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What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480)

January 16, 2026

Apple just signed a billion-dollar deal to have Google’s AI power Siri and other AI experiences on its devices. This is a huge blow to OpenAI. It’s also fairly meaningful for your business too.

Why is that? What does the Apple/Google AI deal mean for your business?

In this episode of The Digital Reset Show with Tim Peter, Tim looks at:

  • Why the Apple/Google AI deal is another sign that gatekeepers gonna gate
  • What this deal means for OpenAI and ChatGPT
  • What the deal also means for your business
  • How you can be sure to succeed in the longer term no matter what happens with Apple, Google, OpenAI, and all the rest

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

What Google and Apple’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Past Appearances

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 18m 07s

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Transcript: What Google and Apple’s AI Deal Means for Your Business

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show.

You may have seen the news that Apple has signed a deal to have Google provide AI capabilities for Siri and its devices. As New York Magazine put it, “Apple is buying an AI strategy from Google.”

And I posted on LinkedIn about why this is really, really bad news for OpenAI and ChatGPT. But this isn’t a story about Apple or Google or OpenAI or anyone else, really. It’s a story about your brand and your business and why this matters. Why? What makes this deal matter to you?

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 480 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

My first reaction when I saw the Apple/Google AI news was that OpenAI, the folks that make ChatGPT, is screwed. And let’s be clear, I still think that, by the way. It’s just not the most important part of the story. To get to the most important part of the story though, takes a little bit of setup. And here’s why.

I have argued for a while that OpenAI is in big trouble. OpenAI and Google, along with others, can only drive adoption of their core AI technologies by offering customers useful capabilities, getting those capabilities into customers’ hands, and then finding a way to make revenue and profits from that.

Those are the three legs of the stool anytime you offer a product or service: utility, distribution, and monetization. ChatGPT clearly provides utility. But its distribution and monetization plans have been, well, to put it mildly, lacking for some time.

I talked about this a few episodes ago, which I’ll link to in the show notes, but that’s why they have introduced a browser and they’re talking about making physical devices. They need a way to put their tools in more customers’ hands, sometimes literally.

The deal that Google and Apple have just announced absolutely destroys one of their best paths forward for distribution and monetization, which would have been to develop a deep partnership with Apple. Google has taken that away.

Clearly Gemini was always going to be the default on Android devices, right? Google simply wasn’t going to use someone else’s AI on their hardware. Now Gemini is going to be the default on Siri and more importantly, more broadly on iPhones and Macs and AirPods and Apple watches and Apple’s ecosystem overall.

Being the default matters. There’s a reason that Google pays Apple over $20 billion per year to be the default search engine on iPhones and iPads. That’s how they ensure that customers use their products on Apple devices. People use defaults way more than we’d like to think. Safari is one of the top browsers in the world because it’s the default. Apple Mail is one of the top email tools. And even Apple Maps gets more use than you might expect. Regardless of what the stories tell you, there’s a lot of folks out there using Apple Maps.

I’d originally assumed that being the default was so important that Google was going to pay Apple to be the default. Apparently not though. According to some of the stories I’ve seen, Apple’s going to pay Google about a billion dollars.

And while that might sound like a lot of money, Fast Company’s Mark Wilson put it best. He said “Apple just straight up robbed Google.”

Wilson continues by saying that,

”…increasingly, AI is a commodity. That’s one reason that, for Apple, this deal with Google is a steal. While headlines focus on the shocking nature of Google-powering Siri, it’s a fact that I suspect most iOS users will forget about in day-to-day use as they encounter more and more touchpoints of ‘Apple Intelligence.’”

I completely agree.

I’ve been saying for some time that AI isn’t a product all by itself. Instead, it’s more like the internet or social media. It’s an enabler that makes other products or services better.

Apple’s revenues already are around $400 billion. And now it’s going to have even better AI-powered products for the low, low price of one-quarter of 1% of its annual revenues. That is dirt cheap.

Even better for Google — forget the billion dollars that they’re going to get from Apple — is that they already have a way to pay for this.

Google prints money. Their Ads platform is one of the all-time great revenue generation machines in history. It’s turned them into a company valued at more than $4 trillion. That’s trillion. With a T. That’s an astonishing amount of money, the highest market capitalization for any company ever.

Now Google’s introduction of AI to consumers and their use of AI within their Ads platform simply make that machine, that revenue generation machine of theirs, even more effective, even more valuable. They’re already starting to add personalized ads into AI so they can get even more money here.

Yes, it’s for the user’s benefit. If we have to see ads, I would argue we’re absolutely better off seeing ads we’re interested in

What’s also true is that we’re more likely to click on ads that we’re interested in and drive more revenue for Google. These guys did not get to a $4 trillion valuation by mistake. Again, they know how to turn traffic into money.

And as I’ve already said, this is a huge blow to OpenAI in the longer term. And that’s why this matters to your business.

Because this is another example of gatekeepers gonna gate in action. OpenAI is getting shut out by gatekeepers cutting off its access to customers. That’s what gatekeepers do. They’ve done it to brands large and small for years. Of course they were going to gatekeep the next company trying to gain access to their club.

That’s what they do to you too. Your brand is almost certainly downstream of these gatekeepers. It probably has been since many of these folks came into existence.

