MxMIndia

Tag: Ashoke Agarrwal

  • On-Device Edge AI – The B2C AI Business Waiting to Happen

    On-Device Edge AI – The B2C AI Business Waiting to Happen

    Image generated with prompts to Meta on WhatsApp

     

    Ashoke AgarrwalAs the ChatGPT excitement fades away, the capital markets are beginning to wonder whether the LLM gold rush is a bust.

    Over the past two years, Big Tech – Google, Meta and Facebook – have sunk hundreds of billions of dollars each in training LLM models and continue to burn hundreds of millions more in inference computing every week as hundreds of thousands of users freeload (or pay pennies) to flood the model with queries that are mostly borne out of curiosity or laziness with not real economic, quality or productivity value add. Further, hundreds of angels and VCs have pumped billions into thousands of AI-driven or AI-adjacent start-ups.

    Although trillions of dollars have been invested in the LLM ecosystem, the business and economic case has yet to emerge.

    In the B2B segment, corporations are busy building machine learning (ML) models that sit atop their proprietary datasets and whatever other data they can access. The ML models (the line between ML and AI) are, in essence, semantic until the day AGI emerges. Predictive pattern building based on complex, structured data and signals will be at the heart of these models. These models will access available LLMs but at the periphery to absorb unstructured data and speed up documentation.

    In the academic and professional world of science and technology research, deep-learning-based ML/AI is an increasing reality. For example, AlphaGo is at the core of research into discovering and synthesising new proteins that will drive the cutting edge of genetics and drug discovery.

    By contrast, the economic case for AI in the B2C arena still needs to be clarified.

    The trillions being spent on creating LLM models and inference testing them by offering them free (or nearly free) to millions of consumers can be likened to the early days of optical-fibre-based bandwidth building, much before the emergence of the deluge of mobile Internet, video-sharing, and streaming. In the final years of the nineties and the early oughts, many wrote off the vast investments in the optical fibre network as white elephants.

    History proved otherwise.

    Device-based Edge AI will create an economically viable future for AI in the B2C arena. This future will be predicated on the investments being made today in LLMs, which have an exponentially increasing number of parameters, increasingly customised hardware and software, and a wide variety of specialist AI agents sitting atop increasingly capable LLMs. Breakthroughs in design will decrease the cost of specialist LLM cloud farms and their environmental impact through greater energy efficiency and better green energy solutions.

    The contours of the device-based Edge AI that will drive the emergence of a viable B2C market for AIs are beginning to emerge.

    Samsung and Google have launched smartphones that are touted to incorporate device-based AI. A slew of laptop brands are also touting AI credentials. However, by the use cases these brands tout, they are marketing gimmicks that harm instead of heralding the B2C AI era.

    Apple’s Intelligence could be the actual start of the device-based Edge AI (EAI) B2C era.

    The launch event of the iPhone 16 mentioned the phone’s AI capability but did not present any use cases. In all the usual slickness of the launch, what went almost unnoticed is that while the hardware and probably the operational software were on the phone, Apple Intelligence would be ready for the consumer to use only a few months down the lines. The reasons could be Apple’s philosophy of not putting out anything half-baked and even regulatory approval.

    Reading between the lines, Apple Intelligence (AI) is the first AI engine focused on deciphering the individual, unlike the written/spoken word, visuals, and video at large that the LLMs are focused on.

    Smartphones are rich repositories of an individual’s lifestyle, interests, attitudes, and behaviour–a finer-grained repository permanently etched. Further variables like smartwatches and fitness rings will continue to add vital data to this repository. With the individual’s permission, the on-device AI can capture more information from conversations, laptops, office computers, and the increasingly innovative IoT devices at home.

    A smartphone-based Edge AI can then be the counterpart of the LLM – the Deep Personal Model (DPM) that is continuously trained to predict and anticipate. An individual needs to interact with her and the world to meet them. For example, if an individual is preparing for an educational test, the DPM could decipher her areas of weakness, alert her to them and provide specific inputs to overcome them. It could create a section of the DPM, her avatar as her professional – an architect, a journalist, a management consultant. This professional avatar could handle her professional communications and routine tasks.

    Another use case is for the DPM to detect signs in her vitals and situational stress and correspond with her doctor’s professional DPM avatar to get remedial recommendations.

    The DPM could take over the essential consumer functions of anticipating and ordering products within set limits and in interactions with market-facing AIs that allow her to access all relevant market knowledge.

    Of course, the consumer will be in complete control of the DPM regarding what personal data it can access and what functions it can perform for the consumer. She would also have the option to turn off and turn on the DPM. She decides based on her perception of access and utility trade-offs.

    The DPM will be charged as a service, much like Apple, at various subscription levels. A few years into the emergence of device-based DPMs, the device could come free with a subscription to a DPM, making the DPM market the largest B2C category in the world.

    The crucial aspect of a DPM’s success is the assurance of privacy and control for the individual. That’s why the DPM must reside on the device, not the cloud. Equally important will be trust in the brand offering the DPM. Apple with its brand positioning on privacy and its track record on that aspect has a leadership advantage in that area

     

    PS: I first wrote about a concept called “Concierge Intelligence” in my first MxMIndia column published on Jan 6th 2022; thirty-two short months later, the idea of what I now call DPM seems to be around the corner.

  • Do brands have a mid-life crisis?

    Do brands have a mid-life crisis?

    Ashoke AgarrwalNike is 60 years old, and is it showing signs of middle age?

    The brand still signs the world’s most high-profile athletes and has a legacy of proprietary technology.

    The mojo was displayed at the Paris Olympics with a three-day ‘Nike on Air’ gala.

    It debuted new shoes for runners, basketball, and soccer and optimized performance apparel for skateboarding and breakdancing. It also showcased Project A.I.R., a platform that leverages generative AI to design and print personalised prototypes for athletes in minutes.

    It was as if the brand was pushing to remind everyone of its mojo. Forty years ago, at its pomp, the brand had debuted Air, a tiny, pressurised airbag in the shoe’s sole that gives athletes an energy return as their foot hits the ground. A legendary functionalisation of the brand’s ‘Just Do It’ promise with a literal swoosh of compressed Air. Today, the legend lives on moviedom with a movie called “Air” starring no less than Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, but does the brand’s mojo?

    Or, like a lifetime achievement award, is the movie a tribute to a has-been cultural phenomenon?

