 2.0 launches with enhanced AI coding features. The updated AI code editor earns top Product Hunt visibility, giving lean engineering teams pair‑programmer capabilities without hiring another developer.
(💡 Agentic AI) IFS Loops digital workers save Kodiak Gas 90,000 hours in two months. Industrial “digital workers” cut search time by 15 minutes per part and could add $3M in annual value if staff use them once per day.
Brought to you by
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AI search replaces Google for B2B buyers
Over the last few months, multiple of my calls started with some version of “we found out about you from ChatGPT.” G2’s latest research now backs what we’ve been feeling on the ground: half of B2B software buyers begin their journey in an AI chatbot instead of Google Search, and 70% are using AI search tools somewhere in their process. Google is still there, but increasingly as plumbing under an AI layer, not the surface buyers actually see. AI chat is now the front door to your funnel, not your blog.
Conversational AI lets buyers ask very specific, contextual questions like “Which CRM fits a 10‑person agency with usage‑based pricing and a short sales cycle?” and get a synthesized, opinionated answer in seconds. They no longer have to click through ten SEO‑optimized posts, skim, compare, and manually piece together the signal.
At the same time, the Reddit–G2 partnership gives AI tools two deep, trusted data wells: verified user reviews on G2 plus unfiltered conversations on Reddit. So when someone asks an AI for “best automation platform for a 20‑person team,” it pulls from those wells first. 72% of buyers see Google’s AI Overviews in results, and vendors that answer key questions clearly (on their own site or on third‑party platforms) get cited more often. This is no longer a fringe behavior – it is the new default pattern.
In the short term, your top‑of‑funnel organic traffic will quietly shift from “10 blue links” to AI overviews and chatbot answers. Being cited becomes more important than ranking for a specific keyword.
Over the next few years, buyers will treat AI search as a meta‑layer that aggregates your website, your G2 profile, your Reddit footprint, and your customer content into a single narrative about your product.
The uncomfortable question for businesses is simple: if ChatGPT summarizes Reddit threads and G2 reviews, what happens if your brand isn’t in those sources? Or worse, only your competitors are there?
Thin, generic SEO articles matter less. Deep, opinionated, experience‑rich assets spread across multiple surfaces matter much more. “AI search doesn’t kill content, it kills lazy content. The game now is to be the most quotable source in your niche, not the most prolific.” For any company under 200 people, that means investing in sharp, opinionated guides, real benchmarks, and detailed customer stories on your own site.
Then you repurpose those assets into Reddit answers, G2 reviews, and community posts that LLMs can happily quote when your ideal buyer types their next question into ChatGPT.
Community Q&A
Q: “Is ChatGPT Plus worth $20/month for my small business, or is the free version enough?”
A: For most SMB workflows, the real question isn’t “free vs. Plus,” it’s “do we standardize on a paid tier like Go or Plus so the team has reliable access every day?”
The new ChatGPT Go plan in supported regions gives you GPT‑5 access at around 4.50 USD per month and covers roughly 80–90% of what most Plus users actually lean on: fast general reasoning, writing, and everyday research.
Plus still makes sense if you need higher capacity, heavier usage, or specific advanced features. But it should be the exception, not the default.
A sensible path for most businesses is to start with ChatGPT Go for your core users. Then after a month, evaluate with your power users if there were tasks that made them feel constrained. If so, then you can upgrade ChatGPT to higher tiers.
And as always, it’s not only about features. It’s about users’ ability to use them. It’s more important to teach your team how to effectively work with ChatGPT, how to effectively create prompts, and how to prepare AI agents or GPT models for them to use and incorporate into their processes.
Tool stack
Make.com: Visual workflow automation tool that recently announced a new feature of building AI & automation solutions through conversation.
Tembo: Automate infrastructure toil with webhook-driven background agents that fix production errors and generate PRs autonomously freeing engineering time.
Mintly: Generate 100+ UGC-style product videos monthly for $50 instead of $5K traditional shoots; scale e-commerce content without agencies.
n8n: Open-source AI & automation platform for advanced solutions that can run in cloud or self-hosted (even for free).
Dataminr: Integrate enterprise-grade real-time threat and risk intelligence APIs for anomaly detection without custom coding; level playing field for SMBs in finance and cyber.
What’s next
Thursday: 5 Signs Your SMB Is Ready to Migrate from Zapier.
Premium members
December workshop: “Build Your AI Research Assistant with Perplexity + ChatGPT in 60 Minutes”. Replace 10 hours of weekly research with an AI system for competitor analysis and market trends. Premium members build it live with Yuri.
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