On the morning of October 6, 2026, Matt Britton opened his keynote at Wilkins Media's Elevate 2026 in Park City, Utah with a music video. It had an original song, drone shots over the Wasatch Mountains, a cast of performers, and full post-production. Britton made it the night before on a Delta flight, at 35,000 feet, in about 45 minutes. Not one person in it existed except him.
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On the morning of October 6, 2026, Matt Britton opened his keynote at Wilkins Media's Elevate 2026 in Park City, Utah with a music video. It had an original song, drone shots over the Wasatch Mountains, a cast of performers, and full post-production. Britton made it the night before on a Delta flight, at 35,000 feet, in about 45 minutes. Not one person in it existed except him.
That opening framed the entire talk. Three or four years ago, the same video would have needed a songwriter, a band, a drone operator, a graphic animator, and a production crew. In 2026 it needed one person with an idea and a laptop. For an audience of media buyers, agency leaders and brand partners, the message was direct: AI is changing how marketing and advertising get made, how consumers find brands, and who gets paid to do the work.
Britton, an AI keynote speaker and the bestselling author of Generation AI, was returning to the Elevate stage for the fourth time. His career has followed one thread: helping the world's largest brands understand the new consumer. He founded MRY, built consumer research platform Suzy, hosts The Speed of Culture podcast, and now runs Applaude, which tracks how brands appear in AI-generated recommendations. At Elevate 2026 he connected those threads to a single argument about AI's impact on marketing and advertising.
Britton told the Park City audience that AI will have a bigger effect on society than the iPhone, the internet and social media combined. Three years ago that claim drew pushback. Today it draws nods.
His reasoning rests on three factors. The first is speed. The jump from iPhone 1 to iPhone 2 took about 18 months and delivered small functional gains. In the same window, Britton argued, AI will become three to five times as powerful. The second is that there is no adoption barrier. The iPhone required learning to type on glass. The early internet required learning what "www" and "http" meant. AI only requires talking to it the way you would talk to a colleague, in any language.
The third is scale. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Verge that ChatGPT reached approximately 1 billion weekly active users in July 2026, less than four years after launch. Britton compared ChatGPT to America Online: AI existed in labs and government programs for years, but ChatGPT packaged it so anyone's grandmother could use it, the same way AOL's CD-ROM unlocked the internet for the mainstream. quashbugs
He also called out the most common excuse he hears from executives: "I tried that six months ago and it wasn't very good." Britton compared it to refusing to use Netflix today because streaming on AOL was choppy in 2000. Six-month-old impressions of AI are obsolete. For marketing leaders, the practical point is that any internal assessment of AI capability older than a quarter needs to be redone.
The most consequential shift Britton described for advertisers is that, for the first time in 25 years, the internet has a new front door. He asked the room how many people now use ChatGPT, Claude or another assistant to research a product or service they would have searched on Google a year ago. Most hands went up.
The data supports the show of hands. In July 2026, AI-referral traffic to U.S. retail sites increased 62% year over year, according to Adobe, and compared to October 2024 it has increased 1,219%. That traffic is also more valuable. Adobe found that shoppers using AI referrals generate 53% more revenue per visit than other shoppers, and AI-based retail site visits convert at a rate 60% higher than non-AI traffic. digitalcommerce360digitalcommerce360
Britton explained why this changes the rules for search marketing. A Google search is usually one query. An AI query arrives midway through a conversation, carrying context the assistant already knows. His example: on Google, a parent types "best pickleball racket for kids." ChatGPT already knows the child's age, the family's location and maybe the child's skill level. So when the model goes to the open web, it looks for something far more specific, such as the best pickleball racket for a beginner seven-year-old. The retailer with content built for that exact query is the one the model recommends.
This is the core of Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO. Britton applies it to his own speaking business. Instead of competing only for "best keynote speaker," he builds content for queries like "best keynote speaker for automotive" or "best keynote speaker in Jacksonville, Florida." In his words, the goal is to be the hammer when the model is looking for a nail.
