A Product/ Feature Idea
How to Start on a Journey
Separate From The Herd.
Wise folks say beginnings are hard. Here’s the first post. Cold. A small step.
Welcome to the conversation. Your are invited to engage and construct greater, better, higher themes.
Value it purely for the insight. Or the idea. Or both. Insight Plus Ideas.
The CliffsNotes: Thinking about a product or a feature idea is inextricably linked with thinking about the market, the industry and the ecosystem for it. On the day Geoffrey Hinton was announced as a recipient of the Nobel Prize, we use an idea as a strawman for AI use cases to illuminate possible directions of the AI ecosystem.
#product #producthinking #AI #ecosystem
1. The Product/ Feature Idea As A Thought Experiment
You get a message (say, a voice memo, for the moment) that's an AI you can interact (verbally, for the moment) with.
Why should any trillion dollar company, or any phone device company, for that matter, care?
What's the use case?
All in line with the steady drumbeat of "Why spend all this money on AI?"
2. Why Do We Care?
The use cases! Here goes:
Hurricane Helene: We've been watching Hurricane Helene and efforts to get help and connectivity to folks; getting a single Emergency Response Assistant over, who can help in many ways (do I have to list thee the ways, O wise reader?) could make an impact, and accuracy will, of course, be critical, here
Election Robocalls: We're in election season, and robocalls are painful; this could be the next level of election campaigning, providing a lift that the current mix of message, medium, and analytical/ logistic regression tools can only dream of, and yes, a hat tip to Geoffrey Hinton the day he wins the Nobel Prize, that the misinformation possibilities are a Black Mirror episode in itself and I'm calling this out to tackle, head on, the governance challenges
Brands and their Technicolor Content Factories: SSince we are on this journey of 'the medium is the message', this thread of thinking started with a simple question, "Why does a brand have to send me an email?"; needless to say, this can be disruptive of the content factories and creative ops models and processes in place today
3. This Must Be Easy. Is it?
Not really. Sure, there are many such use cases- and some are ripe for the picking too- that you can implement in a few different ways. These are dependent on how the ecosystem is built and how the industry shakes out, with these thoughts below as starting points for thinking about the ecosystem:
Are vertical alliances, or vertically integrated use cases, going to drive the initial wins and offer the initial bang for the buck? I will stick my neck out to say that companies driving AI adoption, with as specific implementation of specialized tools like Ontology, in the Formula 1 ecosystem, are an example of a keiretsu level “virtual” vertical alliance and integration- temporary, if you focus on the build scope alone- to drive results in a specific industry and a specific company
Is it an AI specific to that task or capability, an AI personal assistant specific to you, like Ironman's Jarvis, or an AI specific to a "service provider", or the ecosystem supports all three? I would not be surprised if tech. product companies (also Ads!) product teams have been playing around with use cases that cover these scenarios
Do you leverage edge computing, with its on device processing, memory and inference capabilities, or use a heftier pipe with low latency, with processing, memory and inference sitting elsewhere, or a mix of both? How to you train this AI? Chip and training data companies, including those starting their inference processor journey, would be watching for these ecosystems to begin to coagulate
4. An image and “subscribe” button!
Substack tells me a picture will look nicer. This one is of Tibetan buddhist art from the Rubin Museum of Art, while at its 17th street location in Manhattan (I will add more credit information as I dig it up).
Yes! The obligatory subscribe button.
5. Thank You
Ideas can come in a vacuum. Not always.
Many thanks to a brilliant coffee conversation for triggering this thinking and this thread- few can toss interesting thoughts over and be prepared to go where the conversation leads you- let alone at a quiet coffee shop, after sunrise, before the day takes over.
More Insights + Ideas to come.
(So trust me on the “subscribe” button & share!)