Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Media apps running in AI chatbots, and a Sonos scoop.

Earlier this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the company’s Gemini AI app is now being used by over a billion people monthly. OpenAI’s ChatGPT app surpassed the same milestone last month. Include Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s AI search, and it’s safe to assume that hundreds of millions of people interact with AI every single day to get answers to their most pressing questions.

One of those questions: What should I watch tonight?

It’s a question media companies have spent years to answer, with complex recommendation engines, highly fine-tuned user interfaces and, lately, customized AI chatbots that live inside streaming apps and services. But what if none of those touch points matter anymore? What if consumers, instead of scrolling through row after row of carefully fine-tuned recommendations, simply ask the AI chatbot of their choice?

“ChatGPT is starting to intermediate between media brands and their customers,” says  Yann Jouanin, whose startup builds AI-native apps for media companies and other enterprise clients. “If you’re expecting that people will still come into your EPG or your search – I think that’s gonna disappear,” he says.

That’s not to say that media companies have to completely hand their keys, and fate, over to the new AI overlords. Instead, they can use platforms like ChatGPT and Claude to deploy their own apps, complete with visual interfaces that preserve their brand identity – all while benefiting from the strength of third-party AI services that know consumers better than a streamer ever will.