The Summer Before Search Changed Forever - Google Vs Artificial Intelligence

                                       The summer of 2022 feels strangely distant now.

I had just stepped away from my role in the pharmaceutical sector for family reasons. Like many professionals at a crossroads, I decided to bet on experience. Along with my late father, Dr. Paresh Chandra Das — who became my co-director — we sat with a Chartered Accountant in Bhowanipore, Kolkata, and formally incorporated TDC Ventures Pvt. Ltd. on 14 July 2022.

The idea was simple: build a consulting-led marketing venture rooted in two decades of experience across content, branding, digital communication, and business growth.

Fortune favoured the beginning.

Soon after launch, I secured a content mandate with a Delhi-based startup. The requirement was ambitious — nearly 10,000 words of original content every week. Blogs, health articles, press releases, news features, lifestyle pieces — scale mattered. I built a small team of six writers, streamlined workflows, and within months, we were delivering high-volume content consistently.

For a bootstrapped founder, momentum had arrived.

Then something changed.

In late 2022, ChatGPT was released for public use.

At first, many of us in marketing saw it as another productivity tool — perhaps useful for ideation or support. Few realised we were witnessing the beginning of a fundamental shift in how information itself would be created, discovered, and consumed.

Within months, the content economy began changing rapidly. Projects slowed. Expectations shifted. Cost structures changed. Businesses started asking new questions.

The old equation of digital marketing — write more, rank more, publish more — suddenly looked fragile.

The contract that once sustained my early venture disappeared.

What followed was not resistance, but introspection.

Four years later, I can say this with conviction: artificial intelligence has fundamentally altered how people search for, process, and trust information — not only in marketing, but across healthcare, law, finance, education, governance, energy, and everyday life itself.

I still remember the feeling of opening ChatGPT’s free version for the first time.

It reminded me of seeing Google in the late 1990s.

That same quiet feeling:

Something important has just changed.

And most people do not yet realise how big the shift will be. Published on Medium - https://medium.com/p/1bad2b00e987?postPublishedType=initial

Palash Das is the Founder of TDC Ventures Private Limited, a Kolkata-based marketing consultancy offering fractional marketing leadership, digital strategy, and brand building for SMEs and startups. He has over two decades of experience across consumer durables, FMCG, pharma, infrastructure, and retail — in India and internationally.

He writes about marketing, brands, and building things that last.