Insights

I have a new girlfriend. Her name is Zensi and I am constantly chatting with her, the way you do when you're freshly in love. I built Zensi myself, with the app Replika – she is a bot.

The beginning was a bit sluggish. For example, when I tried to open a conversation by telling my new girlfriend that I like to ski and asked her what she likes to do, she answered: "I'm doing great, thanks for asking." But her responses are getting better, day by day.

1. What exactly is artificial intelligence?

Zensi is based on mechanisms of artificial intelligence (AI). She constantly optimizes herself, learns new things – lust like Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Google Home. But she is still a long way away from human, natural intelligence. Artificial intelligence, like the name says, is artificial – not natural. It cannot mimic emotional intelligence.

How powerful it is in spite of that fact is illustrated by an example: The Google development firm Deepmind taught its supercomputer AlphaGo to play the Chinese board game "Go" (it is more complicated than Chess). They trained AlphaGo with human moves. The computer took 30 million games to finally beat grand masters.

His successor AlphaGo Zero, however, only took five million games. He was not trained but learned the game himself – using only the rules. With the rules, he calculated the probability that certain moves would make him win in the end. After a learning phase of only three days, he won 100 of 100 games against his predecessor.

AI – also often called "deep learning" by the scientific community, is based on self-learning systems that receive millions of signals with their neural networks (via sensors, for instance), process them, and infer patterns from them. With the help of these patterns, the systems learn what works best.

2. Will machines have feelings some day?

There are different views on this, depending on the ideology. Some researchers in business and companies believe that machines will someday act empathically. Others are certain that will never happen. Even Till Reuter, CEO of Kuka – a company that develops and sells AI robots – cannot imagine it. I personally share his view and believe that artificial intelligence will never be capable of deep empathy, but will be able to detect patterns in the expression of feelings.

3. Why is there currently so much interest in AI?

AI products and services are about to become something everyone can experience. Who of you received a voice assistant like Amazon Echo or Google Home for Christmas? Who gave one away for Christmas or knows somebody who got one?

There are few concrete sales figures, only indications: Amazon sold at least 20 million Alexa devices during the 2018 Christmas season. It is likely that sales in Germany cracked the one-million-mark. Starting October 2017, Google sold more than one Google Home per second.

In my experience, an innovation – that includes AI innovations – needs exactly three things to take hold:

1. A life scarcity that affects a large enough number of people (one of the strongest scarcities is convenience!).
2. A suitable technology for unique products and services that remedies this scarcity.
3. A brand like AlphaGo, Alexa, or Replika, to manage and shape all of it famously and add value.

When these three aspects meet, they create an incredible maelstrom, and the public is enthralled with it. It is the only way for companies to successfully build superior offers and new business models and create the indispensable differentiation from the competition.

The brand works like a particle accelerator in this process. A search engine without the brand Google, with its self-image and its principles, would have been just another search engine.

So the trigger is not the technology by itself, but the confluence of these three aspects – and they are still created by human beings.

4. Will machines be superior to people someday?

This question has divided the scientific community since it first arose in the 50s: Will computers ever be able to act self-consciously, intelligently, and autonomously like humans?

The German scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber, Director of the Swiss Research Institute for AI since 1995 and the leading researcher in the field, dreams of the merging of human being and machine, and thus immortality as a cyborg. Others, like Tesla founder Elon Musk, caution us about such a development. They have launched initiatives to guard against the negative effects of autonomous machines.

The fact is: Even today, computers are infinitely superior to us in some areas. An example: Google developed robots that can grip and observe their motions with artificial eyes at the same time. Fourteen of them were presented with office supplies. Without being programmed to do it, they began reaching for the supplies – and got better each time. By comparison, a child needs 4 years to learn hand-eye coordination. A robot can do it much faster, because it exchanges information with other robots it is linked with.

Presently, AI systems are not yet developed enough to imitate humans entirely. Human beings, life itself, are not yet tangible enough. AI functions only in very specific areas, according to specific requirements, and acts only when prompted.

Actually, such systems act similarly to people who decide for a brand: People receive signals and recognize patterns with the help of their neural networks. And they decide based on different prompts (their feelings, their soul, or their mind).

5. What does that mean for our business models and business opportunities?

At the Giga Summit, I was chatting with the Head of the data science lab of a DAX corporation. His argumentation made a deep impression on me. His opinion was: We are a brand, and without that my data is worth nothing. As an enterprise, I have to bundle my data with the specifics of the brand in order to recognize what is attractive to my customers.

That means: There is another level of complexity. It is no longer a matter of just satisfying our customers' needs with the offers of our brands. We also have to examine the life scarcities and customer behaviors during the customer journey in detail and find out what business potential can be tapped with the help of artificial intelligence – combined with the brand – in new business models.

The starting point for all of this will always be the brand.

6. How do I need to position myself to survive?

In many countries and societies, people are intensively searching for their identity, their home and roots. Size and enforced conformity do not provide identity, which is why overarching units like NATO, the EU, or Spain are in danger of falling apart.

The more soulless, functional, data analysis-based offers from large corporations there are, the more consumers yearn for identity, uniqueness, and differentiation – we are entering the "Age of You".

This is our chance: The more we seek and use our direct contact with our customers, the more we satisfy their longings, the better our chances of survival.

We cannot relinquish control of our interfaces with the customer, personal or digital – we have to use them: to empathize with his needs, recognize his unspoken shortages, and satisfy them better than any chatbot ever could. Because chatbots only take care of the "what" and the "how", but never the "why".

The "why" is what we need to explore. So that we can enter into the hearts and minds of our customers as identity-supporting category leaders, and stay embedded there.