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Tag: Concierge Intelligence

  • AI is set to impact the daily lives of all of us significantly, writes Ashoke Agarrwal

    Apple, Musk and AI

     

     

    By Ashoke Agarrwal

     

    Ashoke AgarrwalI coined Concierge Intelligence (CI) as a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) owned by and dedicated to an individual and fully protective of his privacy. CI would aid the individual in understanding herself better and leading to better life outcomes in health, education, career and relationships – in general, as a putative ad copy would say: ‘Be A Better You’. Further, CI would handle routine tasks like shopping, bill paying, appointments, correspondence and travel arrangements based on a deep understanding of the individual’s preferences and needs and an up-to-the-minute and universal understanding of options. CI would be under the complete control of the individual, who can switch it off and on and decide on the level of access granted.

     

    When I first wrote about CI in Feb 2021, the concept seemed at least a decade or more away. Not any longer. Like the world, I was unaware of the rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLM) technology.

     

    Today, many factors indicate that the first generation of CI is around the corner. A CI prototype might already be in the hands of hundreds of millions worldwide! Let me explain.

     

    For a couple of years now, Apple has been communicating the following:

    :: Many of the functions and Apps on its devices – Siri, Keyboard Suggestions, Health, Messages, Mail, Music, Books, and Apple TV – use AI to enhance user experience and utility.

    :: Apple puts ensuring user privacy as the highest priority. Therefore, all its AI works on data and software residing on the user’s device, under complete user control, and cordoned off from other entities, including Apple.

     

    The penny dropped when I first read about the Journal App that Apple is readying for release with iOS 17. Journal App gives iPhone users the means to record their day-to-day activities and uses advanced prompt features enabling users to track their emotional state and the causes.

     

    The latest iPhones carry specialised chips that allow the device to run sophisticated AI programs on the device itself. With the breadth and depth of information, the iPhone has about its users, the phone’s processing capabilities and the level of trust Apple had built with its users, all the conditions that make for a CI already exist. Over the next few years, iPhone users, prompted by Apple, will increasingly find use cases for the CI that resides over the phone. With each new generation of iPhones, the CI will get more powerful and within the next decade, Apple will likely brand this as a proprietary feature and build a revenue model around it. CI by Apple could be the next big thing from Apple after the iPhone. If Apple keeps its promise of protecting user privacy, iPhone CI will add to the quality of life and be one of AI’s boons.

     

    While the wizards of Cupertino are coming at AI based on an individual’s shared experiences, the wizard who has given the world Tesla and SpaceX is taking a different tack.

     

    Musk wants Tesla to be the first to launch a fully self-driven car without a steering wheel or a brake pedal to allow a human driver to take control. While many companies, Alphabet being one of them, are at work perfecting AI systems, Musk’s approach is entirely different from the rest.

     

    Alphabet and others are trying to build a self-driving car based on an algorithm that relies on the following:

    :: Signals from a hardware system consisting of cameras and radars that transmit in great detail, second by microsecond, the physical environment of the car as it drives through a roadscape.

    :: And rules that codify the signals into millions of scenarios and actions that are needed to respond to the system.

     

    The above approach is similar to the early days of Natural Language Processing, which tried to create language models based on the contextual meaning of words and rules of grammar and idiomatic usage.

     

    In one sense, Musk’s flip on the AI needed to build a self-driven car is simple. He believes if humans can drive cars based on just visual inputs, so can AI. So, radars are the first things he has taken out of the equation. His second lead is even greater. Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT 4.0 work through patterns that a Deep Learning AI system detects from a large enough set of training data without needing an explicit set of rules. Musk’s leap is that he can build AI systems that can operate in the physical world through a large enough training data set. The difference is that in the case of the physical world, the data set is visual.

     

    Every Tesla carries a set of high-resolution cameras. And its software records all the actions that a driver takes. Further, all the data from the cameras and the software systems are transmitted to Tesla’s servers. With millions of Teslas worldwide, Tesla has an ever-increasing training data set.

     

    Musk is not stopping at building self-driving Robocars but is busy building a human-like robot branded Optimus on the same AI principles. The training data for Optimus-like robots will come from recording humans engaged in various activities – cooking a meal, navigating a home, an office or a mall, playing a sport, etc.

     

    Further, in all cases, the training data will be culled so that the robot learns from the best drivers, champion players, chefs, etc. So ipso facto, robots will come out of the gate better than humans because they learnt from the best and have the advantage of being faster, connected and untiring.

     

    Paradoxically, Musk also pays lip service to the dangers of AI and contends that he is trying to build something like Assimov’s Three Laws of Robotics into the AI systems he is busy inventing.

     

    So, between the CI that Apple is fast making a reality and Musk’s promised Robot Intelligence (RI), AI is set to impact the daily lives of all of us significantly.

     

    Another AI revolution is brewing in the scientific field, launching tectonic shifts that will alter human civilisation. But that is grist for another post.

     

  • Starting a new fortnightly column by advertising and marketing services veteran Ashoke Agarrwal. Here he discusses the concept of Concierge Intelligence, as AI with soul

    The Coming Post-Digital Age

     

     

    Starting a new fortnightly column by advertising and marketing services veteran Ashoke Agarrwal

     

    By Ashoke Agarrwal

     

    Ashoke AgarrwalThe inexorable rise of digital and social media has rocked the world of mass media, marketing, and marketing communication.

    However, I believe the current disruption is only the tip of the iceberg.

    Media, marketing, and marketing communication professionals should prepare for a more profound disruption driven by the rapid and widespread development and adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) leading to a Post-Digital Age.

