The Birth of the Real-Time Internet and What It Means for Your Business
by Jared Ficklin
I have burned a lot of time recently entertaining myself and friends by generating images or prose with Generative AI platforms like Midjourney and ChatGPT. Like many of our clients, I am asking myself where this all leads and if it is time to reassess machine learning strategies.
One thing I am sure of is that we are entering the next sea change in technology. In 2007, it became clear that the iPhone and accompanying app economy was a similar sea change. We all had to decide when to commit or catch up. Generative AI (GAI) feels like the final piece of the next sea change puzzle, with computing everywhere all the time and the ability to generate custom instantiations from existing patterns.
What we are witnessing is the birth of The Real-Time Internet.
On the Real-time Internet, applications or experiences are invoked. One can not only create images from a prompt, but also music, movies, poetry, social media posts, and even a complex workflow in the form of a web page or application — all in real-time. Imagine prompting Siri to inventory your books and a properly engineered AI model codes up and runs an application locally in real-time. It creates an interface in which you hold up your phone, or look at your bookshelf through mixed reality glasses, and identify, value, and index all the books on your shelf. Similar possibilities are endless.
While we used a consumer example here, there’s great potential for industrial and B2B. This is a time to pay attention to technology for first-mover advantages or differentiation.
If you are already utilizing insights and big data strategies, the opportunities are expanding. Machines now have the ability to model entire campaigns. You need to architect for this and create or integrate in-house tooling for deployment, governance, and metrics. We are seeing a lot of activity of this kind in large data verticals like insurance, fintech, health care, and large capitalized businesses where efficiencies mined from data create ROI.
There are emerging areas where AI can now contribute with a lower lift. Often the insights new systems offer don’t appear to be directly valuable, but if you look at adjacencies, the value emerges. In-home automation, for example, the ability to integrate basic device commands with the natural language of ChatGPT could result in deeper nuance: ‘make the living room less depressing’ turns on accent lights.
Up until now we’d been handling this natural language problem by making the user create a very large decision tree and writing the insights out as rules. Only early adopters have been willing. Now home automation — and many other models — can operate in the way more users expect. It’s the perfect time for you to look for possible adjacent values that may come at a low enough cost to create a return.
We’ve reached the moment when you can playbook a vision of the future and begin the transformations needed to achieve new workflows, efficiency, or a more effective use of your business solutions.
Reach out if you want to join in the discussion with us. We would love to work with you on your AI Story or strategize where and how this can most benefit your business.
Jared Ficklin, Chief Creative Technologist at argodesign, is a designer and technologist with two decades of experience creating products and visions for major companies. For his previous work integrating technology into the design process at frog design, Jared was named one of 4 frog fellows. He has contributed to the visions, strategy, intellectual property, and products of clients including HP, Microsoft, AT&T, LG, SanDisk, Motorola, CognitiveScale, and Magic Leap. He speaks internationally as a creative technologist and futurist.