    The brave show at the Paris Olympics did not hide Nike’s struggles with low sales numbers and its longest losing streak since 1980. The company’s move from wholesalers to direct-to-consumer wasn’t as successful as hoped.

    The reasons for Nike’s bad period are myriad, and it will probably cause them to go on for another 60 years.

    The point I want to make is that many storied brands—Nike, Coco Cola, Levis, VW, Marks & Spenser, Bajaj, Titan—the list is long—are undergoing a crisis. And the commonality between them is that they are all “middle-aged” or “old.”

    The most straightforward explanation for the crisis is that times change, consumers change, technologies change, and challenges come with change.

    However, shouldn’t then the uber-successful leader brands should be the first to meet such challenges? They have the resources, expertise and experience.

    But nine out of 10 ‘middle-aged’ leader brands flounder with a new generation of consumers.

    Could the explanation lie in the realms of psychology – the mid-life crisis that affects most successful men in Western cultures as they slide into middle age?

    While a mid-life crisis is, at its core, a disruption in self-confidence and self-image, its manifestation is a rejection of this disruption and an over-assertion of the past.

    Is Nike’s Paris Olympics show an assertion of this sort?

    The wise counsellors suggest that the proper response to a mid-life crisis is to evaluate the self, identify your core values, discard peripheral notions that no longer fit the circumstances, and orient your core values to the new paradigm.

    Is Nike confronting a new generation for whom fitness is a holistic concept that deals with social attitudes, diet, and exercise? To them, is seeking the extra edge of proprietary technology in their daily exercise regime an aspect that robs it of a value they cherish -authenticity? So, while they admire Nike and the premier athletes whom it helps perform better, the admiration does not translate to them wanting the brand for themselves. They are happy with brands like On Running and Lululemon.

    So, how does Nike be relevant to the new generation? For starters, it should be admitted that the mother brand is now a niche brand for performance athletes and the small part of the market that are aspiring athletes or have a self-image of being athletes. There is money to be made in that niche to support their other plans. It should then get down to using its inventiveness and brand-creation skills to launch a new brand that hooks onto the concept that fitness is a 360-degree concept with authenticity at its core. It could then build a whole range of products and services, including digital platforms and AI application layers to enable an individual to ‘Be the Fittest Yourself’.

    The above is just an illustration. An innovative set-up like Nike would have scores of better ideas provided it got out of its middle-aged funk and stopped doubling down on the past.

    The point is that a brand in a mid-life crisis needs to recognize the crisis, reevaluate and use the opportunity to reinvent.

    There are so many well-resourced brands in mid-life crisis worldwide that I expect all the big consultancies to make a beeline for this rather lucrative pie.

    But then, aren’t the McKinsey’s of this world also in mid-life crisis?

    It may take a bold, young start-up consultancy to convince old, foggy brands to see their mid-life crisis as an opportunity to reinvent.

  • Marketing Luxury to Indian Millennials

    Marketing Luxury to Indian Millennials

    Ashoke AgarrwalIndia’s early millennials, those between the ages of 44 and 34, are roughly 220 million strong. Given this group’s educational profile, rising incomes in the tech and knowledge work sectors, the booming start-up sector, and the increasing prevalence of double-income households, the estimate is that at least 5% of the early millennial age cohort live in households with annual incomes above INR 6 million, which in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms–INR 25 to a USD–is equivalent to a USD 2,40,000 yearly income.

    Indian millennials, like their global counterparts, exhibit a lower inclination towards saving than earlier generations. This trait and increasing affluence position the 11 million affluent Indian millennials as a growth market for luxury and bridge-to-luxury products and services.

    Millennials place experiential richness above material wealth. This shift has significant implications for the luxury market. While luxury brands have traditionally marketed themselves based on exclusivity and prestige, these factors hold less sway with millennials.

    Studies worldwide have revealed four factors enabling brands to market luxury and bridge-to-luxury products to millennials successfully.

    The first of these factors is that millennials value experience over possession.

    Further, millennials prefer customization and personalization.

    Millennials prefer brands with authenticity and brand purpose.

    And finally, they gravitate towards digitally integrated brands that engage them seamlessly from online to offline.

    Many global luxury brands have tailored their marketing to millennials in the rich world. Burberry’s is a digital innovator pioneering interactive campaigns integrated across their showrooms and online spaces. Gucci builds on the authenticity dimension by leveraging social issues and cultural narratives in its campaign and content marketing. Rolex delivers customization, offering personalized engravings on its watches. Louis Vuitton has added an experiential dimension to the brand with pop-up experiences and collaborations with artists.

    There is a massive gap between the nominal and PPP values of USD (the dollar is overvalued vis-av-vis the Indian rupee by nearly 3.5 times), which leads to global luxury brands losing out on the domestic Indian market.

    Further, the space for “luxury” as defined by millennials—products and services that offer rich, customized, and personalized experiences seamlessly across online and offline spaces—is expanding the remit of luxury offerings beyond the traditional areas of fashion and accessories, decor, cars, hotels and high-end liquor- to a whole host of categories.

    In today’s India, brands from financial services to bespoke travel to fitness can aspire to tap into the market defined by affluent millennials with luxury and bridge-to-luxury offerings.

    The fact that global biggies find it challenging to match price expectations in India is an opportunity for Indian brands to leverage domestic demand to, in time, build global markets.

    Across all potential categories, the most essential way to build a luxury or bridge-to-luxury brand is to create a relationship with the client. In other words, as I wrote in my MxM India column dated March 17th 2022, titled ‘Like Saas is BaaS the Future’, creating a new brand paradigm with the Brand-as-a-Service (BaaS) model. In the case of marketing luxury products to millennials, a BaaS model will be crucial to the success because BaaS will deliver on three of the four factors listed above directly:

    • It delivers a subscription-like experiential relationship with the brand – think of a subscription service to a luxury car brand where one can change models as frequently as one wants
    • BaaS implies a continuing relationship that makes delivering customization and personalisation easier.
    • And integrating communication and interaction across online and offline channels

    The fourth factor of authenticity and brand purpose will determine the more successful BaaS brand in the luxury market.

    In conclusion, Indian marketers should see a luxury product and service market emerging among affluent Indian millennials as an excellent opportunity to build businesses and brands that can eventually go global.

