The New-Era of Innovation
100% of jobs, 100% of industries, and 100% of professions will be affected by Artificial Intelligence in the next 5 to 10 years, By 2020, companies using AI will take 1.2 trillion from competitors who don’t… Every day we see or hear another mind-boggling statement about the impact Artificial Intelligence will have on the future. As consequential as these statements are, the truth is nobody can predict just how profound this emerging technology of AI will be. For example, just look at Amazon no one could have foreseen what started out as an online bookstore could have grown to be one of the world’s most powerful and valuable companies in the history of the earth. More specifically, how the “Amazon Effect” has grown it’s supporting ecosystem comprised of manufactures, logics and even suppliers like the card board box industry — all of which have greatly benefited from Amazon shipments.
What we can be certain of is because of new emerging technology like AI, the rate of change will only increase. And the need for human intelligence, creativity and ingenuity will be even more valuable and in demand in the future. However, here in lies the paradox that AI technology is not only fueling the pace of change but will also make us more intelligent. And it is with this thesis that I not only wrote a book about AI’s profound capabilities, but actually used AI to co-author the book, as an example of how AI will be our intelligent assistant moving forward. Throughout my career as a creative technologist, I have always been fascinated with this very topic; what happens when human creativity and ingenuity meet and is then amplified by technology.
In the pursuit of ‘walking the walk’ I’ve leveraged AI to help co-author much of the narrative. In doing so I dramatically reduced the time taken to create this book. As a metaphor for how AI is giving us superhuman powers, and for the purposes of this book, we have given AI a name: Aimé, which is derived from the French for ‘beloved’ (bien aimé) and is also coincidentally a combination of AI + me. Aimé reflects the goal of this book — to show that AI will become your beloved co-creator and your intelligent personal assistant going forward. Aimé illustrates the role and relationship that humanity is now starting to have with AI. Much like Amazon Alexa, bots, Siri and other voice assistants we are moving into an age of intelligent assistants, where they will be companions that predict our needs, inspire, amplify our human abilities and enhance our evolutionary state of being. Throughout the book, Aimé learns from me, aids my thoughts, suggests and interprets my needs, contributes humor to situations. This is reflective of where advancements are being made in ‘modern day AI’.
The underlying aspects of the AI used to be a co-author primarily embody three systems: AI voice recognition, AI content understanding and summarization, AI content creation and generation. Voice recognition and continuous dictation enables human-to-system interaction through a voice-user interface (VUI) for tasks such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice editing, formatting, spelling, and sharing documents. AI content understanding and summarization technology reviews and abridges databases, articles or research papers into quick digestible content through approaches such as sentiment analysis, labelling and the organization of higher-level concepts based on contextual understanding. AI content creation and generation is the ability of the system to develop concepts and ideas to aid the content creation process. Writing algorithms emulating the human writing process helped contribute ideas, titles, content and drafts.
AI is sometimes referred to as the new electricity of our time because it has the power to revolutionize industries the world over and is changing how we fundamentally view and understand work. In Superhuman Innovation I show how AI will supercharge the workforce and world of work and how it can be harnessed to deliver powerful change to how companies innovate and gain competitive advantage. The book is a practical guide that explains by what means AI and machine learning are impacting not only the way businesses, brands and people innovate, but also what they innovate with their products, services and content.
Something wondrous happens in early childhood around the age of two. This is when children develop the understanding that other people have their own thoughts and feelings, in other words, the theory of the second mind. This theory describes the ability of individuals to understand that others have beliefs, intents, desires, emotions that are different from theirs. Humanity is now having a moment of awakening much like this, where we are now realizing the theory of the second mind with artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI), the ‘second mind’, can be leveraged to help expand and propel our abilities and intelligence beyond what we ever imagined. It will help tap into superhuman powers to be better at school, excel at sports, succeed in business and ultimately live a longer and fuller life? Who wouldn’t want that competitive edge? With this in mind, Superhuman Innovation unpacks the tangible magic around the possibilities of AI, demystifies AI into practical strategies and provide a mindset to apply AI to business innovation and transformation. The Superhuman conversation is divided into three parts: the AI foundation; the AI activation and the AI future and centers on five key tenets of AI: Speed, Understanding, Performance, Experimentation and Results.
The AI foundation
Every 10 to 15 years the world receives a new game-changing technology platform. Look at what the desktop computing and publishing revolution achieved for the democratization of the creation of and access to information via the internet. This was soon followed by the ubiquity of mobile devices that helped deliver all this content. This vast amount of data created the need for cloud storage. The desire to take advantage of that information, or digital exhaust (data that is the result of the choices and actions made by people online) led to the acceleration of the development of AI. In other words, artificial intelligence, in many ways, was driven by the need for a tool to make sense of all this data.
