I was at a recent event where Rich Beaudrie posed an interesting question: what will AI collide with?
There are many examples of collisions from the past. At one point 15 years ago, we had cell phones with large screens + 3G networks + compact GPS chips and Google Maps was born.
Or you can look at things like early social networks, which combined the fact that everyone had a computer at school + the internet really taking off.
So what’s next?
Rich talked a good bit about what AI might collide with, and he sees a big intersection between AI and AR/VR technology. His role involves digital learning, and to be able to learn by conversing with an AI that is tuned to you in a VR world would be miles ahead of watching a generic video and answering questions. I think he’s quite right about a future there.
On a lighter side, I see AI coming to more video games. I have the new “College Football 25”, and it’s fantastic, but the announcers are still just dreadful. At this point, it seems that it would be fairly easy to train an AI on the voice of someone like Kirk Herbstreit and have it generate the in-game announcing on the fly. They’re still doing the process of “record 1,000 phrases and we’ll stitch them together”, and it shows. Given what GPT-4o can do with voice inflections, I could see AI working quite well for something like this.
If nothing else, Rich’s presentation has me pondering what else AI will “collide” with in the near future. So far we’re seeing it stuffed into products in rather predictable ways, but some big collisions are certainly coming.
What are some AI collisions that you think we might see in the next few years?
This is good Mickey. I like how you concluded AI: “So far we’re seeing it stuffed into products in rather predictable ways.” It does feel that way right now. In the accounting industry, everyone is “stuffing” in their AI components and we’re all still trying to figure out what to do with it.
I have seen predictions that AI will mean no one has to work but a few hours a day in 50 or so years, but those seem like a stretch. At least in our profession (and the design profession too), AI is going to collide with the manual parts of our recurring work. Coding transactions, reconciliations, and payroll journal entry postings are just things accountants shouldn’t be doing anymore, even now (largely due to API integrations between cloud products). But those who continue down this road are in for a surprise as AI will be able to add even more context to these transactions that even humans can (since the human mind doesn’t have the breadth of knowledge that AI has access to).
Interesting to keep pondering what AI will collide with. It will be exciting to see!
It feels like those were the same predictions we saw during the industrial revolution (people will work less), but it didn’t pan out. I think we’ll see the same here. Take our agency for example; suppose with AI we can serve 50 clients as well as we serve 5 today. That’s great! However, everyone else can do the same, so the costs will plummet and our revenue for those 50 clients will be the same as our 5 today.
It’ll be super interesting to see how things sort out!