  • Transform or Bust – Advertising Agencies in 2030

    Transform or Bust – Advertising Agencies in 2030

    Source: https://ccnull.de. Published under Creative Commons Licence

    This image shows the year 2030 in gold numerals on a blue-toned, textured background

     

    Ashoke AgarrwalLately, I have been forecasting the future of the Indian economy as part of a consulting assignment.

    It was interesting to consider the future of my first love, the advertising agency business.

    Everyone in the advertising agency business knows that the future is not what it used to be.

    The rise of digital advertising, the increasing value of data, and the transformative role of adtech are reshaping the advertising landscape.

    New advertising behemoths have sprung up while long-established agency groups are losing importance.

    Today’s advertising business is vastly different from 10 years ago.

    Budgets have already shifted substantially towards digital. Within digital, programmatic prevails and automated processes increasingly replace human skills in advertising placement.

    Adtech is becoming an increasingly important part of the business. Deloitte estimates that the global ad software market reached USD 16 billion in 2018. Consumers are becoming more demanding and less patient about advertising. They want ads to offer a clear added value—highly relevant or entertaining. If not, they skip them.

    One constant of the modern world is not just change but rapid change.

    What will the advertising agency business look like in 2030?

    The advertising business has five major players:

    • Digital Platforms facilitate online interactions between brands and consumers. Google and Facebook are examples. They act as content aggregators with high reach and direct consumer access. Their technology competence and data ownership are the basis of solid analytics capabilities.
    • Media companies produce relevant content for consumers. They adapt to the digital world by transforming their offerings, distribution, and business models. Advertising alongside paid content is an important revenue source.
    • Agencies and agency networks nurture competencies ranging from creativity to media space transactions. New agencies with comprehensive tech skills have arisen in the digital advertising world.
    • Advertisers are the payers in the ad ecosystem. Increasingly, they are internalising advertising skills, especially in technology.
    • Consumers increasingly avoid advertising that does not meet their rising expectations regarding relevance and entertainment.

    A wide range of factors will impact the future of the advertising business. A seminal factor will be the depth and strength of regulations regarding data privacy and the use of data for ad targeting.

    This factor will determine the emerging scenario in the ad business and, thus, the role of ad agencies.

    One scenario is that Big Tech, by and large, wins its war against the regulators on data privacy. An important reason this would happen is that a new generation is much less sensitive to data privacy.

    In such a case, transactional marketing will become a norm. Advertising will use data to predictably target consumers with highly relevant ads on the right channel at the right time to effectuate a shopping transaction. Advertising content will be designed to be informative rather than appealing. The large digital platforms will become all-powerful in the advertising business. Advertisers will play by the rules of digital platforms as brands battle for attention and suffer from decreasing brand loyalty. Media companies will increasingly depend on paid content, and advertising agencies will disappear in their current form.

    In the second scenario, Big Tech is highly regulated, and marketing and advertising shifts to interactive, permission-driven targeting of individual consumers based on first-party data owned by brands. This will spark a creative renaissance with advertising campaigns tilting towards a form of content marketing. Advertising will evolve into personalised entertainment that uses emotional formats and creates strong relationships between consumers and brands. A new creative sector will emerge, and it will be a tug-of-war between media companies on who wins this new sector. The erstwhile agencies will offer their brand advocacy skills with their newly integrated content creativity skills, and media companies will compete with their established content creation mastery with newly acquired brand advocacy skills.

    Both scenarios may coexist, with some geographies and consumer segments becoming driven by transactional marketing and others by interactive content marketing.

    Either way, the advertising agency business is primed for a major upheaval in the next few years.

  • Can India be an MaI and AdI Powerhouse?

    Can India be an MaI and AdI Powerhouse?

    Ashoke AgarrwalThe world awaits the paradigm-shifting potential of Machine Intelligence (MI) and Advertising Intelligence (AI).

    MI and AI are foundational technologies like electricity that need to be deployed for specific purposes to generate economic and social value.

    The competition is fierce, with established corporations and countless start-ups worldwide vying for a piece of the MI and AI pie. With its unique strengths, India can make a significant mark in this arena.

    This column briefly explores India’s opportunity and potential to be a leader in applying MI and AI to marketing and advertising—a field I term as MaI and AdI.

    The first requirement for MaI and AdI is the accumulation of relevant data, including public-facing data like syndicated market, media, and consumer data compilations and research and, to the extent possible, private data on sales, consumer profiles, and research with brand owners from across the world.

    Developed on this data, MaI and AdI engines can offer a brand owner the following based on deep and evolving consumer insight:

    • Fine-tuned and dynamic marketing mix plans that maximize ROI
    • Messaging templates that turbo-charge the marketing mix
    • Product enhancement and development ideas

    Can India become a global leader in this game?

    Yes, if we move fast and move-wise.

    The first step would be to test and perfect new modes of collecting consumer data.

    The internet, the smartphone, MI, and AI promise a new age of syndicated consumer research. Currently, syndicated consumer research sits in silos. Sales numbers are compiled through retail audits. With retail worldwide increasingly dominated by e-commerce and big-box retail, retail audits largely fail as market share indicators simply because e-commerce and big-box retailers treat sales data as a valuable resource and loathe sharing it with third parties.

    Conventional media research needs to be improved. The increasingly dominant digital powerhouses like Alphabet and Meta think of audience data as the engine central to their business, and they have it at a level of granularity that no conventional research technique can match.

    As OTT platforms like Netflix and e-commerce giants like Amazon muscle into advertising, they will keep their audience data close and be equally impenetrable to conventional research.

    Media research focused on traditional mass media has a utility and funding problem. As a hangover from the halcyon days of advertising agencies when they fed at the 15% trough, brands wanted the agencies to fund media research and who, in turn, twisted the arms of media houses to share the costs. Audience research for traditional media thus came to be split into silos – press, TV and even radio, OOH and cinema – had research funded and controlled by narrowly focused bodies.

    As the percentage of marketing communication budgets allocated to traditional media continues to shrink brand, mass media owners and media agencies are finding it hard to continue funding research and the brand managers who are increasingly used to the clarity of performance marketing and pay-per-click contracts, wonder whether bland broad-brush data of who watched what is adds any edge to their marketing data.

    The third data dimension is brand lift. Marketing is going down the AIDA funnel – from awareness to consideration set to intention to purchase, with the final sale, satisfaction, brand loyalty and advocacy culminating in the process. Currently, very little syndicated consumer research is available in this area. The big brands invest in privately funded research to track this dimension, with others adopting a set-of-the-pants approach to this crucial aspect.

