Artificial Intelligence is . And for good reason: regardless of where you think we are in the hype cycle, it’s increasingly clear . The questions now turn to when and how it will impact specific markets and categories. all the rage amongst founders and investors AI is going to touch everything eventually I’ve about the and the impact on There’s a tendency to reduce AI to machine (ML), the subfield for AI’s resurgence, but ML is just one part of a broader story. been particularly excited consumerization of AI everyday products and platforms for consumers and professionals. learning primarily responsible . If Computer Science sparked an era of , Artificial Intelligence is sparking an era of It’s these that become the products of an AI-first world. I believe AI enables a new paradigm for how products are built by creators and experienced by users software-driven programs data-driven agents. intelligent agents Agents + Things Agents have a few essential traits: They’re designed to be autonomous, ambient, context-aware, proactive, and even full of personality. They’re equipped with fuzzy interfaces like voice, natural language and vision. They’re architected to sense, learn, decide, and act in environments with less structure (imperfect information, uncertainty, non-determinism, etc.). They’re powered at their core by data and algorithms wrapped in commodity software. And they’re deployed across a constellation of around us, from PCs and phones to wearables and to robots. things thereables None of these traits on its own is necessarily new or transformative. You can see hints of them poking through the current paradigm: voice assistants on the phone (e.g. Siri), notification-centric apps that deliver content and support interaction directly on the lock screen (e.g. Now, Yo), or apps that passively learn and take actions in the background (e.g. Swarm). apps + mobile But the of these traits shapes a new paradigm. This AI-enabled era, like the Internet- and mobile-enabled eras before it, creates space for new approaches — new strategies, architectures, platforms, products, experiences — that have the potential to transform existing market categories or create new ones altogether. synthesis agents + things Voice Assistants There are already a few highly visible “expressions” of . The shining example so far is the home-voice-assistant-speaker-thing category pioneered by Amazon Alexa + Echo and, now, Google Assistant + Home. CIRP since launching late 2014, not including this holiday season which saw ! agents + things estimates Amazon has sold 5.1M units Echo device sales up 9x over 2015 [Update: CIRP just released a report estimating 8.2M customers own an Echo .] For now, these products are simplistic, voice-activated assistants and skills embedded in your home environment. It’s only a matter of time before they also become proactive (e.g. nudge to get your attention), context-aware (e.g. detect presence, identify speakers), adaptive (e.g. learn from your behavior), and anticipatory (e.g. take predictive actions on your behalf). AI and ML are lynchpins to making this work, from the user interface to the agent behavior. The in these products will also operate on as many as will host them. Alexa can already indirectly control an ecosystem of smart home devices, and integrating her voice capabilities and custom skills. Google Assistant, too, takes shape outside of Home as a voice assistant on the Pixel phone and a bot in the Allo app. In time, agents will become loosely coupled with many devices rather than tightly coupled with mobile, as apps have been so far. agents things will soon work directly on a crush of 3rd party IoT products Chatbots Another expression of can be found in text-based chatbots on messaging platforms such as Messenger, Slack, and Skype. Analogous to rooms in the real world, messaging apps are data-rich, semi-structured environments in which bots can be ambient, context-aware, proactive, and so on. And they run across a wide range of OS and hardware platforms (e.g. iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, etc. and PCs, phones, watches, etc.) as well. agents + things Early indicators show the , but the AI promise of bots is still contentious. The category can be hard to make sense of because it lumps together three separate trends: conversational UI, new messaging platforms, and deep AI/ML technologies. Most bona fide “bots” only incorporate the first or second of these trends, but a small subset at the intersection of all three represent as characterized above. So even though most bots embody AI-enabled agents, and many of them , some of them . bot economy is growing faster than the app economy did agents don’t needn’t do It’s in this sense that chatbots are just another embodiment alongside voice assistants — not to mention new modalities like VR/AR-based characters and physical robots! In fact, the ultimate expression of is the choreography of user scenarios fluidly across environments (home, office, car, transit, …), devices (PC, phone, watch, hearable, …), and interfaces (voice, text, vision, …) through this multiplicity of embodiments. agents + things Endgame: Ubiquitous Computing The endgame of may well be the ubiquitous computing era that Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown : agents + things speculated about two decades ago The “UC” era will have lots of computers sharing each of us. Some of these computers will be the hundreds we may access in the course of a few minutes of Internet browsing. Others will be imbedded in walls, chairs, clothing, light switches, cars — in everything. UC is fundamentally characterized by the connection of things in the world with computation. This will take place at many scales, including the microscopic. They go on to outline the era’s attendant challenge of , a powerful rallying cry for realizing many of the long-standing promises of AI and IoT: calmness The most potentially interesting, challenging, and profound change implied by the ubiquitous computing era is a focus on . If computers are everywhere they better stay out of the way, and that means designing them so that the people being shared by the computers remain serene and in control. Calmness is a new challenge that UC brings to computing. When computers are used behind closed doors by experts, calmness is relevant to only a few. Computers for personal use have focused on the excitement of interaction. But when computers are all around, so that we want to compute while doing something else and have more time to be more fully human, we must radically rethink the goals, context and of the computer and all the other technology crowding into our lives. Calmness is a fundamental challenge for all technological design of the next fifty years. calm technology Time will tell when and how all this plays out, but the seeds of paradigm-changing products, platforms, and companies are being sown today. 🤖