You’re well aware that Google and Apple make money by standing between you and your potential customers and charging you for access to those folks via ads or their app stores, the revenue share that they get in the app stores. That $20 billion that Google pays Apple for search and the billion dollars that Apple is giving back to Google for its AI doesn’t come from their pockets. It comes from yours.

Well, what should you do about this? If this is the case, what should you do? As I’ve argued in my book, Digital Reset and other places, your best path to success is to make sure your brand is the prompt.

Your job is to build a brand that your customers ask for by name, no matter which AI tool they use. I might be wrong about which AI platform your customers will end up using for the long term and which one will succeed or which ones will succeed in the marketplace. OpenAI has a ton of smart people working there. Maybe they’ll find a way to bypass big tech gatekeepers like Apple and Google, and maybe they’ll end up on top.

What’s also true is that you need your customers to ask for you and find you. Gatekeepers be damned.

Remember our core framework that says “content is king, customer experience is queen, data is the crown jewels.” That’s how you build a brand your customers seek out and choose again and again and again. The alternative is to pay again and again and again to talk to your own customers. At which point, this isn’t just a problem for OpenAI. It’s your problem too.

Content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels, all start with a focus on your customer. Your content needs to address your customer’s needs and how you solve those needs every single time. Think about these questions. I’ve shared these with you before, but think about:

  • What are your customer’s problems?
  • Where do they need help?
  • How do you help them solve their problems?
  • And what is your point of view that sets you apart from your competitors?

If your content isn’t answering those questions for your customers regularly, it’s not going to show up in AI answer engines and it’s not going to do its job when and if customers come to your website or interact with you on other channels.

Speaking of other channels, you need to think about your content from a content distribution perspective too. To paraphrase my good friend Mark Schaefer, great content doesn’t work if no one ever sees it.

Well, how do you get your content in front of your customers? In the age of AI, content distribution, weirdly, should start with your CRM. Your job is to show up in the places your customers already ask for content, their email, their text inbox, their social messaging inboxes.

That means that your website then has to focus not just on closing the sale when people show up, but getting customers to sign up to hear from you directly. In an ideal world, everyone who visits your website would sign up for your email and would sign up for your SMS. So think about your website, not just in terms of selling your products, but your conversions should be also around encouraging customers to connect directly with you via email, via SMS, or via social follows. Ideally, all of those.

Look at the chat on your site and your website search too, so that you’re providing the same experience customers increasingly expect when they connect with any company anywhere.

Now, of course, your own website is still going to be a place where your content lives, but you need to make sure your content is available on social media for customers too, given how frequently customers spend their time there. It might be Instagram, it might be YouTube, it might be TikTok, it might be LinkedIn. The key point is that your content has to be where your customers can see it.

Most importantly, you need to ensure that your customers tell a great brand story on your behalf when they’re connecting with friends and family and fans and followers on social media too. And that’s why customer experience is queen.

I want to ask you a question. Have you ever had a great experience? I’m sure you have, probably somewhere along the way. Did you tell anyone about it? Probably a couple folks, right? Most people do.

Okay, now think back to your most recent bad experience with a company. Did you tell anyone about it? Of course you did. If you’re like most people, you tell everyone about it.

Customers tell their friends and family and fans and followers about experience that they’ve had good or bad — and especially the bad ones — in almost every social opportunity. It happens online, it happens in group chats, it happens in face-to-face and sometimes even random casual encounters. You know, if you’re at standing in line at the coffee shop or waiting to board a plane, I guarantee either you’re telling somebody about a story you’ve had with a brand or they’re telling you about a story they’ve had with a brand. I mean, if you’ve got a good story to tell, you know you’re going to tell it.

That’s why it’s so crucial that you make sure the story they’re telling, that your customers are telling, about your brand is a positive one. That’s why customer experience matters so much. It’s why customer experience is queen.

Last, but by no means least, pay attention to your data. Obviously, we’re starting to see shifts in traffic from AI or AI browsers. We’re seeing traffic show up in all kinds of ways. And to understand where this is coming from, we’re paying increasing attention to a metric that we call prompt brand equity.

Does your brand show up when your customers prompt AI? Are customers asking for you by name?

It’s so important that you start keeping track of how often your brand is cited by AI answers, both when they’re asking for you by name, but also when they’re having high intent discussions without referencing anyone’s brand.

The frequency with which your brand is cited, sourced, or mentioned within an AI-generated answer and the context it’s mentioned in is hugely important for your business. Prompt brand equity helps you measure how often the AI thinks your brand is a relevant answer for a given customer’s needs.

And obviously, it builds true equity in your brand with those customers going forward.

So yes, the AI deal that Apple and Google just signed matters a ton for Apple, Google, OpenAI, and frankly, the rest of the AI ecosystem. But what it signals about how gatekeepers go to gate matters even more to your business.

Gatekeepers gonna gate is the core argument in my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Gatekeepers are always looking for new ways to charge you and OpenAI and everyone else for access to your customers. Your job is to make sure that doesn’t happen and your digital reset is all about ensuring that it doesn’t.

Remember that content is king, customer experience is queen, data is the crown jewels, and that your brand is the prompt. And you’ll have a pretty good shot at succeeding, no matter what happens with Big Tech.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about here today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 480, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And as always, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest my book called

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Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy
By Tim Peter
New York Metro
A weekly podcast exploring how e-commerce and digital trends shape your business and marketing strategy
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