NEWSLETTER: AI summit London - a quick overview my presentation
As promised here is a quick overview of the talk I did at the AI Summit London. The title of the presentation I was given was ‘The Transformative power of AI - new frontiers’. I was asked to focus on the ‘new frontiers’ component, but ensure that my talk was relevant for all industry verticals. The audience at the summit was very broad, with execs from finance, tech, health, aviation and retail. As such, I first started by by going into some detail about how they all us AI in their Industries - for things such as fraud detection, drug discovery etc, but that Gen AI and in particular nascent ‘Agentic AI’ was a ‘new frontier’ that would radically transform all of their industries.
Agentic AI
‘Agentic AI’, is a combination of Traditional AI, Gen AI and integration with other systems and AIs that enable the AI to not only source, contextualise and personalise data for workers within companies and consumers interacting with brands, but also to physically do things for you. So its not just writing text, but actually doing useful jobs. If you ever saw the Google demo of ‘Duplex’ booking a hairdressers appointment then you get the idea. The example I used is Siri for example as an ‘Agent’ being able to buy tix for the Rugby World Cup. Accessing the site, presenting ticket opps, and then purchasing them for you. This could for example be through a partnership with Mastercard and their World Cup Rugby Priceless initiatives.
To do this the Agentic AI needs access to those sites (on your behalf) through APIs - and here there are issues - (many companies won’t want to be cut out of this process). Or through VNCs (Virtual Network Computing - a graphical desktop-sharing system that uses the Remote Frame Buffer protocol (RFB) - no API needed, but they remotely control another computer and are very clumsy.
But the Agentic AI revolution has started and it won’t stop.
This level of personalisation, where Agents ‘answers any question’ and ‘do things’ for the consumer, will create new expectations from them about how they want brands to communicate with them, and also new levels of efficiency within enterprises, which will increase the speed of delivery and free up cash flow, giving those buisnesses a competitive advantage.
Is it happening yet?
The Rabbit R1 device has promised this kind of functionality and seems to be doing it -we think with VNCs - see here - although its clumsyish and there are issues - what if a company decides they don’t want any ‘Agents’ interacting with them - but this is a problem for the future.
And then there is Apple…and Microsoft
If you look at the planned release of Apple Intelligence and the new ‘Agentic’ Siri, this will be the first mass adoption of this kind of tech and expectations will start to change.
Check out the video here - it will give you a really good understanding of what they are looking to do later in the year as they role out the product - it was revealed at WWDC this month.
If I was a consumer brand, I would look at getting into Apple Intelligences dev program and platform - where you integrate with their new Agentic system as an app. If I was a COO be looking internally for Agentic efficiencies, I would go with Microsoft’s Azure AI Studio and their SAS CoPilot suite.
Expectations
This will all change consumer / CRM / Enterprise operating expectations over the next couple of years significantly. Consumers will expect that brand Avatars can speak to them as individuals, 24/7, understand the context of what they want and wont want to be shoved into multiple choice conversation trees, they will expect contextual, relevant, personalised and human like comms. And the same will go for Enterprises - although they will take longer to adopt the tech as it is expensive and needs significant culture and behaviour change to implement.
This process is what I called the 'closing of the CRM / Avatar loop', where CRM for a consumer becomes an interaction with an AI Avatar (in apples case the glowing Siri - and for Enterprises Microsofts CoPilot panel). This will be the focus of the client / brand relationship of the future, and we have the opportunity to take advantage of this, move quickly and move the needle on our business or brand - significantly.
Dudley Nevill-Spencer