2 moments that show us AI is at a tipping point

A note to you, dear reader

One of you reading this is the 1000th subscriber to this very new newsletter, and I'm enormously grateful for all 1000 of you?—?thank you. ??

Also, this week I'm testing a new format: My brief reflections on a meaningful moment in the zeitgeist of emerging possibility. Reach out and let me know what you think. ??

The big drop

For longer than most of us have been alive, AI has been evolving —?slowly but surely. Until recently, no widespread disruption in the job market had been attributable to AI per se; the most celebrated threats to human employment have been to the occasional chess grandmaster or Go champion.

And yet for all the relative calm over the years, the narrative undercurrent in most media and cinematic depiction of AI has been one of fear, or at least trepidation. We humans love our drama and our science fiction —?and yet we also know that reality is largely created by the stories we tell...

In retrospect, it feels like AI has been chunking its way up the initial hill of a huge rollercoaster all this time — and the current moment feels like we're peering over the near-vertical initial drop.

2024 is this drop.

A step change

Over the past couple weeks there's been a rolling realization, a shift in the narrative connecting AI and the job market resulting from several breakout stories.

The SORA moment

First, the reveal of OpenAI 's SORA model justifiably broke the internet —?a moment of shock and awe that demonstrated how close we are to being able to create cinematic-quality video with mere text prompts.

While the news was full of reactions to the SORA news, Tyler Perry's announcement that he was putting on hold a planned $800M studio expansion caused its own shock wave due to its bluntness: "Jobs will be lost." And in the wake of the SAG-AFTRA strike that focused specifically on the AI threat to creative jobs, the moment felt particularly poignant.

SORA is currently in private, controlled testing, so it may be a minute (ie a few weeks or months) before we start seeing the larger impact of both this model and its competitors in the realm of text-to-video creative tools. But there's no question this capability is coming, and coming very soon.

Klarna and its chatbot

The second big wave resulted from Swedish payment provider Klarna announcing that its AI assistant, powered by OpenAI , already handles two-thirds of all customer service chats more effectively than the 700 humans it recently laid off that used to service these interactions.

Most companies have been careful to avoid crediting/blaming AI for layoffs over the past year, and Klarna did the same in its announcement?—?but the connection between AI adoption and layoffs is one of the worst-kept secrets in the business world.

While I haven't used Klarna's chatbot, I'm a fan of Four Sigmatic 's products and chatted with its new LLM-powered chatbot just yesterday. The experience was stunningly different from the customer service chat we've known for years —?no waiting, loads of useful text delivered all at once —?it felt like ChatGPT. And sure enough, a quick Google search (still useful!) confirmed that in fact Four Sigmatic now uses Siena to power its chat CX.

Possible ?? Practical ?? Perspective

As The Near Futurist, my focus is on connecting emerging possibilities with practical business value —?for clients and for you, dear reader. (I cover this practice in detail in the inaugural edition of this newsletter .)

That said, in moments like this it's important to take a step back to gain a broader perspective. For each of these step changes —?the ability to create cinematic video from text prompts; and the ability to replace customer service reps with higher-performing chatbots?—?there are implications that transcend immediate practicality.

Fire your agency?

A colleague of mine sometimes describes the creative possibilities of today's AI as sufficient to warrant firing your agency. While it's true that a large swath of agency revenue still comes from creative production tasks that various AI tools can take on, nothing we've seen yet suggests that the visionary aspects of creative direction are about to be replaced.

The real value of models like SORA —?like DALL-E , Midjourney and many other text-to-visual tools —?is their ability to support supercharged exploration of visual directions, making it possible for small teams to cover vastly greater creative territory in a fraction of the time agency teams usually require. And for those of us that have never been visual designers, they make it possible to quickly illustrate and communicate ideas for all kinds of purposes —?presentations, pitches, even everyday communication.

Our communication is becoming more visual —?returning to our ancient cave-wall roots —?at an increasing rate. Expect to see this trend accelerate in the coming months and years —?emojis and animated GIFs are just the beginning.

Shoveling text to customers is not a human's job

Customer service interaction reached its pre-GenAI plateau at least a decade ago. "Press 1 for X; Press 2 for Y; ..." is how it's worked for a long time, whether via text chat, audible menu prompts, or even interacting with many actual human CS reps. As frustrating as it can be on the customer side, I've often felt for the rep I'm dealing with whose job it is to just respond to my inquiry with the designated, pre-approved message. This service design has been ripe for disruption for many years, and since LLMs are brilliant at serving up volumes of useful text guidance in response to human queries, it's frankly a huge relief that they're showing up in CS chatbot contexts.

What loss, what gain?

Interacting with Four Sigmatic's LLM-powered chatbot, I was reminded of the era when spreadsheets became the preferred way to maintain ledgers and do formulaic math. There were absolutely accountants that were displaced by the rise of spreadsheets?—?and they were displaced by accountants that started using spreadsheets. Similarly, when Adobe 's Photoshop debuted just a few years after the first spreadsheet apps, it displaced artists who stuck with traditional airbrushing and other physical creative workflows.

Just as these shifts produced far more gain for more people than the losses they caused, GenAI is clearly going to do the same. Last week I shared the stage at the Building The Future conference with Alexia Cambon from 微软 , and she put it this way:

AI is not a tool for work. It is a new dimension of work.

Just as the internet and the pandemic have prompted the evolution of where we do work and when we do work, AI is causing a shift in what kind of intelligence is best suited to each kind of work we do.

The Near Future

I'm excited to bring my new talk, Co-Creating the Near Future with Spatial Computing & AI to SXSW on March 10th —?if you'll be in Austin make sure to add it to your schedule and bring your questions! I'll be offering old-school, artisan human conversation after an exhilarating and mind-altering journey through the malleability of reality.

I'm now also booking speaking engagements through the remainder of 2024 —?to discuss your next meeting or event, please message me directly or check out my speaking site .

See you in the Near Future!