AI has the potential to innovate the creation of products, services and experiences at scale and will then power automation to increase productivity for these outputs. Innovators have always been in the business of creating opportunities for their products and customers, and AI supercharges that opportunity. There’s a saying (attributed to Albert Einstein) that the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. In the case of AI, the true measure of intelligence is intelligent imagination. What we mean by that is imagination can now be more informed and more tangibly enlightened through the unlocking of data.
Changing landscape: Customer behaviors and expectations
To better understand the tremendous opportunities surrounding AI we first must look at the changing landscape. We are living in an unprecedented time of societal transformation. Digital is disrupting every industry, all societies and each individual. Content is being consumed through more devices at a faster rate than ever before. People expect their experiences to be personalized, connected and flawless across every touch point and they won’t tolerate anything less: this is what is at the core of the digital transformation. Businesses are now realizing the need to shift from a product-focused approach to an experience focused strategy for both their customers and within their organizations.
Yet as the more things change, the more they stay the same. Ultimately, AI is about being of service to humanity. So, what we mean by that is, how can AI technology provide services, products and experiences that enrich people’s lives? The goal with AI is not simply to build smarter machines, but rather to build smarter organizations, smarter societies and ultimately a smarter world.
Another perspective on the impact that technology has had on society is from a generational perspective. Consider that 18-year-olds (born in the year 2000 or later) were born into a world with mobile devices, social media, YouTube stars, tablets and, now, wearable devices. This is their reality and basic to their view of the world. These digital natives see things differently because it’s so effortless for them to communicate with anyone or anything at any time. It’s normal for them to purchase a pizza online and have it delivered in just an hour, or even buy a car from their mobile or tablet. Their expectations have had a halo effect across not only generations but also across businesses. Hence, we are now in the “experience economy”.
The digital transformation: From messaging to experiences
Exceptional experiences have become critical to attracting and retaining customers. Creating amazing and inspirational content is key. Powerful experiences change the way we interact, entertain, work and relate to the world around us. Experiences can be one-on-one, among families, friends, co-workers, collaborative, or through engaging in social media. They can also be one-to many, business-to-consumer, business-to-business, teacher-to student, government-to-citizen, artist-to-audience, and so on. Today, these data-informed experiences are how businesses can break through the noise and make a connection and an impact.
Creating and maintaining an experience culture relies on information. This information helps better understand the behaviors, desires, and actions of employees and customers in order to deliver exceptional experiences. That implies vast amounts of data must be collected, stored, sorted, categorized and understood rapidly and efficiently. Without the data, it’s literally impossible to provide optimum experiences. And this need for data introduces a whole set of challenges. However, out of those challenges come phenomenal opportunities.
Infinite data: Driving better outcomes
Experiences are powered by data and that in turn drives business innovation and success. By leveraging the power of data, we can create experiences that matter. For instance, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created daily; AI can use much of that data to intelligently determine for instance how consumers are interacting with or abandoning a brand. This helps inform what works and what doesn’t, leading to future experiences improved by insights, supported by data and brought to life through beautiful, powerful created experiences. However, AI is not about the technology in or of itself; it’s about how technology can be leveraged to assist in creating these immersive and unexpected experiences. With AI, machine learning and deep learning systems and a number of supporting AI techniques, machines are becoming indispensable and fueling superhuman innovation.
Ultimately, all this data is used for increased insights, profits and decision making. Yet part of the challenge is breaking down the silos and organizing the data. Information is most often streamed from different sources. A merchandising company might store data in three departments — shipping, receiving and customer support. Each of these is a different silo of information. To get the most value, it’s important to be able to see the broader picture by referencing data from all three silos. This becomes even more complex when you consider there are also different types of data. For a customer, for example you need to store their phone number, which is one simple type of data, and their sales history, which is a more complex set of data.
Essentially there are two types of data sets. Structured data is organized in an easily understandable format. Examples include name, age, gender and date. Unstructured data comes from multiple sources and in different formats. You-Tube videos, tweets, Facebook posts and comments are all examples of unstructured data. Unstructured data is basically everything else — if it can’t be easily classified, it’s unstructured. User-generated content and user activity are a huge portion of unstructured data. This includes videos posted to YouTube (over 100 hours are uploaded each minute) and comments posted in social media accounts (510,000 comments were posted every minute in 2012 in Facebook alone). Unstructured data also includes information generated passively, such as GPS-location data generated by cellphones. With all this data much consideration much be given to the infrastructure of where it will be stored and accessed.
