The Personification of A.I.

In this Edition:

1. How the A.I. Arms Race will be Won

2. Where the Money be Made

3. How to Avoid The Chatbot Head Fake

4. The Coming A.I. Bubble

A.I. is the next gold rush and its proverbial veins of gold are running right through our hands in the form of our mobile phones and computers. And like so many past tech innovations it will take a certain amount of intellectual muscle to harness it. During its most prolific phase, the personal computer’s golden era saw the creation and dissolution of massive amounts of capital in the form of new and failed P.C. companies. We only reached a closer realization of personal computing power in the 2000s when the arrival of the smartphone put the power in our hands. Here is looking at you and pouring one out (libations) for now defunct P.C. companies Commodore, Atari, Tandy, and Gateway!

The A.I. Arms Race

A.I.'s muscle will be realized when we integrate it seamlessly into making our lives easier on one side and making money on the other. The Artificial Intelligence arms race will be won by whoever can personify it faster. The HAL 9000 of our dreams (and nightmares) will finally be here to be our expert system to assist us in all things complex from flying airplanes to self-driving cars.

Show Me the Money?

The real money will be made in how well companies can juice and customize A.I. to a personal level for every permutation of customer they have and in leveraging it to build something better than influencers: loyal evangelizing customers. We have already seen the early stages of this for the past ten years as companies have been adding A.I. assistants to help their clients manage data stacks and APIs (see the chart below). An MIT scientist created the first rudimentary chatbot called Eliza in 1966 and more recently we have become intimately familiar with Apple’s Siri (2011) closely followed by Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, and so on. This will only intensify as we move into the future.

Customer Targeting

A.I.'s personification capabilities will become especially important for marketers as they manage how their target customers navigate the purchase conversion funnel, converting complete strangers into becoming a customer to loyal repeat customers and ultimately advocating for their products. One of the earliest steps in the digital marketing strategy process is identifying your target audience through the creation of buyer personas (target customers). A.I. will disrupt this process and companies will create more targeted personas matched to personalized A.I.-driven content gleaned from a wider and more comprehensive data net.

The Headfake

The one watch out is to avoid the chatbot head fake. Chatbots are all the rage now and you can create your own chatbot in minutes with APIs like Botpress, Botnation, and Stack AI. Chatbots are great and they serve a purpose, especially for on-demand customer service. They are getting better daily as more of them are incorporating Natural Language Processing (NLP) elements to be more conversational versus simply drawing canned answers and responses from a static data set. Chatbots are A.I., but they are simply computer programs devised to mimic human conversation. The real fulfillment in A.I. will come as A.I. continues to sharpen its Large Language Models data sets to be more accurate in answering a wider array of questions with greater specificity in answers.

The A.I. Bubble

Prior to reaching true A.I. realization, we will hit a phase of A.I. over saturation as everyone attempts to create their own customized and specialized versions of A.I. This won’t be all bad because we are already seeing problem-specific versions of A.I. For example, Siemens Mindsphere is an A.I. assistant that is used to collect and analyze data from industrial machines. BlackRock’s Aladdin is an A.I. platform that is used to manage trillions of dollars in assets. The challenge will be as with any technological innovation is the avoidance of creating a bubble. Similar to the dot com bubble of the late 1990s, we can expect with A.I. a period of saturation coinciding with massive A.I. tech growth and adoption, a proliferation of available venture capital, and the rapid growth of valuations in new A.I. startups and hopefully, we will have learned our lessons from the ’90s and avoid a bubble altogether.

Despite where you might be with A.I., it’s coming and in more ways, for many of us, it is already here. So let us pull up our bootstraps, saddle up and get ready for the ride of our lives!