    The answer to the challenges above is developing a technology-led process in which the consumer is the direct and single source for all three data dimensions—brand lift, 360-degree media exposure, and purchase. The two critical issues to be resolved are compliance, incentives, and data privacy regulations. The answer lies in innovation in technology, including LLMs and contractual relationships. In the spirit of full disclosure, my partners and I are experimenting with one such system in collaboration with a UK-based company.

    A critical element differentiating successful brands is a nuanced understanding of what works and what does not in advertising and other marketing communication for a particular product category, geography and consumer segment. Ogilvy, in its heydays, used to generate multimedia Magic Lanterns for product categories of interest that laid out, with examples, the dos and donts when creating advertising for a particular category. These Magic Lanterns were assiduously produced by a cell of PhDs running factor analysis on advertising from across the world and some measure of the efficacy of each ad.

    The single source data envisaged above will produce multidimensional efficacy data for campaigns across categories, markets and segments. A state-of-the-art AdI engine could be developed that uses Deep Learning to pinpoint what works and what doesn’t.

    While MaI and AdI will be the first generation of AI in marketing, the third generation will likely result in AI avatars of brands.

    Parallelly as the Siris and the Alexas of the world will, over decades, morph into Concierge Intelligences (CI) that will become AI avatars of individuals. I have written about the idea of CIs in an earlier MxMIndia column. In the age of AI, marketing and marketing communication will evolve to primarily be an interaction between the AI avatars of brands and the AI avatars of consumers.

    In the near future, the single source would meld with the client’s private data, providing a never-before-used base for effective marketing planning.

    There is scope for more than one Indian player to make India the single-source powerhouse of the world for the following reasons:

    • India has the technology nous in the high quality, low-cost quadrant.
    • India is an evolved B2C and B2B market that can support the development of single-source-research-based MaI and AdI systems.

    Since the single-source system will be digital, India can market its fully developed MaI and AdI systems worldwide.

    Single-source data coupled with MaI and AdI are the future of marketing and advertising, and India, on its way to Viksit Bharat, can own it.

  • Can Indian Brands Go Global?

    Can Indian Brands Go Global?

    Ashoke AgarrwalCan India become an economic superpower without some of its homegrown brands going global, whether in the B2C or B2B space?

    Probably not.

    The Germans reconstructed a shattered war economy and became an economic giant, building global B2B and B2C brands like Siemens, BASF, Mercedes and BMW. The Japanese did with mid-market, high-volume brands like Sony and Toyota and the Koreans with value brands like Samsung and Hyundai.

    A brand is a multi-dimensional complex entity.

    Bernd Schmitt of Columbia Business School posited a model delineating a brand into fifteen dimensions.

    Figure 1: Consumer Psychology Model of Brands

    For a brand to succeed in India and establish itself globally, it must build on all 15 dimensions of its markets.

    However, one dimension is critical for a brand to become global.

    It is ‘Brand symbolism’ under the ‘Signifying’ triad.

    Schmitt writes, “Brands must be used to signify not only individual selves; they may also represent a group, a society, or a culture. As cultural symbols, they can stand for nations (McDonald’s), generations (the Gap), and cultural values (Marlboro, Harley-Davidson). As exemplary symbols worthy of admiration and respect, they can assume the role of cultural icons and assume mythic qualities.”

    In writing about Brand Symbolism, Schmitt refers to D.B. Holt’s 2004 book, “How brands become icons: The principles of cultural branding”.

    In his book, Holt explains how brands become icons by creating “identity myths” that connect with culture and help people make sense of their lives. He argues that iconic brands cannot be built using conventional branding strategies focusing on benefits, brand personalities, and emotional relationships.

    Iconic brands do not target specific consumer segments or psychographic types. They do not mimic pop culture but instead lead it. They speak with a rebel’s voice. They don’t try to mirror their customer’s thoughts and emotions. They speak into a cultural conversation in a relevant way and take on meaning beyond their categories.

    The global brands of the US, Germany, Japan, and Korea became global icons because they took a slice of their country’s cultural identity and gave it global resonance.

    Indian brands that aspire to global success must do the same. They must capture India’s soul and make it relevant to people’s lives worldwide.

    India has done it before with Yoga. Yoga is an iconic practice across the world that captures Indian asceticism and gives it relevance to the day-to-day lives of people.

    I have worked, in their foundational years, on two Indian brands that have lately begun to enter global markets – Amul and Tanishq.

    Both brands have the DNA to become global successes.

    Amul, a food brand focused on dairy products, can build on the Indian cultural concept of Satvik. Satvik is a powerful cultural concept that elevates dispassion and purity as the keystones to blissful happiness. This will find global resonance in the world looking to embrace “less is more” to combat environmental degradation and an epidemic of greed. Specifically in the area of food, there is growing disgust with cruelty to livestock to overstuffed, overdosed, and over-mechanised meat farms, leading to a counter-culture movement towards vegetarianism.

    Tanishq, as a jewelry brand, can build itself on the Indian cultural concept of ‘Shringar’. Shringar is one of the Navarasa – nine emotions, moods, or feelings that govern life. Shringara, in Sanskrit, means love, romance, decoration, beauty, attractiveness, and an aesthetic sense. Shringar can give rise to all kinds of love, be it romantic love, love between siblings, parental love, holy love, or even love towards a pet.

    Tanishq can build itself as the Shringar that creates, and nurtures love in an increasingly stressed and alienated world.

    I know that both brands–Amul and Tanishq–are currently in a conventional brand-building stage, focused on the 14 other dimensions of the Schmitt model. However, it might be helpful for them to chart their course to becoming global icons starting today. In that journey, they must identify a cultural strand that underlines their Indian identity while resonating with universal concerns and values.

    Other categories offer India the opportunity to build brands with the potential to become global icons. I’m fortunate to be working with one such brand. It operates in the fabric space–a natural fabric unique to India and resonant with the very Indian value of non-violence–Ahimsa–while being equally strong on Shringar. Someday, over the next few years, I hope to share the global success story with this very Indian brand.

