AI, The Customer, And The Worker

Forbes

7 days ago

Abstract image of businessman walking in VR environment. 3D generated image.
How do we measure the changes that AI brings?
There are many facets from which to view the disruption. Some, of course, are focusing on the customer, and what it means to sell in the AI age.
A panel at IIA showed us some of these insights, as notable participants came together to talk about strategic AI outcomes.
'I think we all know that AI is disrupting traditional customer relationships and really the experiences of how people interact engage with brands, products and services,' said Lindsay Ellerby, in opening the panel, which included Chris McKay, CEO of Imaginative, Joanna Pena Bickley, CEO of Vibes.AI, and Eric Feige, Managing Director of Strategy at VShift.
In exploring some of the ways that LLMs work and what that brings to business, McKay talked about trust, using the example of early spell check tools evolving into autocorrect, and suggesting that businesses should build up to more extreme disruptions.
'You can't introduce a device and expect somebody to trust it immediately. There has to be that ramp up of you educating them as to why you're doing it. You have to establish trust to know that the data that you're using in your models are reputable and ethically sourced. You have to establish trust in knowing that the content that you're generating has a certain level of accuracy that they can depend on.'
McKay also suggested that originality is key. Not every product, he said, needs to have a chatbot, and being able to bring a new utility or idea helps.
it's important to ensure you're bringing your designers to the table now more than ever. Don't just think you need to adopt the latest, most capable model, throw it at a product, and you're going to have a global increase.'
'Marrying up the business objectives that formerly might have been conversions or hard dollar metrics and extending it to the human value, the wellness and the condition of that constituent, (is) critically important for the data scientist, as well as the designer, as well as the product owner, to work in harmony together,' Feige added.
In other introspection on our shared experience, the panel considered the importance of new and different interface designs. That's something that we have been hearing a lot about as we note that our interfaces have been fairly static over a couple of decades.
'I think that over the last 15 years, we kind of really only focused on the visual input, and visual input has actually led to significant cognitive overload,' Bickley said. 'It actually, when you get down into the science of it, is an enormous contributor in why we have an epidemic of loneliness in our country and in the world right now. So the importance of multimodality is super important today.'
Noting a kind of 'space race' in customer interactions right now, the panel went over some ideas about how to innovate and avoid 'echo chambers,' things that may end up being immensely helpful to our MIT students, for example. They talked about expectations, and disruptive tech, and how people don't wake up in the morning thinking about what they need, specifically, but with a more vague sense of intent.
What I heard coming out of this panel was a thoughtful look at where we are and where we're going, in these halcyon days of AI disruption. We keep hearing more from experts and people in the know, people with a front-row seat to the change.
Speaking of which, the panel also talked quite a bit about smaller, agile teams, which begs the question: where are all of these jobless people going? It's a serious question, and from people like my friend Jeremy Wertheimer, to others in public administration or showbiz, for example, we're attentive to the concerns of people who need work. But from a business standpoint, this also illuminated how an enterprise can view the customer in the context of AI capabilities.