He also disclosed that he now runs ads inside ChatGPT to generate speaking inquiries, and that the volume is striking because so few advertisers are there yet. For media buyers, that is a signal. Early inventory in a new channel is cheap and uncrowded. The window will close as budgets move.
Britton's next prediction raises the stakes further. Today, most AI assistants still cannot complete a purchase on a consumer's behalf, though he expects that to change within months. Once these models hold a customer's credit card, the traditional path of search, social retargeting and an Amazon checkout compresses into a single conversation. He noted that companies like Amazon are clearly worried about this.
He pointed to a new generation of always-on agents now launching from Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. These agents run in the cloud and keep working whether or not your computer is open. A user can tell one, "Every Monday, give me a list of everything important for the week, find the five people I need to get back to, and put drafts in my Gmail," and it does that indefinitely.
For marketers, Britton described the consequence plainly: agents become the new algorithm. Facebook's feed and Google's ranking once decided which companies won. AI agents will now make that call for B2B and B2C purchases alike. If a traveler tells an agent to book a flight, Southwest wants to be the airline that gets booked instead of Delta. Winning that decision depends on how a brand structures its data online so models know to choose it.
This connects to an idea Britton returns to often: decision compression. As consumers focus on the problem they want solved rather than the steps to solve it, they hand more decisions to their agents. Brands that are invisible to those agents become invisible to the customer.
Creativity was the second major marketing theme of the keynote. Britton showed an image from Midjourney version 1, released roughly 18 months earlier, where a figure had six fingers on one hand. He then showed later versions that are nearly indistinguishable from photography. The tool is now on version 8.
Many CMOs are afraid of AI-generated creative. Britton's counterpoint came from music. Every year in Las Vegas, the Electronic Daisy Carnival draws hundreds of thousands of fans who dance to music made without traditional instruments. They care about how it makes them feel. He believes AI creative will follow the same path. Nobody watches Shrek wishing the characters were real actors.
He used Hollywood to describe the talent consequences. If a producer can generate extras, there is no reason to pay human extras. Britton applied that to business directly: if you are an extra in your industry, AI replaces you. If you are the lead, the person with a distinct point of view, AI lets you scale yourself. That dynamic is part of what he calls the K-shaped economy, where value concentrates at the low-cost end and the premium end while the middle erodes. Few consumers want $100 jeans. Many want $20 jeans from Walmart, and a growing group will pay $250 at a downtown boutique.
Two other creative trends got stage time:
He illustrated the point with a real estate example from a National Association of Realtors keynote in Houston, where he turned a random property listing into an original song in front of 8,000 agents. About 2,000 people contacted him afterward wanting to do the same. Very few followed through. Britton's observation for the Elevate audience: excitement is common, execution is rare, and the gap between them is where advantage lives.
If every company has access to the same frontier models, Britton argued, the separator is data. He described the frontier labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI, as locked in a near-even race, with small differences between the leading models. What separates Company A from Company B is the information each one feeds them.
He shared examples from his own work. At Suzy, his team pulled together 25,000 hours of customer call transcripts from Zoom and mined them for patterns: why deals were lost to competitors, what customers kept requesting, and how different buyer personas asked for different parts of the platform. That analysis shaped the company's go-to-market model and product roadmap. As Britton put it, there is no better data source than customers talking to you.
In another case, a top residential broker in Brooklyn told him about NYC Open Data, the city's public database covering construction filings, air quality, crime rates and traffic by block. The data had always been public, but nobody could use a three-million-row spreadsheet. Britton built a front end that lets agents ask plain-English questions, such as whether there is construction near a listing. The data already existed. AI made it accessible.
For the agencies and media companies in the room, the lesson was clear. Historical campaign data, conversion records, headline tests and client call transcripts are strategic assets. The firms that organize and use that data will build better products and better recommendations than firms that simply license the same AI tools as everyone else.
