“AI boosts productivity and makes technology available to more people.”
– Jan Loeffler, CTO WebPros
It wasn’t long ago at all that the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was merely the stuff of science fiction and other future think. We all knew Al would arrive someday, quite possibly to take over the world, ala Terminator and The Matrix, but for the moment it still seemed almost futuristic to have on-demand voice access to tools like Siri and Alexa.
Just 30 short years ago though, the internet had not yet risen to popular use, eCommerce certainly didn’t exist, there were no smartphones, no Siri and no Alexa. Imagine being a winemaker, or vintner, in this era. You own a vineyard and winery, you grow and harvest grapes, produce wine and sell your product locally. For the most part, this is the way commerce has always been.
With enough hard work though, and maybe a little bit of luck, eventually you might land a deal with a supermarket or other distributor thereby expanding the reach of your product to exponentially more customers.
Internet Changes Everything
By the start of 1996 there were over 100,000 websites online.1 In 2002, Amazon had become a fully diversified eCommerce website2, offering everything from books and music to kitchen appliances. Shopify would be founded the same year3, followed by WooCommerce in 20114, which enabled eCommerce via the WordPress platform.
All of this begs the question of what impact would these modern tools have had on that winemaker of thirty years ago? It’s also nearly impossible to fully grasp just how fast commerce has evolved in such a short amount of time; there have been more developments in the past 30 years than in the preceding 300 years.
And we’re still squarely within this renaissance given that AI progresses daily. ChatGPT was first introduced in 2022, followed by numerous other AI-powered LLMs (Large Language Models) and even Adobe’s Generative Fill, released in 2023, which uses AI to create original visual content.
There were of course intermediary steps along the way. Search engines gave rise to the entire concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which was initially a manual process of optimizing website content to rank higher than the competition for any given keyword. Once upon a time, websites existed solely as hand-coded HTML.
Just as CMS platforms like WordPress began rising to prominence and eliminating the need to create websites by hand, so did SEO tools, and other WYSIWYG site builders; everything got easier. More people launched websites and online stores.
The Arrival of Social Media Advertising
Not to discount the existence of pre-social media platforms like LiveJournal (1999) and Friendster (2002), but it really was Facebook’s rise to popularity in late 2005 (and more specifically the launch of the Facebook Ads platform in 2007) that truly changed the landscape of eCommerce.
Anyone with the proper motivation could now create an online store and run ads to attract potential customers to their store. This was still a manual process that took plenty of know-how, a fair amount of skill, and (yet again) a little bit of luck. As we would come to learn though, businesses were less interested in doing this themselves than they were outsourcing this work to a digital agency or other web professional. But before we got to that…
AI Enters the Chat
As these words are being written, in the summer of 2024, there are now AI-powered tools that automagically accomplish each of the things we’ve discussed herein, and more: website creation, content creation (words and images), online ad creation and management, inventory and customer management, and so much more.
And, for the most part, it does a pretty good job. Although the keen eye can still spot AI-generated content (take a look at peoples’ hands in AI-generated images, as one example). Do let the record show that this blog post was written entirely without any assistance from AI, just in case you were curious.
It really is getting better every day, though. The difference between the last 30 years compared to the previous 300 years is set to be drastically outshone, likely within just the next three years.
Back to the Vineyard
What opportunities would the modern AI-driven landscape present for our winemaker from 30 years ago? For starters, the winery would now be referred to as an SMB (Small and Medium-sized Business) and would have the tools at its fingertips to entirely bypass the old system of commerce.
But that doesn’t put more hours into the day than already exist. The grapes must still be grown, harvested, and processed into wine; a far cry from establishing a digital presence, creating engaging content, optimizing a website for search, and executing effective ad campaigns, from brand awareness to retargeting and everything in between.
Into the Present
Based on our research, 60% of all professional websites are built by professional web agencies, with another 33% having been built with the help of students, friends, or family.
Of course, our winemaker could opt to take time away from their fundamental business responsibilities and learn to use these new AI-powered tools, but our data shows they’re much more likely to hire an agency to develop this digital presence for them.
And what are the tools these agencies use? More and more it is becoming AI-powered tools. As of May 2024, roughly 11.5% of the content within Google’s search result is AI-generated.5
What We Learned
Over the past two years, we’ve interviewed thousands of agencies and web professionals to better understand their needs, goals, and pains. Most of those interviewed generate revenue from web development, maintenance, and hosting; additional income results from SEO, marketing, social media management, and content and graphic creation.
We’ve consequently developed tools within our WebPros web enablement ecosystem that provide solutions for each of these revenue streams, allowing for virtually unlimited scalability, much of which is thanks to the development and implementation of AI within these products.
Much like how modern-day harvesting machines have rendered horse-drawn plows all but obsolete, no more are websites hand-coded in HTML. The entire globe has become the local market for anyone with a product to sell, a brand, or even an idea to proliferate.
Life in the Digital Age
In the web hosting industry specifically, AI-driven solutions are paving the way for smarter resource allocation, predictive maintenance, and enhanced security protocols. Today AI is creating better, more seamless experiences for customers while also reducing downtime and increasing service quality for business owners. Not long ago at all, a person would spend countless hours reading through massive log files looking for attack patterns or implementing simple algorithms to distribute hosting packages more efficiently across thousands of shared hosting servers. AI can now perform these exact functions within a matter of seconds.
Looking forward, the role of AI in the hosting market is only going to increase. This will be in the form of various aspects already mentioned (predictive maintenance, security & threat detection, content generation) as well as things like intelligent customer support and early spotting of market trends.
WebPros and AI
WebPros is committed to remaining on the cutting edge of these exciting new technologies. Even if our winemaking friend didn’t want to hire an agency, he’d have no problem himself using Sitejet’s user-friendly drag-and-drop functionality with AI-powered content generator to create a website and storefront with compelling words and images that would enable him to begin selling his wines online.
XOVI NOW also has implemented AI content creation, including the ability to produce entire SEO-friendly blog posts simply by providing keywords and then selecting from a list of suggested topics.
The future is bright for AI, and at WebPros we’ll continue pushing the envelope of these technologies within the web hosting space. And don’t worry, we’ll also do everything within our power to ensure those Terminator and Matrix-style AIs never “come to life.”
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1https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/short-history-internet
2https://www.shipscience.com/blog/when-was-amazon-founded-and-when-did-it-start-delivering
3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify
4https://woocommerce.com/about/
5https://originality.ai/ai-content-in-google-search-results
