The impact of the pandemic on society has been acute and it seems that it will continue to be for the next few months. As we emerge from the restrictions, and economies restart, we will become aware of some of the more subtle, perhaps unexpected impacts. Some will be hard to accept, but out of this will emerge some great opportunities. I believe that as Artificial Intelligence becomes readily available, it will be one such opportunity; I would like to show you how you could take advantage of it.
AI Day in the Life: The New Normal?
This is the second of two articles; in the previous article I outlined the main drivers for change, the sorts of things that AI can and cannot do, and some key pointers to help you understand the real-world applications of AI. This article considers what a day in your life could look like in just a few years’ time. I am not advocating you immediately rush out to do these things. Instead, I seek to give you a flavour of this future: how AI will be embedded into our lives in practice, and to inspire you to grasp the opportunities that this game-changing technology will bring.
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It’s Tuesday evening, you check in with your wellbeing monitor. It suggests you should try to get a full 8 hours’ sleep; after all you had a heavy session at the gym earlier in the day. In fact, you think this is a jolly good idea as indeed, you were feeling a bit unfocused. So, you use a relaxation app that is trained using an array of data from your health bracelet and sleep soundly from 10:30 pm until your alarm wakes you at 6:30am with a newly-curated music playlist. While you get dressed, your digital assistant tells you about the weather for the day, the sports results from last night – even celebrating the defeat of your sports team’s main rival – the time of the next bus to the station, and lunchtime deals from restaurants near your office.
Your day starts with a physical meeting with your team. You then dial into a video conference with one of your customers. During the call you receive several alerts that the customer is feeling anxious and that these feelings are most acute when you discuss the commercial aspects of the proposal. Consequently, you change tack during the conversation and progress the call differently. You ask the digital assistant to schedule a debrief with the relevant account executives.
Meantime your friend Julie has asked you to meet with her colleague Sam over lunch. Julie is keen to hold the meeting in a restaurant as she wanted to discuss your side hustle – bespoke food experiences – with you and Sam. You can’t be there in person as the restaurant is 45 minutes away, but you are able to join them via Augmented Reality so you can be ‘present’ at the meeting. You join Julie and Sam at the bar for an informal drink and eat your lunch whilst they tuck into their meals. The session is interesting, so you ask your assistant to liaise with theirs for an in-person follow-up meeting.
Your afternoon meeting involves the Trust Committee for the recruitment system that the company you work for uses. You noticed that job applicants from a certain area of London were not receiving the same proportion of job offers as others in the capital. The data governance team advise that the data gathered in that area may not be truly representative due to significant demographic changes in the recent past. A plan is agreed to use more representative, normalised data to retrain the algorithm and fix the issue. A Quality Assurance ticket is created to check any prior cases that had been processed by the old algorithm. You agree to escalate these concerns with the local community engagement team and agree a communications plan – your assistant sends the emails and schedules the next meeting.
You head home early to have supper with your partner and two young children. Your partner is the mainstay of your bespoke food business which is a side hustle for you. He has prepared a new meal that he thinks your bespoke food company should consider promoting. Your business uses a commercially available AI to predict customers’ tastes and to figure out novel and on-trend food combinations. You started the company in 2021 when AI as a Service had become readily available, and it has grown steadily as you have collected more data.
After supper you spend some quality time reading and talking with your children before their bedtime whilst their toys are quietly cleared up by the AI home robot. After the children are in bed, you relax with your golf app that uses AI to analyse your swing, and while it suggests improvements you quietly seethe about how you could have done with this advice before last weekend’s four-ball. You read a little, check in with the wellbeing monitor and head off to bed.
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Predicting the future is perilous – especially these days – but I hope that I have inspired you to think creatively and consider how, in a world like that I have described, AI could be a significant part of your future. Maybe you have an idea for an AI application? Maybe you could help your organisation by using Machine Learning AI on a particular set of data? If you want to discuss this article, my AI work, or even perhaps get started with the implementation of AI in your organisation, please feel free to reach out to me at john@collaborative-ai.com