    Studying the possible contours of AI in marketing and marketing communication, I have developed a concept called “Concierge Intelligence” (CI), as outlined later in this article (I had published a blog post on CI back in Feb 2021).

    Over the past few months, scandals have rocked the world of social media and digital advertising, threatening the lynchpin of social media and programmatic advertising – cookie-based tracking and cookie pools – with stringent and widespread regulations.

    The other critical development is a shift in the outlook of start-up capital – there is a clear trend towards favoring start-ups in deep tech areas.

    Both these trends bode well for the accelerated arrival of the Post-Digital Age.

    There is a growing realisation that Facebook, Google, and its kin are critical fuelers of fissiparous tendencies in societies worldwide.

    Social media’s power to divide is a result of algorithms (algos in techspeak) that drive engagement, in the process reinforcing tribal tendencies and conspiracy theories.

    The digital and social media giants are reluctant to change these algos, as they are the engines that drive their primary source of revenue and profits -advertising.

    Change in the outlook of social media, digital media, and e-commerce giants will come when they face emergent competition from the likes of Concierge Intelligence that will usher in a Post-Digital Age.

    The increasing disquiet among marketers and advertisers with social media and digital advertising effectiveness will be at the core of this emergence.

    Many in the marketing community started as enthusiastic advocates of digital marketing. It seemed to hold the promise of better ROIs over the short term and more robust, interactive brand-consumer relationships over the more extended period.

    However, the reality of digital marketing has belied most of these high hopes. Today, digital marketing does not represent interactive access to a more clearly defined target consumer. Instead, it obfuscates behind attribution in terms of “views” and “click-throughs”, numbers that cloud as much as they reveal.

    If most marketers are dissatisfied with digital marketing, the question arises as to why the share of digital in most brands’ marketing budgets grows year on year? The reason for this inexorable growth is, I believe, two-fold.

    First, the rise of digital media is weakening mass media. OTT platforms steal audiences away from linear TV, cinema, and radio. Social media and news aggregation are decimating print newspapers and magazines. It forces big brands to allocate an increasing part of their marketing budgets to digital marketing to reach their audience.

    Secondly, digital marketing is growing at a pace is because of the modularity it affords. Smaller brands with smaller budgets can reach out to smaller target markets, a positive development fostering increased consumer choice. But unfortunately, it also encourages hucksterism and fraud on the flip side of the coin.

    After the Arab Spring of a decade ago, social media was much ballyhooed as the force that would bring about and strengthen egalitarianism and democracy in societies across the world. Instead, in nations after nations, social media today is seen as one of the forces feeding tribalism, extremism, encouraging authoritarianism and threatening anarchy. The rallying cry of the likes of Zuckerberg and Pichai seems to be, “Surrender your data, and I will feed you, for free, the opium of tribal comfort while putting your psyche to power my advertising revenues, a la The Matrix”.

    However, I believe that the page will likely turn again, and social media will get back to being a force for good over the coming decade or two. This transformation will come about under the gathering onslaught of regulators, brands, and public opinion. Under this emergent paradigm, individuals will own the data gathered through their digital footprint.

    I envisage a time when a public utility like service will gather all such data and store it in a digital locker solely owned by the individual, managed by a Data Utility provider. The individual would be free to upload more information into her digital locker, including brand and shopping preferences, recent purchases and intentions, demographic details, and attitudinal batteries. Brands could approach the Data Utility and, based on anonymised information, choose to seek more information about a particular type of individuals – say, individuals who currently own a six-year-old mid-size sedan or those who have expressed an intention to purchase a luxury SUV. The Data Utility would inform the individual of the interest and the fee the brand is willing to pay for their access. The brand will be allowed a permitted level of access with explicit permission from the consumer. Blockchain technology will ensure that a significant part of this payment would go to the consumer (the actual owner of the data) and the rest to the Data Utility provider.

    Central to the above ecosystem will be an AI product I call “Concierge Intelligence” that will mediate for the individual between brands and the Data Utility provider. The individual will own the Concierge Intelligence platform, much like owning a house, a car, or an electronic device.

    The era of Concierge Intelligence will avoid the concerns raised by the age of marketing to bots like Alexa or Siri, posited by some technology forecasters. Instead, Concierge Intelligence will emerge as a tool for individual empowerment instead of yet another money-making and control-enhancing platform for data aggregators, data miners, marketers, or the government. As a result, Concierge Intelligence could be the next big consumer product category of the coming decades, just as the smartphone has been for the past couple of decades.

    The individual will buy his Concierge Intelligence (CI) — a software application -from the market and load it onto all the devices she uses. Then, CI will get to work to learn the consumer’s interests and preferences. The individual will set the scope and depth of this learning.

    CI will be mediate between the world and the individual. First, it will map the individual’s learning patterns and maximize the speed and efficacy of the individual’s learning. It will continuously keep a tab on the individual’s inherent talents and emergent capabilities and connect her with opportunities to put these talents and abilities to use, in the process not just maximizing her earnings but also increasing her sense of self-worth. Finally, it will perceive the individual’s relationship and leisure needs and help her meet them. One of the duties of CI will be as the gatekeeper to the Data Utility service and brands 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 desires, much like today’s smartphones.

    To my mind, CI will, over the next decade, become the most widely prevalent form of AI. I like to think of a CI as AI with soul. A form of augmented intelligence fusing an individual’s psyche, with all its complexity and humanity intact, with AI’s power, speed, and reach.

     

    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.