By Ashoke Agarrwal
Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, many have heralded (and some) feared the arrival of the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
The rush to find good use cases for Generative AI is spawning a new class of start-ups and keeping Angels and VCs busy.
I have always thought the Information Age was a way-stop on the road to the Age of AI. I have also surmised that the Age of AI will amplify the gains and ills of the Information Age. However, being an eternal optimist, I have always focused on the good technology can do.
In February 2021, in the gloom of the Covid lockdown, when the world had barely an inkling of what Generative AI was, I imagined a use case of AI I called Concierge Intelligence and published a blog post about it.
Here are some excerpts from the post:
“I believe one of the critical directions Artificial Intelligence will develop over the next decade is what I call “Concierge Intelligence”.
Concierge Intelligence will go a long way towards fulfilling the initial promise of the digital age.”
“The era of Concierge Intelligence will avoid the concerns raised by the age of marketing to bots like Alexa or Sirir that I wrote about in my post of April 25th 2018, titled “Marketing to Bots: The Coming Paradigm Shift?”
Concierge Intelligence will instead be the emergence of AI with an agency. The kind of agency that I wrote about in my post dated June 14th 2019, titled “Machine Intelligence to Machine Curiosity – The Route to Machine Creativity”, as also in my post dated December 19th 2019, titled “Should AI Have Agency.”
The individual will buy his Concierge Intelligence (CI) – a software application -from the market and load on onto all the devices she uses. I believe CI will be the next big thing in consumer marketing. CI will get to work to learn the consumer’s interests and preferences. The individual will set the scope and depth of this learning. I can imagine the emergence of a new form of Yoga – CI Yoga! CI Yoga trainers will coach the individual on how to refine their CI settings for maximum well-being.
CI will mediate between the world and the individual. It will map your learning patterns and maximize the speed and efficacy of your learning. It will continuously keep a tab on the individual’s inherent talents and emergent capabilities and connect her with opportunities to use these talents and abilities, in the process not just maximizing her earnings but increasing her sense of self-worth. It will perceive the individual’s relationship and leisure needs and help her meet them. One of the minor duties of CI will be as the gatekeeper to brands and services that seek to message and sell to the individual. While the CI will have powerful capabilities, it will be under the total command of the individual. She can change its functionalities whenever she wants and even switch it off if she so desires, much like today’s smartphones.
Over the next decade, CI will become the most widely prevalent form of AI. I like to think of a CI as AI with a soul. A form of augmented intelligence that fuses an individual’s psyche, with all its complexity and humanity intact, with AI’s power, speed and reach.”
My concept of CI has so taken hold of me that I even wrote about it in my first column for MxMIndia in January 2022, titled “The Coming Post-Digital World.”
Post ChatGPT, the concept of an individual-owned and operated AI model is in the air. Sources in the VC world now tell me that a couple of start-ups are proposing systems close to the CI concept. While musings in blog posts do not give me any monetisable rights, I am glad that while some of my prognostications target a future too far out to find vindication in my lifetime, the CI concept will, in some measure, come true in the next couple of years. I would bet on Apple to be the company that will lead the world into the age of CI. Its current stance of developing AI systems that reside entirely on the user’s AI device and use user information without transmitting out of the device is a stepping stone to CI systems. Plus, of course, the fact that it is the most resourced company in the world and among the most trusted brands.