Startups Are Enlisting College Students in the Battle to Win AI Search

• Tech startups like Perplexity, You.com, and Liner intention to problem Google’s dominance in search.
• They’re now enlisting faculty college students to advertise and endorse their manufacturers on campuses.
• To win over younger folks is one technique to win the market.

As Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others rush to construct a extra highly effective search engine, smaller tech rivals try a well-worn technique to spur progress: utilizing faculty college students to assist convert folks into trustworthy customers.

Previously yr, startups like Perplexity, You.com, and Liner, which is South Korea’s search equal, have recruited lots of of scholars to advertise and endorse their providers. These “campus ambassadors” submit flyers, throw hackathons and speaker occasions, and provides away quick meals and merch in alternate for signing up.

Perplexity’s downloads have been helped by guerilla advertising techniques that particularly goal college students. Greg Feingold, the corporate’s head of neighborhood, says a profitable back-to-school marketing campaign pulled in over 50,000 sign-ups for a free month of Perplexity Professional. By December, the three-year-old search and chatbot developer noticed utilization surge amongst American college students, with hundreds of thousands of queries despatched every week.

“They seem to be a substantial a part of our person base,” Feingold mentioned, “and in addition they arrive again to the product quite a bit. It is so tied to what they’re utilizing the web for, which is analysis, finding out, this type of data work that Perplexity is constructed for.”

As of March 2024, Perplexity had round 15 million month-to-month energetic customers; it declined to offer a more moderen person complete. The corporate was final valued at round $9 billion in a funding spherical led by IVP.

Constructing a viral app all however requires buy-in from teenagers, tweens, and twenty-somethings. By now, most of them have heard of ChatGPT. It has been over two years for the reason that chatbot’s public launch dazzled the tech world. And the usage of ChatGPT is ticking up, significantly amongst youthful folks. A few quarter of American teenagers say they’ve used ChatGPT for schoolwork, in accordance with a Pew Analysis Heart survey carried out within the fall.

Enlisting college students permits ChatGPT’s rivals to succeed in trendsetters who’ve entry to hundreds of different college students by their dorms, mailing lists, non-public WhatsApp teams, and courses. This technique mirrors the techniques utilized by iconic apps like Fb, Snapchat, and Tinder.

“That is the technology that has grown up with tech of their lives,” mentioned Emma Yee Yick, world neighborhood lead at startup Notion, the place she’s run a campus ambassador program these previous three years. “And so now they’re in faculty, and they’re those who’re going to resolve what instruments we use sooner or later.”

ChatGPT, however higher

Liner is likely one of the hottest engines like google you have by no means heard of. With over 10 million customers globally, Andreessen Horowitz acknowledged it because the fourth-most extensively used generative AI net product final yr. The app works equally to Perplexity however as an alternative of combing massive swaths of the web, it narrows its search to credible sources like tutorial papers and authorities databases.

However as a South Korean startup, Liner’s title barely registers exterior some increased schooling circles. The corporate’s campus ambassador program goals to vary that.

Each week, Kristine Zhou, a sophomore and Liner ambassador on the College of California, Berkeley, hangs exterior the scholar heart with a laptop computer and a celebration tray of Chick-fil-A. She affords demos to college students passing by, reeling them in with free rooster sandwiches. However the true hook, mentioned Zhou, is Liner’s deal with offering customers with dependable content material.

This system kicked off final semester at 4 California universities, which the corporate picked for his or her proximity to Liner workers in San Francisco, mentioned Alex Yoon, head of US operations.

With Perplexity, pupil evangelists deal with sensible functions when tabling on the quad or talking to a membership. Arthita Ghosh, a graduate pupil at Chicago Sales space in London on an alternate time period, engages college students by asking about their journey plans. She makes use of the app to swiftly generate a two-day itinerary with must-see sights, journey instances, and prices.

Isis Decrem, a pc science main on the College of Chicago, emphasizes the flexibility of Perplexity. She demonstrates the flexibility to change between fashions inside the app to fluctuate the result.

You.com can also be within the enterprise of search however does not name itself a search engine. Based by two former Stanford machine studying researchers, the corporate makes a digital workspace for conducting analysis, creating content material, and constructing customized brokers to carry out duties on their very own. To assist develop its foothold, You.com leverages campus ambassadors at 18 universities, together with Stanford, New York College, and Georgia Tech.

Vishal Makhijani, You.com’s chief working officer, notes that if this system works because it ought to, the corporate ought to see advantages for years to return.

“You.com is attempting to be the main productiveness platform for data staff, and faculty college students are simply data staff in a yr or two,” mentioned Makhijani, who was the longtime chief govt of on-line schooling firm Udacity.

These loyal customers may proceed utilizing You.com of their first jobs, streamlining the corporate’s efforts to promote into organizations and shortening gross sales cycles, mentioned Makhijani.

Goodies and goodwill

To make certain, the unstated objective of rivals on this market is to safe a second-place end. Google is the dominant search engine, with a 90% share of the worldwide search market.

Whereas these startups could not dethrone Google because the go-to search engine, their efforts are removed from futile, particularly for the scholar ambassadors concerned.

Although the place is normally unpaid (Liner pays college students $20 an hour), the scholar ambassador will possible profit from free subscriptions, brand attire, digital occasions with firm leaders, and the chance to hyperlink their title with a buzzy startup. In as we speak’s frozen job market, many college students imagine working as a campus ambassador helps bridge the hole to their preferrred employers.

Perplexity noticed an over 600% enhance in functions for its spring semester program in comparison with the autumn, in accordance with Feingold, Perplexity’s neighborhood lead. This system now boasts “lots of” of ambassadors throughout the globe, from Egypt to France to South Africa.

The ambassador program’s attain is mirrored not simply in numbers but in addition in each day pupil life. On the MIT Sloan College of Administration, Honey Pamnani knew she’d made an impression throughout class when her professor answered a pupil’s query with a easy directive.

“Simply Perplexity it.”