Greg Kahn is an expert of the intersection of tech, media and advertising. He is the CEO of GK Digital Ventures and Emerging Tech Exchange.
Practically every business this year has been racing to embrace generative artificial intelligence (GAI). But to what end?
GAI might be the most disruptive technology since the emergence of the internet. Whether the use of large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s rapidly launched rival, Bard, will alter the way content is created, accessed and presented will be known in time. All we can say for sure right now is that GAI is an impressively responsive chatbot. In a sense, it’s an impressively smart virtual assistant.
The way that the current frenzy over these tools is completely changing the landscape for every profession that involves creating, gathering and disseminating content feels very much like the discussions from a decade ago, when voice-activated assistants were purportedly going to change the way consumers got everything from news and information to groceries and travel bookings. Voice assistants are not “dead,” by any means—but neither can anyone truly argue that these platforms altered consumers’ and businesses’ use of interactivity as meaningfully as was initially predicted. It’s 2023, and consumers still use Google search and mobile apps as much as they have for the past five years.
Lasting adoption and true game-changing technology generally depends on how customer experience is impacted. If the high expectations of GAI are going to be realized, I believe that marketers in particular are going to have to find the specific value consumers want. Missing that customer experience mark could mean wasted investment down the wrong path. That’s the lesson to be learned from the period when voice assistants emerged.
A Booming Voice…
When Apple’s Siri was positioned as the first popular voice assistant when it debuted in 2011, it was relegated to the iPhone. Then Amazon Echo launched in November 2014, and the world saw the larger potential that a standalone voice-activated speaker represented. Amazon’s device, which introduced the world to its smart assistant, Alexa, was immediately a record-breaking holiday seller. Exactly two years later, Google Home was released, and the voice assistant wars were on. Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung rushed to compete for smart home spaces in living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms.
By 2016, two years after Amazon’s Alexa made its introduction, it was considered the prime mover. The hype, for a time, was real: In just two years, Amazon had sold 5 million Echo devices. But hubris crept into the conversation with claims that Echo and its rivals would remake the way consumers and businesses would interact: In addition to single direct answers about everything from the weather and the latest news, voice assistants would change the way we search. The days of receiving millions of blue links in response to a query were supposedly over. Internet metrics provider ComScore predicted that by 2020, half of all web searches would be conducted by voice.
… Reduced To A Whisper
Those numbers were in line with other industry analysts. The Manifest’s 2018 study claimed that 53% of respondents use voice search once a week. But the researcher’s follow-up study found that only 18% of its survey participants used voice search frequently by September 2021.
Voice assistants were supposed to have made touchscreens a thing of the past. Not only that, but consumers were expected to ask voice assistants to place orders when stocking up on groceries, hailing a rideshare, booking a hotel or reserving a table at a restaurant. Guest rooms at many major hotel brands added Amazon Echos as a common amenity.
Fast forward to 2023: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the Financial Times in March that these voice assistants — the company’s Cortana included — are “dumb as a rock” (subscription required). In November 2022, Amazon’s Alexa division suffered the brunt of the company’s massive job cuts, suggesting the once highly vaunted Echo assistant’s importance has become much more attenuated. A month before that, Google reportedly reduced the staff working on Google Assistant.
The expansive promise of voice assistants seemed astonishing as well as inevitable. But in the end, the use cases produced only minor tweaks in information gathering. Smart speakers have not opened up greater avenues of commerce.
Beyond The Hype
The best technology makes our lives, our work, easier. All technology acts as an assistant, whether it’s a calculator on our desk for bookkeeping or a smartphone that allows us to communicate wirelessly. Smart speakers turned out to be excellent, if non-essential, assistants.
GAI has a short time to prove its actual utility. Simply being smart and fast isn’t good enough. If the use cases are deemed “dangerous,” political and business forces will coalesce to reign it in. The pitfalls of the hype cycle are rapidly becoming apparent, as well. When three Samsung semiconductor engineers rushed to employ ChatGPT to check a company program’s source code, the Samsung staffers ignored ChatGPT’s warning that all proprietary information introduced into the system would become fodder for the program’s continued “training” — and could not then be deleted.
However, if GAI can help people and companies produce higher-quality content and communication and drive commerce, it should successfully move beyond the current hype cycle. Who knows? Maybe GAI will completely upend the way we create everything from advertising and software code to fine art and novels to legal arguments before the Supreme Court. Maybe it will be used to totally shatter notions of truth and misinformation. Or, it might just turn out to be a convenient way to summarize commonly held knowledge while putting public figures in obviously incongruous yet viral fashion poses.
As businesses incorporate GAI tools into their marketing and communications, coding, and sales materials, let’s move deliberately. What are the clear goals? Greater efficiency? What are the dangers in terms of accuracy and privacy? Let’s experiment, but let’s also plan where, why and how deeply consumers integrate GAI into their actual lives before making any great assumptions.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
Read the full article here