  • Artificial Intelligence will produce a range of genuinely pathbreaking consumer devices and services tomorrow, creating a new consumer and economic boom, writes Ashoke Agarrwal

    Ashoke Agarrwal: The Near Future May Bring Some Personal Goodies

    Ashoke AgarrwalThe world is passing through an uncertain phase. The crumbling global order, war depredations, and the accelerating threat of climate change only exacerbate the acrimony of increasing tribalism across societies. Nearer home, the era of coalition politics is back, and its effect is uncertain. Will it reduce the bickering across political, regional and class lines, or will it only amplify it? Will it help solve inequality and employment issues, or will it only dampen overall economic growth without helping anyone?

    Amidst the uncertainty of the present, it’s comforting to envision a future that holds promise. Not a distant future, but one that is within our grasp, the near future.

    The sociopolitical and economic arenas are too fraught to think about a near future that will benefit the world. What about technology? Enough is happening there to change lives globally. However, the overall sour mood also permeates the view on technology forecasting.

    Take Artificial Intelligence (AI). Future historians will see 2023 as the year the Age of AI dawned. However, current prognostications on what AI will do for humanity are primarily dominated by doubt and dread.

    After a day spent reflecting on the Indian election results and uneasy contemplation of India’s social and economic future, I have decided, as an exercise in therapy, to generate a listicle in today’s column on the transformative potential of AI. These are not just ‘goodies’ but solutions that can revolutionse our lives in the next decade. AI systems and devices that are personal and make an individual’s life better.

    Here it is:

      • An AI audio avatar. A personal wear device that not only translates speech from one language to another but also puts it out in real-time as a lip-synced dub, mimicking the speaker’s voice. The potential of such a device is immense, and the result could be greater cohesion within and across societies, especially in multi-lingual polities like India and Europe. There could also be negative aspects – for example, a rabble-rouser will rabble in real-time in multiple languages. But then, no technology or means has ever been invented that does not have a negative aspect. All the technologies that the above kind of device will need already exist and are ready to be adapted and integrated. This doability aspect applies to all other items on this list, too.
      • An AI Chef. Cooking is a science. An AI Chef operating in a fully equipped AI kitchen with all ingredients on hand and robotic arms could rustle up any dish on demand. It could do so from a recipe, of course, but it could even analyze and recreate a cooked dish. It could act on human feedback and tailor a dish to specific requirements. Give it a dietary requirement, and it creates a week-long menu that fits it and serves the meal every day. While an AI Chef is a possibility within the next decade, within the next few decades, it could reach Start Trek levels – rustling up dishes from manipulating a few basic chemicals that taste the same as those made from natural ingredients and also have the same if not better nutritional values. Imagine agriculture and animal husbandry being replaced by the chemical industry!
      • An AI Concierge. An AI system that resides on all your devices and is witness to all that you do (based on the level of access you give it) and, if you choose so, all that you think (by inputting your thoughts into the system, a cyborg-like interface that knows what you think is probably a century away). Your AI Concierge, if you so choose, handles all your routine correspondence (personal and business), shopping and even financial transactions. Your AI concierge will do all it does based on a deep understanding of your needs, an all-around knowledge, and a speed of action unmatched by an individual or even a human team of specialists.
      • An AI Personal Physician. Today, VVIPs, like heads of state, have personal physicians. Tomorrow, the miracle of AI will lead to many of us having one – a constantly up-to-date AI expert system that will access all of the individual’s health data – from all the wearables, lab tests and medical scans (the amount and quality of health data that wearables will collect are constantly improving. A wearable lab-on-the-arm that continually tests and provides periodic detailed blood work reports is possible. Home scanners that can provide essential X-ray scans are likely to become familiar. Over the next few decades, an AI bathroom could scan a user’s body and waste output daily). The AI Personal Physician would then make health recommendations to the individual and consult specialists, who could also be AI systems when needed. It would coordinate with the AI Concierge to fix appointments for tests and consultations.

    Today, AI is a hollow add-on claim touted by many consumer device and service sellers. However, AI will produce a range of genuinely pathbreaking consumer devices and services tomorrow, creating a new consumer and economic boom. Initially, the boom might cater to the affluents, but economies-of-scale and increasing economic productivity will ensure the boom spreads across all sections of society.

  • As I drowned in this murky media sea, I perceived a country and a society riven by strife where misery ruled, and the only alternative was another form of misery, rues Ashoke Agarrwal

    Ashoke Agarrwal: Thank you, CNBC-TV18!

    Ashoke AgarrwalI’m an avid consumer of political and economic news.

    My consumption habits are, however, skewed.

    I focus on the US media simply because the US is the best and most entertaining but enlightening reality show on Earth. Many years ago, I had an advertising executive from New York in stitches when, during an argument, I quipped, “Hollywood is not an American institution. America is a Hollywood institution.” Plus, the world’s most prosperous country delivers bonzo production values in everything it does. However, I do assiduously ignore the US media’s take on India and generally the rest of the world because of its “Ugly American” bias.

    I rely on magazines like The Economist and a series of well-chosen podcasts (YouTube videocasts) for serious geo-political, technology and economic takes.

    I tend to mostly ignore the Indian news media, not because I’m not interested in Indian news but because its professional standards and production values are so horrendously low. I still dip into India Today magazine because its coverage continues to be grounded and unbiased. Though page after page of “sponsored” content is an irritating distraction, everyone, including a storied magazine, must make ends meet in these dog days for mass media.

    Over the last couple of months, caught up in the implications of the impending election, I made an exception. I started watching the Indian news channels and reading the Indian newspapers. The reasoning was that the reach of news media, especially the vernacular TV news channels and newspapers, continued to be good. Watching and reading them was one way to get in touch with what was happening on the ground.

    The upshot of this experiment was that in a matter of weeks, I was depressed!

    As a form of self-analysis, I asked myself, what gives?

    A recent article in The Economist,”Are American Progressives Making Themselves Sad?”, offered an interesting perspective. Gallup’s annual global poll on happiness found that progressives are, of late, much less happy than conservatives. The cause for this was a flip in the attitude to change. In an earlier era, progressives anticipated change and were very happy about it. Now, after decades of progressive change, the conservatives are looking for radical change. And since change is inevitable, the happiness pendulum has swung.

    But does the progressive-conservative dichotomy, fascinating though it is, explain my depression? Not really. I’m a centrist, and I have no dog in the political fight that is currently raging in India. While one party is a better manager of India’s fiscal and economic policy, India’s financial strength and growth will endure whoever is at the political helm.

    Shouting matches about secularism, appeasement, dynasty, authoritarianism, national image, security, threats to the constitution and democracy etc., etc., are just shadow-fighting. Such shouting matches about ephemeral issues are de rigueur in heated political campaigns.

