"What Did The Dog See"? - The AI Value Proposition?

The grip artificial intelligence has gained over humanity in 2023 - or at least the increase in conversations about whether it will be a force for revolutionary good or apocalyptic destruction - has led AI to be given the title of "word of the year" by the makers of Collins Dictionary.

Use of the term has quadrupled this year, the publisher said.

Just like the majority of the world's tech savvy population, and most likely everyone reading this article were all still trying to figure out where this potential leap forward in harnessing all of the (non curated) information and data uploaded to the internet (and now from our own personal machines) over the course of the last few decades is taking us - one thing for sure is 'artificial intelligence (AI) is here and evolving at a lightning pace.

It has quite a few innovators jumping on the commercial hype opportunity and has people and governments worried!!

I'm certainly no AI expert (neither are many of the so called experts from I can see) but I'm very much in the headspace to try and better understand it's commercial potential, and I do have a few decades of business experience in the online space so below are a few of my thoughts and opinions that might help you to 'see what the dog saw'.

I'm a fan of the author 'Malcolm Gladwell', many years ago I particularly enjoyed reading his book 'What The Dog Saw' which summarises that dogs are finely tuned to human behaviours and body language, as such they often see things we (humans) simply don't pick up on.

What I like about his work is that it's packed with common sense (not common practise) and good judgment, but always from his point of view….. and then the dog’s.

AI is not a science fiction prophecy for the future: it is happening now, and understanding the role it plays is critical for those who want to stay informed about market evolution.

Companies that are prepared to adopt AI will see how it benefits their operations and hopefully customers, while those that do not risk falling behind.?

But....is it more than just clever chatbot agents?

Most of the hype we see in the press along with the networking and industry discussions I've been having recently on this subject is based primarily around AI being a labour/cost saving, and productivity invention - but is this the right way we should be thinking about the use of 'Artificial Intelligence'?

I specialise in 'growth and go to market' strategies so as someone who over the years has become obsessed with trying to understand why we choose one brand/service/product over another the challenges in the book really helps us to look at things from a different perspective, which in theory should help us work back from the customer and hopefully better understand what it is they see in our value proposition - especially as we leap into AI.

In 2022 the buzzwords for the world of business was 'The Metaverse' including all manner of creative uses for tokens, NFT's, and of course the Blockchain.

As such we saw a plethora of 'guru's spring up with expert advice on how we should be investing our time, attention, resources, and finances into this new frontier - and from what I can see and experience it seems like the same frenzy is happening all over again in 2023/24 with AI.

We need to see more 'current' real world commercial use cases combined with the next phase concepts that can take our imagination in several directions with the AI opportunity.

I always find it useful when faced with huge new business opportunities to understand 'what the dog saw' in the early days of the internet and ecommerce.

The Internet: In the early days of the internet the early movers were the businesses that had mountains of new and legacy content. Their operating models focused on the creation, curation, production, and publishing of content - these were the news and magazine industries.

In their frenzy to 'sweat the assets' they more than embraced the additional advertising dollars that followed by moving into the digital space.

The rest as we now know is the demise of the printed medium as was, the catalyst for GDPR, Ad Blockers, and increased data privacy laws.

Their revenue model was most definitely the aggregation of eyeballs to sell ads, and content was/is the driver of that. Today aggregation of eyeballs and ears are still the key driver for all manner of streaming services, news outlets, and those in search of 'new' customers.

Advertising: The first significant use of IA came in 2013 when it emerged as a tool for content organisation. The following year, its uses expanded into advertising, aiding decision-making and reducing part of the labor involved in buying, selling, and placing ads on platforms. By 2015, AI was determining user intent from search results, and in 2016, it entered voice recognition and virtual assistants - so is the current version of AI just a chatbot agent on steroids?

eCommerce: Back in the day when ecommerce started to take off the early adopters proved to be home shopping (mail order) companies. Most of the mail order operating cost model was very much based around procuring and photographing products, associated copy/content in printed form, combined with expensive customer recruitment cost via those news and magazine publishers, and of course snail mail distribution!

One of the big operating cost was call centres, these required investment in people and telephony. All this investment was to be able to take inbound sales calls, answer queries, and for some innovators this included an 'add on' sales function.

For many it also included people opening envelopes to process order forms and deal with payment processing in the form of cheques - those were the days eh!

