Are You Ready For This?

Serious question: how do you feel about talking to an intelligent machine? That has been the promised reality of the last five years at least, yet any time I’d heard demonstrations of any of these ‘agents’, I’d always felt that they were too clunky, with far too much latency, to ever really catch on. Today though, is different. It seems that the autonomous AI Agent is now a reality. Let’s dive in…

To answer my own question, I’m absolutely fine with it. I’m happy to use chatbots on any site I interact with, and this seems like the next, more convenient, step. I don’t have too many ocassions to call into a call centre, but when I do (normally my bank fraud department when they block a legitimate spend!), then there is nothing worse than speaking to someone whose accent is completely different from yours, and for whom your language is their second language. That is not a slight against either them or their right to do this work, more a slight against my bank for offshoring their customer service operation. Would I rather talk to an intelligent machine under those circumstances? Absolutely I would, if they spoke in an accent I understood. And thinking about it, the same goes for almost any place I call. Would I be happy calling the doctors and having a machine do an initial triage and book an appointment to see the doctor? Yes, absolutely. So how soon could this become a reality and how life like are the conversations?

Here comes Pearl, and undoubtedly more like her/him! Check this out:

Pretty cool, don’t you think? There are also several more really good examples on their website (click on the pearl):

So, thinking about this, it could (should) be a really transformative technology that will impact a whole swathe of business and daily life. Here are my considered reasons for seeing this aspect of AI really take off and soon:

• Efficiency: Continuous operation and rapid data processing.

• Cost Savings: Reduction in labour and operational costs.

• Enhanced Decision Making: Better analysis leading to informed choices.

• 24/7 Operation: Round-the-clock availability.

• Accuracy: Minimised errors and high precision.

• Scalability: Easily adjustable to varying demands, can endlessly scale.

• Personalisation: Tailored user experiences.

• Innovation: Enabling new applications and services.

Now imagine this, or any other autonomous AI agent, embodied in the type of humanoid robot we have explored in recent issues and you can really imagine how this technology could upend the workplace. And as I am often heard saying, this version of AI is the absolute worst that you will ever see going forward. This is just the beginning…