    So, the ingredient in my daily diet of Indian mass media coverage of the Indian elections that upset my mental equilibrium was not the content but the tone delivered by Indian politicians from both sides and the tone of the onward transmission by media coverage.

    The bile, from both sides, is poisonous. The rhetoric is devoid of all reason. Instead of providing a patina of deliberation and studied comments, the media seeks to amplify the bile and the unreason.

    As I drowned in this murky media sea, I perceived a country and a society riven by strife where misery ruled, and the only alternative was another form of misery.

    And then I remembered that the most potent pillar of modern society globally, including in India, is business, not politics. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2023 confirms this. The finding is that people’s trust in business is consistently higher than that of government, the media, and NGOs. Given this, perhaps the state of Indian business better reflected the mood and state of India and its people than its politics. I, therefore, added India’s business news channels and newspapers to my daily diet of Indian mass media. Soon, I found relief. The tone is measured. The analysis is grounded in numbers. And the mood is cautiously optimistic. India is in good hands, I realised. Its economy and businesses are in good hands. Hands that will find equilibrium and growth whatever the political dispensation. Isn’t it evident when State Governments play a crucial economic role, and businesses continue to boom under State Governments of varied hues?

    My analysis is probably too facile, but it helped me beat the downward loop. For this reason, I must thank CNBCTV18. You guys are steadfastly devoted to the numbers, financial reports, and the stock market with a smile, steadily ignoring the political storm outside your studios. Thank you once again. Bill me for therapy if you must, though I pay the requisite subscription charge.

    PS: My fellow MxMIndia columnist, Ranjona Banerji, regularly reviews the news media scene in India. To do so, she must digest a daily diet of Indian news media over the years. After my experiment, my admiration for her has increased manifold. What perseverance! What an iron stomach! Hats off!

  • Net-Zero and The Diffusion of Technology

    Net-Zero and The Diffusion of Technology

    Ashoke AgarrwalClimate change, the most pressing issue of our time, is manifesting unprecedentedly. The erratic weather patterns, marked by prolonged droughts, devastating floods, and uncontrolled forest fires, underscore the need to achieve net zero emissions swiftly and subsequently reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

    There are four broad routes to reaching net zero (and then continue on the path of reduction):

    • Reducing the average carbon footprint of each human through lifestyle changes – mainly through consuming less electricity and fuel and changing to more eco-friendly diets
    • Technology that a) enables humans to consume less electricity and fuel beyond lifestyle changes and b) lowers the carbon footprint of economic and industrial activities like agriculture, manufacturing and computing.
    • Increase the natural green cover that absorbs greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and
    • Create, build and run technology systems that absorb and sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

    Decades of grappling with the problem of climate change have made it clear that getting humans to change lifestyles to reduce their average footprint is challenging, if not impossible. The reason is that fundamental human nature prevents humans from sacrificing individual comfort to attain community goals.

    Preserving and increasing the green cover runs into a geopolitical logjam engendered by the uneven development of countries worldwide.

    The above reasons make the development and diffusion of new technology critical to meeting the world’s net zero and beyond goals.

    These technologies range from low—to zero-carbon footprint power (wind, solar, nuclear fission, and someday perhaps nuclear fusion) to greener mobility (biofuels, hybrids, hydrogen and electric) and industrial processes (grey or green Hydrogen).

    Each of these new technologies faces multiple challenges in meeting its full potential.

    Take electric cars, for instance. The market opened at the high end, and pricey Teslas became symbols of a woke lifestyle. In the process, Tesla solved tricky technical problems, including batteries with enough juice to support viable range and life and reliable and fast charging systems.

    The Theory of Product Form Strategy (PFS) postulates every innovator of new technology faces a product-form decision at an early stage of building a business out of his innovation. The innovator company has three choices: Market the Know-How, Market a Component, or Market A System.

    In a pre-print manuscript submitted to the Journal of Marketing titled “A Theory of Product-Form Strategy: When to Market Know-How, Component or Systems.”, Frias, Ghosh, Janakiraman and Duhan, have an interesting illustration of the PFS Theory. For example, consider an innovator who has developed a technology that tracks the mechanics and dynamics of a baseball bat as it meets the ball, allowing coaches to refine a batter’s ability. As a result, the innovator can decide to sell the technology to a party that determines how to market it. Alternatively, the innovator can develop the technology into a component that fits on a bat and market it to bat manufacturers.

    The third alternative is for the company to get into bat manufacturing and build a bat brand based on its advanced technology.

    Tesla, the pioneer in the EV market, decided to go the “Market A System” route.

    This decision has impacted the very structure of the EV market globally. Today, the EV market is a positioning and pricing battle between traditional auto brands and newcomers.

    In an alternative scenario, if technology pioneers had developed and marketed know-how and components in the battery technology, charging, power electronics and drive train areas (including hybrid), the structure of the green mobility market would be very different. It would be akin to how the PC industry developed with Windows and the smartphone category with Android.

    Over the past year or so, the EV category has experienced a slowdown, with many people wondering whether hybrids will be the future of green mobility. As a result, the green mobility market might evolve with standard batteries, charging systems, power electronics and drive train components, releasing economies of scale in capital costs and end pricing. In such a scenario, a brand like Tesla could be the premium walled-garden brand, much like Apple is in smartphones.

    Green Hydrogen has a more extensive remit than EVs or Hybrids, as it can impact broadly and deeply, as illustrated below.

    The Product Form Strategy that pioneers the Green Hydrogen revolution will have a seminal impact on the global economic and industrial framework over the next few decades.

    Green Hydrogen is at an early stage of evolution; given its distributional nature, it is likely to mature into a Big Oil-type category–“Big Hydrogen,” so to speak.

    The penetration of Green Hydrogen will follow the Technology Adoption Life Cycle as stated in Geoffrey Moore’s “Inside the Tornado”.

    “Big Hydrogen” must adopt “The Bowling Alley” strategy to release The Tornado to build tomorrow’s hydrogen economy.

    I explained “The Bowling Alley” strategy in some detail in my MxMIndia column of February 16th, 2023, titled “The Diffusion of AI: What do the marketing models predict?”.

    AI, Green Mobility, Green Hydrogen, and their offshoots will be important marketing and communication categories for tomorrow, and marketing and advertising people should invest in closely following their development and diffusion.