In summary the key motivators for both industries was wholly based on the internal value proposition;

• News/Magazines = additional advertising revenues
• Mail Order = reduced operating cost
• Advertising = Automated buying/selling

Programmatic media advertising was one of the first areas to adopt AI as a tool to make the buying and selling of digital advertising more efficient.

Other areas of digital marketing started doing the same. For example, chatbots and virtual assistants use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand human language and respond to user questions. Personalisation and remarketing also use AI techniques to adapt advertising messages to individual consumer preferences and needs.

We now know what happened when the banner ad and automated buying/selling was introduced and the subsequent rise of the ad fraud, bot ridden criminals took hold.

We also know that once you have driven down your internal cost what then?

A few recent examples of the current mindset here:

Amid growing calls for schools to teach pupils about artificial intelligence (AI), BBC Young Reporters Theo and Ben have been looking at its risks and potential - and asked their classmates how they have used it to try to sharpen up their homework.

"A geography assignment was due next period and I used ChatGPT to write out the whole speech for me. When I was saying it out loud and I got asked questions I had no clue what I was saying. I got a detention."

"I didn't know what the question meant... so I put in ChatGPT and it just simplified it."

"When you're doing homework, there's no teacher in the classroom. It's like a teacher when you're at home."

That is just a snapshot of how some of our friends have tried to spruce up their schoolwork using AI - technology that allows a computer to act and respond almost as if it was a human.

OpenAI is rolling out new beta features for ChatGPT Plus members right now.

Basically, users won’t have to select modes like Browse with Bing from the GPT-4 dropdown — it will instead guess what they want based on context.

The new features bring a dash of the office features offered by its ChatGPT Enterprise plan to the standalone individual chatbot subscription. Once the file is fed to ChatGPT, it takes a few moments to digest the file before it’s ready to work with it, and then the chatbot can do things like summarise data, answer questions, or generate data visualisations based on prompts.

From what I can see it's (current) interpretation of use seems to be finding it's artificial feet with improvements in chatbot agents that augment all manner of FAQ customer service to help people navigate the minefield of non human interactions, and/or it's a great experimental toolkit to assist with enhancing ideation.

However, if you follow the money (or the dog) you can hopefully see what others are seeing;

Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup founded by ex-OpenAI executives.

The commitment involves a $500 million upfront cash infusion and an additional $1.5 billion to be invested over time.

Anthropic is the developer of Claude 2, a rival chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that’s used by companies including Slack, Notion and Quora.

The company was founded in 2021 and, in addition to Google, has received funding from Salesforce ?and?Zoom and was valued earlier this year at $4.1 billion.

Claude 2 has the ability to summarize up to about 75,000 words, which could be the length of a book. Users can input large data sets and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. ChatGPT, by contrast, can handle about 3,000 words.

Safety Summit: Early November 2023, around 100 world leaders, tech bosses, academics and AI researchers are gathering at the UK's Bletchley Park campus, once home to the codebreakers who helped secure victory during World War Two.

They will take part in discussions about how best to maximise the benefits of artificial intelligence such as discovering new medicines and being put to work on potential climate change solutions - while minimising the risks.

The summit will focus on extreme threats posed by so-called frontier AI, the most advanced forms of the tech which Mr Hassabis described as the "tip of the spear". The summit's priorities include the threat of bio-terrorism and cyber attacks.

Speaking ahead of the summit, Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google Deepmind, one of the UK's biggest AI firms, said the "move fast and break things" mantra associated with Silicon Valley should be avoided.

"It has been extremely successful in building massive companies and providing us with lots of great services and applications," Mr Hassabis said.

"But AI is too important. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that we understand [AI systems] and we know how to deploy them in safe and responsible ways."

He identified potential risks including the risk of AI generating misinformation and deepfakes and the deliberate misuse of the tech by bad actors.

As many companies enter either start up or pivot stage in order to leverage the commercial naivety around AI the one common theme starting to appear is no different than those news/magazine and mail order companies I alluded to earlier in this article.

I am yet to better understand the external 'value proposition' outside of the current message of more chat bots/agents delivering 'lower operating cost and increased productivity' - something that every other AI evangelist is hanging their brand hat on!.

Where do you see AI's general direction of travel in the coming months/years - chat agents or lots more innovation in the fields of health and medicine?