Infrastructure: The need for a foundation
One of the biggest challenges of infrastructure is that most companies do not have the luxury of building from scratch. In other words, they must deal with legacy systems vital to operating the business while expanding existing and building new systems. This can complicate the process of expanding and modifying the infrastructure. Even so, companies must continue to operate as they expand and add on to existing infrastructure, build new facilities or take greater advantage of offsite (cloud) infrastructure. Sometimes this is relatively simple, as when plugging in a new disc cabinet. In other cases, it can mean building an entirely new computer room and switching over to it when complete. You can also have a hybrid approach, where the old infrastructure continues to operate even after the new equipment is running. This latter case often occurs when legacy applications cannot be moved to newer equipment.
As with any new technology, the technical and organizational foundation must be in place to realize AI’s full potential and value. Essentially, infrastructure can be thought of as several layers. First is your network and second is your hardware, such as servers and disc drives (or the cloud-based equivalents). For the sake of this discussion, operating systems and virtualization should be done at this time. It’s becoming more common for businesses to use resources based in the cloud. This has many advantages, including lower cost, high performance, high availability and disaster recovery. However, using the cloud requires a larger investment in your network and communications, since the work is being done offsite. Some businesses use a hybrid model, keeping some applications and data in-house and running others in the cloud.
1 The network
2 Your hardware, such as services and disc drives
3 The data model
4 Databases
5 Applications
One of the guiding principles of technology is change becomes exponentially more difficult as you proceed through the process. Errors are easiest to correct in the preliminary design, more difficult once coding starts, even more difficult once the databases have been populated and extremely difficult once it’s all in production. That’s the advantage of the agile and scrum techniques — these tend to keep the teams aligned and catch errors more quickly than the traditional waterfall approach. To put that into perspective if you are off by just one degree, after a foot you’re only going to miss by .2 inches. But if you travelled to the moon, you’d be off by 4,169 miles. It’s far easier to correct at the beginning, when it’s just .2 inches.
Part 2: The AI activation
Artificial intelligence: The what and why of the AI revolution
We mentioned earlier how AI is going to have an impact on humanity at the same level as the invention of electricity. Because of which we are now entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will cause the most dramatic change in human society in history. Consider McKinsey recently noted AI is advancing 10 times faster and at 300 times the scale of the Industrial Revolution.
Until the 1980s, schools taught the technical aspects of computing. Fast-forward to today and the methodology is no longer about the technology, but rather it’s about putting the computer or the software into action, whether it be handing out iPads to learn math’s strategies or using a smartboard for reading. With that in mind, we’re at a similar point with artificial intelligence.
We don’t start off with the technical aspects but instead we focus on how and where it can be used and leveraged to solve business problems. A great metaphor is that of the maestro or the composer. They understand the capabilities of the instruments within their orchestra, but they don’t necessarily need to
be able to play each of them or know how the instruments were created or constructed. Their role is to bring all those instruments together to create a masterpiece. That is essentially what we’re talking about with artificial intelligence on a business strategy level. Customers and consumers are not interested in the technicalities of AI. They want to know what it can achieve and how AI technology can serve people and businesses.
A lot of people think intelligence is measured by a thing or a test, but actually human intelligence can be categorized into nine types, according to Multiple intelligences: New horizons in theory.
The nine types of intelligence are intrapersonal, spatial, naturalist, musical, logical-mathematical, existential, interpersonal, bodily-kinesthetic, and linguistic. Of course, everyone has all these components to a greater or lesser degree. Some are strong musically while being weaker spatially, while others are strong in the existential area but are introverted and thus have less in the interpersonal area.
Consider Donald Knuth, who is well known for his mathematical abilities and for writing The Art of Computer Programming, but not so much for his musical talents. Contrast that with Bach, who was strong in music but weak in logical- mathematical. Or take someone like Leonardo da Vinci, who was an equal balance of a scientist and an artist. It is commonly believed he said people should ‘study the science of art and the art of science’. However, people are holistic in nature — they do not normally fit into just one category. Herein lies the complexity of artificial intelligence, the purpose of which is to try to re-engineer the human mind to a certain extent.
The super framework: A superhuman strategy
Now that we’ve laid the foundation of the technical aspects of AI, let’s talk about the strategic model that will unleash competitive advantages for you and your business.