     

  • Is Marketing coming Full Circle?
    AI-generated image

    Is Marketing coming Full Circle?

    AI-generated image

     

    Ashoke AgarrwalTime was when marketing was confined to the bazaar. Goods and services were sold in one-to-one transactions between a buyer and a seller. More often than not, the buyer and the seller had a relationship, if not of trust, then at least of familiarity.

    Then, the eras of mass manufacturing and mass media dawned. After World War II, the industrial age shifted into high gear, leading to a proliferation of products and services. The prosperous 1950s and 60s, driven by the economic boom in the USA, marked the birth of the consumer era.

    Marketing underwent a significant transformation, shifting from the traditional model of building one-to-one relationships to a new era of mediated one-to-many brand-building. Modern media made this shift possible, revolutionizing how mass audiences could be reached.

    Marketing and media forged a symbiotic relationship, each playing a crucial role in the other’s success. With its ability to attract and retain audiences, media provided the platform for marketing to communicate its messages. In turn, through advertising, marketing financed the accumulation of these audiences, ensuring the continued viability of media.

    In the initial days of mass media marketing, brands were the pegs through which information about the product or service was conveyed. In the early days of the consumer age, many products and services had differentiated features, and advertising was then the art of conveying unique selling propositions (USPs) memorably.

    A few decades into the consumer age, as categories matured, competition heated up, investment flowed into consumer businesses, contract manufacturing emerged, and brands in many categories didn’t have differentiating features to hang their stories.

    Brands morphed away from information providers to signalers of personas and lifestyles. For example, the Nike user was a never-say-die enthusiast, while the Adidas guy strived for perfection.

    Brands’ dependence on mass media increased. Signaling a persona or a lifestyle on mass media allowed the entire market–loyal users of your brand, potential users of your brand, and, as importantly, loyal users of your competition–to know what your brand stands for. Brand equity was built on what the brand stood for and what it did not. The acceptance among loyal users complimented the rejection by the faithful users of the other brand. Pepsi’s equity depended not just on its persona but as much of the persona of Coke.

    While mass media might have been primarily financed by marketing, its importance went well beyond its role as a vehicle for advertising.

    In its heyday, mass media offered society a shared cultural arena that builds societal cohesion. Most religiously read the same one or two newspapers in the morning covering the same news, watched the same prime-time TV programs and went to the same movies.

    The arrival of Facebook and the subsequent social media juggernaut fractured this cohesion. Today, the average person gets his information, views, entertainment, and cultural content from various social media and OTT sources that may have little in common with those in his family, his colleagues, or his neighbors. The cohort that shares his principal information, entertainment, and cultural sources is not a community in the traditional sense – they might not reside in the same city or even country, they might not share the same profession or educational level, and they may not be even in the same age group. The only thing they have in common is the echo chamber of partisan views and attitudes they share. They are the modern tribe – divorced from the shared everyday space and civic responsibility that defined traditional communities.

    This fracturing of societal cohesion has also fractured the rationale that drives modern brand-building.

    The core function of a brand as a widely accepted signal of a persona or a lifestyle is fast losing its potency, mainly because, in post-modern society, there is little that is widely accepted. In an era when even facts have alternate facts, what chance does a brand have as a widely accepted symbol?

    In light of failing mass media, brands have shifted their marketing resources to new media. However, the paradigm that drives their brand-building effort remains the same as in the modern era. By and large, they are yet to find a new paradigm that better suits the changed reality.

    Lately, I have heard murmurs from the marketing fraternity that perhaps digital and social media are better suited to “performance marketing” (another name for baiting someone to click on a link) than brand-building. And they must reweigh their mass media spending to strengthen their brands.

    Instead, the new reality calls for re-examining the very purpose of brands. Instead of brands being broad-based signalers of lifestyle or persona to a market, brands in the emerging new marketing era become builders of permission-driven one-to-one relationships with their consumers. Like the shopkeepers and the shoppers of the bazaar of the old days, a brand and its consumers must develop an interactive relationship of trust and constantly deepening understanding of each other.

    With the maturing of Big Data, a digital-immersed consumer, e-commerce, and the economies of scale of cloud computing, marketing can today shift to a paradigm where a brand can build and nurture a one-to-one relationship with consumers at scale.

    Given my current obsession with AI, as marketing reverts to building one-to-one relationships, the day is close when the one-to-one relationship will be between the brand’s AI avatar and the consumer’s AI avatar, as I have written in many of my MxM columns, starting with the first one.

    Marketers at the cutting edge, including many D2C start-ups, have started working on this new paradigm.

    Post-modern marketing could address another shift. The younger generation of consumers – Gen Z and, over the next decade, the Alphas (those born after 2010) – are opposed to marketing messages touting lifestyles and personas and, simultaneously, intensely devoted to a chosen cause. Can tomorrow’s brands be built based on a cause it espouses, not just in communication terms but through on-the-ground action? An exciting area to ponder in a MxMIndia column to come?

  • In the Age of AI will Media & Advertising Divorce?

    In the Age of AI will Media & Advertising Divorce?

    Image rendered by ChatGPT given the column theme

     

    Ashoke AgarrwalA few decades ago, I was helping an advertising honcho craft an acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award. High on the list of reasons why advertising is a social good is that it enables citizens to access information and entertainment by providing media at a reasonable or no cost. Fast forward a few years, and the media veteran Pradeep Guha shocked the world by overtly positioning the primary role of the Times of India (TOI), once India’s newspaper of record, as an amasser of audiences for advertising to address. Pradeep’s honest assertion presaged the fall from grace of TOI and most other newspapers from a necessary read to a toilet accessory, if that.

    In the realm of broadcast and cable television, the relentless pursuit of audiences for advertisers has led to a steady diet of mind-numbing soap operas and shallow news coverage. The once vibrant and diverse landscape of television has been reduced to a monotonous cycle of content, all in the name of catering to advertisers’ demands.

    In the early years, social media was hailed as a tool of enlightenment and revolution, and the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution were credited to it. Today, it is seen not just as banal but as an insidious cause of rising depression among the young and tribalism at large. What gave? Once again, it was social media’s marriage with advertising. As Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta) anchored their business model to advertising, they invented and nurtured algorithms that invented hordes of individuals hooked on content that amplified their worst impulses.

