How AI is rewriting discovery
Discovery moves from homepages to ecosystems and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
This is a reader-supported publication. If you like what I do, help me keep doing it by upgrading to Streaming Made Easy Premium, we got a free month giveaway code right here 🫶 (ending today!)
Three disruptions reshaped the media landscape (in Europe and beyond) in the last two decades:
→ Social media challenged broadcasters’ gatekeeping role.
→ Streaming ripped up distribution models.
→ Creators rewired attention.
AI is different. It doesn’t just pressure-test business models. It questions what media is.
At Streaming Made Easy Live, Ezra Eeman (Chief Strategy Officer at NPO and founder of Wayfinder) took us on a tour of how AI is rewriting discovery. From the “jagged frontier” of breakthroughs and flaws, to the prospect of agents acting on our behalf, his point was clear: discovery is being rebuilt around AI ecosystems, not media destinations.
At a glance:
The jagged frontier
Visible shifts
From AI in media to media in AI
Find, Feel, Flow: the new discovery journey
The intent paradigm and semantic discovery
Predicting vs answering: the hybrid model
Agents and the next marketplace
The stakes: trust, performance, affordability
🎥 Watch Ezra’s keynote during Streaming Made Easy Live.
📑 Download the full presentation.
The jagged frontier
AI development isn’t linear. It’s jagged.
2022: ChatGPT launches.
2023–24: multimodal models, real-time answers, reasoning.
2025: agentic AI enters the scene.
Each leap feels transformational. Each exposes flaws: hallucinations, bias, costly compute, unpredictable “agents” taking actions no one anticipated. Too big to ignore. Too broken to fully rely on. That tension is the media industry’s reality check.
Visible shifts
Adoption isn’t niche anymore.
ChatGPT now: 700M weekly users, 1B daily queries.
Dutch youth: 86% of 15–20 year olds use AI, 48% often.
Average ChatGPT mobile user: 16 minutes a day.
But as usage climbs, traffic falls. Publishers report up to 40% drops from Google since AI overviews rolled out. Scraping wars intensify: models pull content thousands of times for every single user view. The open web is being consumed without clicks in return.
From AI in media to media in AI
The old game: media using AI to optimise workflows.