It is called the SUPER framework, and it will provide superhuman capabilities. SUPER is an acronym for Speed, Understanding, Performance, Experimentation and Results. It’s a powerful five-pronged model that harnesses AI as a catalyst for innovation. The super model provides five guiding principles that are necessary for successful AI implementation. These serve as the basis for an AI roadmap on which a strategy can be built. All five prongs — Speed, Understanding, Performance, Experimentation and Results — must be addressed by your AI strategy for your project to succeed.
Speed (by facilitating work processes)
Understanding (by revealing and mastering deep insights)
Performance (by enabling customization of delivery to customers)
Experimentation (by allowing the iterative process of re-invention and feedback)
Results (by providing tangible, measurable and optimizable results)
In this world of product and pricing parity, the delivery of superior experience of service has become the new marketing and competitive edge. With the AI SUPER framework, companies and entrepreneurs can now harness the power of data, personalization and on-demand availability, to name but a few, at the touch of an intelligent button.
Speed: Facilitating work processes
AI will help with business efficiencies: everything from speed of manufacturing, to ideation, to content creation, to internal processes. For the consumer, this will result in faster service and faster delivery of products.
Let’s take a more detailed look at Speed, by which we mean increasing the velocity of work and reasoning or getting to a starting point more quickly. For instance, if you want to improve customers’ experience of getting through an airline check-in procedure more efficiently, you’d focus on optimizing their traffic flow. One airline company, Trans States Airlines (TSA), has been testing a new system that could accelerate the speed with which travelers pass through security at the airport. It uses AI to evaluate the facial expressions and posture of travelers to point out any that may pose a threat to security. Of note body scans are not shown to TSA screeners to ensure travelers’ privacy is protected; TSA personnel will only be alerted about those who might pose a threat.
Understanding: Revealing and mastering deep insights
AI will permeate innovation across marketing campaign creation, service bots, applications, attribution and delivery. AI makes experiences more effective through better Understanding. AI can access vast amounts of data very quickly, revealing and interpreting that information to provide insights into marketing, customer behavior, healthcare, automotive, driving habits and so on. Combined with IoT and similar technologies, the possibilities for comprehending the world around us are unlimited. Netflix uses predictive analytics to understand customer preferences and make predictions to provide optimal recommendations. The recommendation engine not only connects viewers to the content they want to see, but it improves over time. It learns about customer tastes and distinguishes between what people say they want to see and what they really like.
Performance: Measurement and optimization
When we talk about Performance, we mean efficiency, which measures the effectiveness of the process. In this respect, we’re concerned with how well the job, service or product is or has been performing. AI strategies and their application must be measured and optimized on their performance and how well they are supporting the overall business strategy. In other words, those strategies must pay off, and that must be measured, quantified and reported to various stakeholders. Key performance indicators need to be defined before the AI initiative is begun, to measure business-level success.
As the volume of data and content explodes, companies need to deeply embrace AI and machine learning techniques to unlock true insights from these datasets at scale. With AI/machine learning,
cloud computing will evolve from a simple automation layer to an indispensable and pervasive intelligent fabric across organizations for predictive audience segments and hyper-personalization capabilities.
Experimentation: Actionable curiosity
AI also ushers in a new era of Experimentation, by allowing for faster interactive processes, meaning supporting minimum viable product (MVP) feedback loops; creating, testing and optimizing. Also, AI inspires new approaches to products and services that were unimaginable in the past.
We are now at a point in time that is reminiscent of the mid- 1990s, where the early winners of the internet were those who identified opportunities and experimented to address those business problems. We are in a very similar setting with AI today. However, there needs to be a systematic game plan for experimentation with AI.
Results: Business transformation
Finally, AI must produce Results that support businesses, consumers and industries. PayPal, for instance, uses deep learning to detect deceptive merchants and pinpoint sales of illegal products. In addition, their models optimize operations by providing an understanding of why transactions fail. Both these solutions improve the ability of PayPal to deliver service to its customers by cutting down on fraud and improving reliability.
As AI matures, we’ll be able to measure results in a more quantifiable way because AI can quickly process vast volumes of data and make inferences based on what it finds. This opens up the power of predictive analytics and highlights the value of the virtuous feedback loop.
Part 3: The AI future
Where to start
The first question to answer when beginning an AI project is to figure out where to start. Before beginning, define the problem to be solved and who needs the solution. Put the customer first beyond all else.
To operationalize the SUPER framework, use the concept of people, process, data and technology. With people the focus is with building a team with the right skill set and organization. Processes deal with how the project is developed and the different methodologies available to achieve the goal. With data, have a data strategy and focus on quality not quantity, as well as accessibility. Finally, technology provides the software and hardware considerations on which to build the project. The SUPER framework can be molded and customized to fit the needs of any project. Just to be clear, this is a blueprint and is not intended as a straitjacket. Use the framework to enable progress, not to restrict your freedom of action.