    The rise of OTT (Over The Top) television based on a Netflix-like subscription model led to a creative renaissance that restored television content as an art form similar to the movies (the fact that film and music had survived, in the main, as art forms have to do with the fact that advertising played little or no role in their business model). To my mind, OTT’s recent experiment with advertising as a source of revenue is dangerous and could lead to an inevitable creative slide into inaneness.

    The world is now seeing two revolutions.

    There is now a backlash to the increasing irrelevance of traditional mass media and an increasing wariness with social media as a news and information source. As a result, social media like Instagram and, where available, TikTok (or its imitators) have become platforms for content creators across various genres. While traditional social media platforms are becoming forums for content creators aiming at the mass market, niche platforms like Substack, Medium, Reddit and YouTube are becoming platforms for niche content creators in journalism, opinion, reviews and think pieces.

    In the coming years, if traditional media continues its decline, individuals or small, independent teams may take over a more significant share of the content market. While niche content on platforms like Substack and Medium is subscription or micro-payment-supported, content creators of mass platforms like Instagram and TikTok depend upon an insidious form of advertising called Influencer Marketing.

    While the dispersed content-creation model gathers momentum, another revolution is afoot as AI matures and uniquely empowers individuals and businesses. In a decade or two, communication between brands and individuals will be AI mediated with an AI avatar of the brand in communication with an AI avatar of the individual. I have posited this in my MxMIndia column of Jan 2022 titled ‘The Coming Post-Digital Age’.

    This will then result in a divorce between the media and advertising, leading to:

    • A re-emergence of mass media, albeit with a different business model
    • a repositioning of social media as a valued platform for content creators
    • And more effective and efficient brand-building by marketers through direct communication and social diffusion

    What do I mean by social diffusion? Globally, brands like Tesla and Apple have been built chiefly on social diffusion, which involves shared social narratives and the prosaic term unpaid media. Brands like Mercedes and BMW may have had advertising support in developed countries but have been mainly built on social diffusion in India. The guru brands – Sri Sri and Satguru – have been built through social diffusion. If Patanjali had continued to rely on social diffusion instead of relying on advertising to meet vaulting ambition, it would not be in the trouble it is today.

    In conclusion, the marketing communication discipline will shift paradigm over the next decade. One dimension of the change will be technology, with the emergence of AI as the vital medium of consumer interaction. The other dimension will be social, with the slow and steady accretion of social diffusion through narratives and word-of-mouth.

    Ashoke Agarrwal is a veteran advertising professional with around four decades in advertising and marketing services. Agarrwal, a chemical engineer from IIT Mumbai and a postgraduate from IIM Bangalore, is a pro-entrepreneur with past and current ventures in market research, advertising, CGI, e-learning and brand consultancy. He writes on MxMIndia every Thursday. His views here are personal.

  • Market Research in the Age of AI

    Market Research in the Age of AI

    Ashoke AgarrwalWhen one plots the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing, one arrives at a singularity where all of marketing is the AI avatar of a brand in direct conversation and interaction with the AI avatar of the consumer. I have called the AI avatar of consumer – Concierge Intelligence in many of my columns here, including my first MxMIndia column back in Jan 2022 -“The Coming Post-Digital Age”.

    However, plotting and thinking about the intermediate points would be helpful.

    I have been part of a team working since 2020 on using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate secondary research semi-autonomously. The launch of GPT-3 and subsequent versions reframed the project for us. Like scores, perhaps hundreds worldwide, we are now trying to find a market niche, proprietary prompt engineering, and the correct interface to support a viable business. Say, a freemium WhatsApp interface for Indian SMEs offering online business consultancy services based on open-source predictive and generative AI models working on public and paid data sets.

    What about the emerging role of AI in primary consumer research? The big two—Alphabet and Meta—have been using predictive AI for decades to segment consumers, keep them engaged with their social media feeds and search results, and harvest clicks so their advertisers can pay them big bucks.

    Over the past decade, big corporates from both the B2C and B2B worlds have been using Big Data and Predictive Analytics to fine-tune their business and marketing plans. However, it is unclear whether they are at the cutting edge of predictive AI, just as Alphabet and Meta are. While a lot is currently being made of Generative AI and the likes of GPT, Llama, Gemini, etc., I bet that we shall discover that the disruptive power of AI will come not from generating sentences, pictures, videos or music but from underpinning key business, economic, social and personal decisions based on a dynamic array of multi-dimensional data sets. While predictive AI underpins generative AI, a different kind of predictive AI will also underpin the AI age. It will be predictive AI that works on an integrated, dynamic view of the natural world to deliver strategic action plans and monitor and fine-tune them. To use this level of AI, corporations and governments will need to go beyond internal data sets and subscribe to a whole range of third-party data sets.

    One category of these third-party data sets will be garnered through an IoT network of sensors synthesised with publicly available identification data sets—for example, vehicle movement with ownership details or scans of browsing shoppers, personal IDs and billing details. The ownership and personal ID can be scrubbed of all details except for basic demographics to meet privacy rules. Alternatively, the individual could opt to belong to an ID Bank that holds his details in escrow and can release them, using blockchain technology on payment of a fee – thus making the individual the valid owner of his ID and personal data.

    The ID Bank idea will fuel the second category of third-party data sets. These data sets will contain in-depth profiles of individuals, including contact information, demographics, psychographics, societal and cultural attitudes, media usage, product and brand usage, and purchase behaviour and intentions. The ID Bank will have a watertight agreement with the individual on securely holding the data and releasing any of it to a third party only upon approval and release of a specified fee.

    Corporations can then request the release of specified data from a selected consumer profile. For example, a car company may ask for a data set consisting of individuals who own one of a set of car models and have indicated a purchase intention for a new car in the next six months with permission to contact with offers. The ID Bank, in discussion with the consumer, will quote a certain fee on payment, for which the data will be released in a blockchain format that allows for usage tracking. The fee will be released to the consumer’s account, and the ID Bank will get a management fee.

    Creating, managing and marketing the two categories of data sets envisaged above will define the future of the market research industry over the next few decades.

    The corporation’s predictive AI systems will define the need for data from third-party data sets, consider the cost-benefit of buying them, and incorporate them into predictive analysis to build business and market plans.

    Over the decades, as AI and consumers become more sophisticated, intermediaries like ID Banks will be cut out, and a brand’s AI will be in direct touch with a consumer’s Concierge Intelligence (CI) with market research evolving into a version of anthropology focused on studying the behaviour of AI systems. “AInthropology” anyone!?