CES, NRF and the Word Economic Forum have all wrapped and I reckon there’s already been more hot air expelled on AI in 2024 than throughout all of last year! Here are 3 problems with the emerging discourse on AI in business and what we could be doing differently.
1/ Over-use of AI rhetoric
Nearly every announcement at CES and NRF touted AI, along with nearly all of the headlines coming out of Davos. Yet there were often no specifics about what kind of AI was being used. In many cases Generative AI was conflated with Predictive AI. Concepts and techniques are being tossed around interchangeably and the result is that non-technical buyers and users are confused. The risk of over-using AI rhetoric is that it becomes meaningless. The reality is that there are elements of AI in nearly all the software and hardware that we use on a daily basis. Thanks to the advances in generative AI in 2023 we are collectively more interested in the topic but that’s not an excuse to be lazy about labels and details. It’s time for marketers, sales leaders, and the content folks behind these announcements to get smarter and more precise with messaging.
2/ Low standards on tangible ROI
Along with the sloppy messaging, I felt there was a lot of sloppy product strategy, often devoid of any meaningful value. Volkswagen announced a chatbot in their cars based on ChatGPT. There were loads of new robots labeled with AI. Samsung and LG announced TVs that use AI to improve content. Dell Laptops will have a dedicated AI key to launch Microsoft co-pilot. Salesforce unveiled a slew of new AI features. But will any of these actually make our lives or our world materially better? It’s time to turn the dial up on the benefits and hard value of these innovations.
3/ Insufficient focus on ethics and transparency
Both CES and Davos had a few interesting sessions on ethics, but the global conversation is far from easy to follow. With the US now in a critical election year, the importance of monitoring and regulating AI’s impact on news and information could not be greater. Our leaders are doing a lot of hand wringing and posing open-ended questions but without any real answers. AI regulation has been stalled for years in the EU and North America. There are some simple steps we can take, and leaders would be wise to move quickly rather than try to have all the answers to every question. Aidan Gomez of Cohere has done a good job elucidating three simple areas that need to be addressed: protecting sensitive data, mitigating bias, and knowing when to keep humans in the loop.