Breakthroughs often lie in subtle differences. This is how fundamental innovation sparks from a change in perspective.
Many e-commerce companies failed because they focused on selling rather than ensuring customers could easily buy. Amazon changed the game by putting the customer at the center, designing an experience that removed friction and empowered users to make purchases effortlessly.
A similar shift is playing out in search. Perplexity for instance, is moving from a traditional search engine model to an answer engine, summarizing information directly rather than directing users to web pages. While Google has mastered search, Perplexity’s approach represents a fundamental change, aiming to deliver answers more efficiently and potentially reshaping user habits in the process.
With over 100 million weekly queries, this shift seems significant, but it also sparks controversy: it disrupts the established “search bargain,” where publishers create content in exchange for traffic coming from Google. As Perplexity bypasses this by summarizing content without driving clicks, it prompts lawsuits and debates about fair compensation for creators.
Other industries, however, remain largely stuck in the old “sell & search” mode. Take the retail banking sector, for instance.
Despite the wealth of customer data at its disposal that can be leveraged to deliver meaningful insights and personalized answers to customers’ needs, banks often push products indiscriminately. This is for instance the case whenever you see an ‘Explore’ call to action in the main mobile app navigation leading you to a “best suited for you” concoction of unrelated products.
This not only misses opportunities for genuine customer engagement but also reinforces outdated models that focus on transactions over relationships, or hard sell over need satisfaction.
Whether in e-commerce, search, or banking, the lesson is clear: the true breakthrough lies in rethinking the user experience, aligning product design with actual user needs, and respecting the broader value chain.
Only then can we move from merely selling to enabling real solutions