Threats of Upcoming Era of AI Enabled Smart Assistant (Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple SIRI
There is lot of buzz these days everywhere we are talking about inducing Artificial Intelligence whether it is IT Industry or any other conventional industry be it automotive, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, banking, hospitality retail.
We are on spree of automation and minimising human involvement wherever possible and with use of artificial intelligence , predictive analytics enabled with the image, speech we are now trying to approach the end user/customer with an option where the probability of using it becomes certain.
Have we ever thought where are we heading towards : ALERT ALERT ALERT
Need is Mother of invention. However I would like to say here Invention has always proven to be weapon for destruction.
AI Enabled Assistant can talk like a human an act as per your command. This feature has created buzz all around the world.
Your assistant can do the same in multiple different voices /accents to act like different individual every time. A Salon is very popular and has all it’s slot usually booked in advance. Wherein in the same neighbouring salon the footfall is minimal.
All of sudden we see that one fine morning the polar salon is having it’s all booking full however actually it has been booked by Assistant posing different individuals for different slots. Now, human tendency is we do like to go to our regular place for such routine services. However in case the same place is not available we would go to the alternate option. And if this incident repeats couple of times we become regular to different place.
Here it has resulted into drastic downfall in the business within a week or two wherein it is practically too less time to think and react on it. The salon was not able to cater the customer as they were running out of slots. It is quite common that customer’s don’t run up 100% on bookings. One also would not risk doing overbooking as it has an history of good occupancy. Which makes them refuse to service the walking -customers as well . As they would like to keep the seat reserved for the customer who has reserved the slot.
By the time one starts correlation and acting on it , it has already damaged to than extent which may get tough to survive and irrecoverable in case it is a chain. It puts negative impact on your brand.
Take another example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBVCFcEBKLM
You have used assistant to book your favourite restaurant in in the neighbourhood which usually have wait time in hours especially over the weekend. And the usual business a restaurant does in the week vs weekend is 40:60.
Usually the restaurant takes reservation upto 60% of occupancy and keeps 40% for walking guests. And they do booking in slots to cover 2-3 seating on every table.
Another restaurant nearby has similar spread at similar cost but attracts very less guests and occupancy 30-40% over the weekends.
Flip the game, the restaurant has been booked for the whole weekend and slots upto its capacity. The customer’s turned up less then expected but the occupancy remains at 70-80% as there used to be waitlist and 40-50% occupancy through walking guests. It is usually the management will think of being a lean weekend business. But becomes fierce and restaurant keeps the table vacant for reserved guests and not able to accommodate walking guest while waiting with empty tables for reserved guest. These walking guest would move to the another restaurant where they got immediate availability. Now icing on the cake , if the 2nd restaurant start increasing the warmth of service. It may be able to lure the guests in longer run.
This may result into big time losses as for analysing such pattern and activity you need bulk data which takes time. Where in to cause damage it just needs few hammer at right point and in time.
We can think of numerous abuses of technology. As a Information Security Professional I know our community works hard to tap the holes and a single breach creates a previous damage.