Pundit
David Berkowitz
5 receipts • Tracked since Apr 2026
Founder of Serial Marketers and AI Marketers Guild; longtime marketing writer and newsletter publisher (High Caliber AI, Marketecture AI Brief, Serial Marketer).
Affiliations
No firm affiliations on record.
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5 receipts
2026
2 predictions- Apr 28, 2026Too early to tell.“I'd just be skeptical that there some of these point solution things that are viable for the long haul, especially when anything's competing with part of like the Google or Microsoft Office suite.”
Filed for tracking. Outcome to be evaluated as the timeline plays out.
- Jan 15, 2026Too early to tell.“Not everyone needs to buy everything through AI for it to become a healthy sales channel. This year, many of the sources of friction are going away. Consumers may be surprised at first that they can buy that weather-sealing tape without leaving the conversation. Soon enough, they'll expect it.”
Made at NRF 2026 as in-chat checkout was just rolling out across ChatGPT (Instant Checkout), Perplexity (Shop with Pro), and Amazon Rufus. The thesis is testable through 2026–2027: does conversational commerce hit a "healthy sales channel" share, or stall like Alexa shopping did?
2024
1 prediction- Mar 22, 2024Called it.“While streaming services once felt like the death knell for TV advertisers but now are ramping up ad inventory and rolling out ad-supported plans, we'll see that happening in AI too.”
Within 18 months, every major consumer AI platform Berkowitz pointed to was experimenting with ads. Microsoft Copilot rolled out ads in chat answers, Perplexity launched sponsored questions in November 2024, and OpenAI publicly began exploring ad-supported tiers in 2025. The "subscription-only AI" model he questioned has effectively given way to the streaming-style hybrid he predicted.
2023
1 prediction- Sep 8, 2023Story still evolving.“Now, it’s so easy that it feels worthless. And the bigger fear I have is that it will devalue the work that actual authors do. ... But the incentives align with doing more of this questionable behavior, not less.”
Within weeks, Amazon began requiring authors to disclose AI-generated content and capped self-publishing at three titles a day after a flood of suspected AI-written books. AI-generated books keep coming, and how much they devalue human authors' work is still playing out.
2012
1 prediction- Nov 19, 2012Partially right.“I predict that search will be dead in 2020.”
Search wasn't dead in 2020 — Google search revenue actually grew. But Berkowitz's broader thesis (predictive recommendations replacing "head" and "tail" queries, behavioral data displacing typed queries) is exactly what AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are now doing. He publicly graded himself in 2024: "I was wrong. And I was right. And I was right for the wrong reasons."