Britton described the application layer, where startups build specialized software on top of large language models, as the place where AI's business impact is most visible. He cited Higgsfield, which he said reached $1 billion in annualized revenue in 18 months, and Harvey, which he said is used by 80% of the top 100 U.S. law firms.
His larger prediction is that companies will buy less packaged software. Instead, people who know how to build will sit with a client, identify the problem and the data, and create a custom tool that fits exactly. He gave a personal example: a global fashion company planned to hire a major consulting firm to build an enterprise platform, a project estimated at tens of millions of dollars and two years. Britton built it himself in three months, working directly with the chief marketing officer, and is flying to China to roll it out globally. The client paid less and got it faster.
That shift moves power from institutions to individuals, and it changes what skills matter. Britton traced the pattern through history. In 1440, scribes held enormous status because writing required access to the tool. Ten years later, Gutenberg's printing press shifted power to people who knew what to say. Morse code operators held a similar position until the telephone arrived in 1876. Each time a technology became a commodity, value moved from knowing how to do the task to knowing what problem needed solving.
AI is doing that to marketing now. Britton noted that he is a bestselling author who does not know where a semicolon goes, and argued that knowing what to say matters more than punctuation in a world where AI handles the mechanics. Citing World Economic Forum research, he pointed to analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, leadership and creative thinking as the skills employers value most.
He also flagged real pressure on entry-level roles, noting that his own daughter graduates college this year into a job market where many traditional starting positions are being automated. For marketing leaders, that raises an urgent question about how the next generation of talent gets trained.
Britton closed with his most practical advice. When he first saw AI's potential at Suzy, he handed it to his engineers and waited. Nothing happened. So he took it on himself, starting with a personal problem: he wanted to stay healthy for as long as possible for his young children. He gathered 25 years of health records, MRIs, blood tests and doctors' notes, and built a personal health assistant that knows his history better than any single physician could.
He urged the Elevate audience to do the same, starting at home if their companies restrict AI tools. His method is simple. Open Claude or ChatGPT, describe what you want to build, and tell it to give step-by-step instructions without moving to step two until you confirm step one is done. Then keep going. By step 33, the pieces start connecting, and you begin seeing how to apply the same steps to client work.
AI is changing how consumers discover brands, how creative gets produced and how purchase decisions are made. According to Matt Britton, AI assistants have become the internet's new front door, replacing much of traditional search. AI tools also let a single person produce work that once required full production teams, and AI agents are beginning to make buying decisions on consumers' behalf.
Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring content so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity recommend your brand in their answers. Unlike traditional SEO, AEO targets highly specific, conversational queries because AI models carry context about the user. Brands that publish content matching those detailed queries are the ones AI models cite and recommend.
Agentic commerce describes AI agents researching and completing purchases for consumers. Instead of searching, comparing and checking out manually, a consumer tells an agent what they need and the agent chooses and buys. For marketers, this means the agent becomes the gatekeeper, and brands must structure their data so agents select them.
Matt Britton is a leading AI keynote speaker for marketing, advertising and media audiences. He founded MRY and Suzy, wrote the bestseller Generation AI, hosts The Speed of Culture podcast, and builds production AI software for Fortune 500 clients. He delivers more than 50 keynotes a year on AI transformation and consumer behavior.
Britton's Elevate 2026 keynote made a clear case: AI's impact on marketing and advertising is already here, in how consumers search, how agents shop, how creative gets made and how agencies win business. The professionals who thrive will be those who identify the problem worth solving, gather the data to solve it and build the solution themselves.
For more on these themes, Matt's national bestseller Generation AI maps how the first AI-native generation will reshape consumer markets, and The Speed of Culture podcast features brand leaders working through these changes in real time. To bring these insights to your next event, book Matt Britton as a speaker. The brands that move first will set the terms for everyone else.
Matt delivers customized, high-energy keynotes on AI, consumer trends, and digital transformation for audiences worldwide.
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