Google's AI Answers Killed 80% of Our Clicks
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About this Episode
Google's AI answer box took 60 to 80 percent of the clicks that used to reach business websites. Rex Kurzius watched it happen to his own funnel, and instead of waiting for it to pass he rebuilt his company around it.
Kurzius founded Asset Panda in 2012 to solve the least glamorous problem in business, knowing where your stuff is. It now tracks assets for customers including Amazon, Toyota, Dyson and Carnival, and runs in 67 languages. Eighteen months ago he tore the platform down and rebuilt it around AI, and he calls that stretch the most stress he has ever endured.
The product went from a noun to a verb. It used to be a container you filled in. Now a movie studio asks it which props in inventory fit a 1901 to 1925 production, a utility technician asks which tools and training he needs before he leaves the yard, and an inspector photographs a generator instead of filling out a form. When he could not find a tool to replace the search traffic AI took away, he built a generative engine optimization studio in house, and he is about to sell it as a product.
Then the part nobody expects from an asset tracking founder. His father was a German immigrant who named a bakery in Albuquerque after his two sons, Dan Rex Bakery, and died of a heart attack when Rex was 10. The family was nearly homeless and moved in with grandparents in Dallas. That older brother, Dan Kurzius, went on to co-found Mailchimp. Rex's daughter picked the name Asset Panda off a list as a kid and now works there as an account executive, alongside her brother who runs AI. He is blunt about the rest: career silos dissolve, he hires athletes rather than job titles, and if you are not replaced by AI you will be replaced by someone who uses it.
About Rex Kurzius
Rex Kurzius
Founder & CEO, Asset Panda
Rex Kurzius is the founder and CEO of Asset Panda, which he started in 2012 after running Timberhorn IT Solutions and failing to find a good way to track high-value equipment inside it. He sold Timberhorn to the Ettain Group in 2015. Asset Panda was built on a deliberately unglamorous premise: every organization owns things it cannot reliably track, and the existing tools were rigid where the work was not. He built a configurable platform instead, ran the company fully remote years before that was standard, and grew it into a global product with customers including Amazon, Toyota, Dyson and Carnival, operating in 67 languages. It reached number 104 on the 2018 Inc. 5000 with 3,552 percent three-year growth. The original model was sized off a government survey estimating seven trackable assets per employee, which clients blew past almost immediately, and a re-architecture with AWS turned out to fit the arrival of AI almost exactly. Eighteen months before this recording he rebuilt the platform around an AI layer called Ursa, moving Asset Panda from a system of record to a work companion that inspects, audits and answers. Along the way he built an internal generative engine optimization studio to replace the organic search traffic AI answer boxes took away, and plans to sell it as its own product. His older brother, Dan Kurzius, co-founded Mailchimp. Two of his three children now work at Asset Panda, including the daughter who named the company off a list when she was a child.