Security, privacy and ethics
As businesses become more reliant upon AI in their strategies, it becomes vitally important that security be at the forefront from the beginning. Everything from huge databases to fast networks to computer systems must be designed and built with strong security policies in mind. AI is becoming mission-critical to the success of businesses, governments and individuals. Many of the initiatives currently being designed and rolled out involve aiding in the decision-making process by analyzing extremely large amounts of data to produce reports and even recommendations used to drive a company or the government.
A closely related subject has to do with privacy. The challenges of data privacy related to computing and AI are difficult to overstate. Not only is it technically challenging, but quite often those speaking about the subject are prone to rhetoric and highly emotional discussions. Complex privacy agreements written in legalese don’t make the topic any easier to understand. As the internet of things grows almost exponentially, and companies make more use of massive amounts of big data for artificial intelligence and other purposes, keeping data private becomes challenging, to say the least.
One solution is privacy through anonymization. There are four types of data anonymization, which is the removal of personally identifiable information. You can completely remove any information that can be used to identify a person; you can redact, which means to blackout the data on paper with a marker; you can encrypt the data; or you can mask the personally identifiable information.
In addition to privacy there is also security needs. Essentially, there are two sides to AI in security. First, AI must be secure, and that introduces challenges. Second, AI can be used to improve security, solving one of the most critical problems facing the internet of things and business today. So, the question becomes, ‘How do organizations keep AI safe.’
Yesterday, tomorrow and today
We can look to the past to better predict the future and its impact. Some of the greatest glimpses into the future have been in the world of science fiction. Some of the fundamental hopes and promises AI aims to achieve and deliver can be uncovered and reveled through science fiction.
The intriguing thing about some of these glimpses into the future is that they aren’t just showing single devices or technologies. Instead, the indicate a connect world, a smart city or smart home in which a set of interconnected devices that can, in many cases, communicate with each other and with systems in the cloud. The resulting data can be used to feed artificial intelligence-based systems to provide even more capabilities.
The point is that artificial intelligence will dramatically improve the lives of individuals and humanity going forward. AI is already being used to give individuals superhuman powers that were not even dreamed of until recently. The possibilities provided by AI and humans working together are practically endless.
Next-Gen creativity: Improving the human experience
The question here is: What does humanity do if AI lives up to its full potential and helps solves many of the world’s major problems? — The power of human creativity combined with AI will be fully unleashed for the good of business and the world.
Creativity, like intelligence and consciousness, is hard to define. There are varying definitions, including the one from Steve Jobs: Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences, or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
That brings up the topic of the dynamic between creativity and innovation in business. For a number of years there has been a rise in the need for innovation in business. Let’s take a look at advertising.
Traditional agencies have historically created advertising that is one-way messaging, such as TV commercials, print ads, magazines and banner ads. But the advent and then the rise of digital and social platforms have created the need for inventive experiences and services under the umbrella of innovation.
Fundamentally, creativity is a tool for creation. And it’s important to remember that creativity is at the core of solving business problems. As we’ve established, things are changing so quickly, we must use creativity to reimagine businesses. As such the role of creativity in business has expanded and must be woven into everything from technology, consulting, to strategy, to digital and business transformation.
The AI-infused future: Transforming the world
Technology has changed our world forever. Individuals can communicate with anyone at any time from a small handheld device. They can retrieve information from all the libraries in the world, watch movies in the comfort of their own home, play vast multiplayer games with tens of thousands of people and have food delivered directly to their homes in a matter of minutes by drones.
With this new digital reality, AI promises to advance the world and us on an individual level. Virtual and augmented reality, guided by AI, is enabling new vistas of understanding. IoT devices such as smart refrigerators already order food automatically to be delivered in a few hours by autonomous drone. Education can be delivered wherever an individual may reside, and entertainment of all forms is available at anyone’s beck and call. AI is changing you, the individual, into ‘superyou’. You are immersed directly into the connected world, whether it be your smart device, your virtual reality headset or voice assistant, and can send and receive information to and from wherever and whomever you want. You can take classes wherever you might be, play video games at will, and work from home or the beach if you desire. The magic of AI has created the ‘superyou’, with powers beyond belief at your fingertips. This is truly the magic of AI.
In the end, business and consumer power will drive and determine the course and success of AI. It’s important to understand that AI is a tool, to be leveraged for good, to unite the art of human creativity with the logic of science to create magical experiences to propel business and societal innovation for years to come. The opportunities for innovation with AI are endless.
