Immediate Innovation with Generative AI

Posted on January 23, 2023 by Design in Design Innovation | 0 Comments

This is a cross-posting from OMD as part of their Rapid Response analysis of topics in the media and marketing industry

AI at CES

Recent months have been dominated by news and speculation about a new wave of generative AI services such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and Pointe-E.

Development has moved so quickly in recent months that many innovations launched at CES this year have yet to be able to utilize them. After all, ChatGPT was only released around seven weeks ago.

AI has remained a major theme at the event, with numerous technologies utilizing different forms of AI in new form factors and services, such as AI Pet Health Collars or Digital Twins, as well as embedded in familiar settings such as TVs and Cars.

Many of the devices shown utilizing AI are concepts that may scale in the later half of the decade. Our lens for CES 2023 has been Immediate Innovation focusing on the ideas, technologies, and services that can transform business in the short term.

Generative AI services do not need to wait for hardware innovation adoption; they will deliver transformative digital services this year.

The technology conversation is shifting. 2022s hot trends of web3 and the metaverse are entering their own ‘winter’ as technology seeks to catch up with expectations. Many more CMOs are focused on how AI can be utilized in 2023.

At CES, many panels and events discussed how AI would shape their industries. Content creation is already being impacted—auto-generation text content to AI utilization in Hollywood blockbusters. Nina Schick predicts that AI will generate 90% of the content in some way by 2025.

OMG teams at CES have created multiple updates and summaries of what was launched or discussed at CES, covering many more topics than just AI. Including a look at ChatGPT.

Hype around Gen AI

The launch of ChatGPT at the end of November has caught the public imagination. Powerful AI that has existed for a few years suddenly became available to all in an easy-to-utilize format.

A simple text box leads to a myriad of new capabilities, from being able to code in any language to pastiche any style.

Many recognize similarities to the launch of Google in 1998 or the iPhone in 2009, where complex new technologies are packaged to be as intuitive as possible and open up new capabilities.

We can expect to see disruption born from these technologies. Google is worried that its core search business may be disrupted.

However, Google has long been a leader in generative AI. Google engineers wrote the seminal paper that started this wave of innovation in 2017. We can expect to see creations that will shake up the search model.

Apple has been developing innovative solutions as well. This week is launching synthetic voices to narrate any text with the resonance and emotion of an audiobook.

Microsoft has made some of the most significant public moves, investing USD 1bn in ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI 4 years ago. They are rumored to soon increase their investment by USD 10bn taking a 49% stake.

Generative art hit the mainstream with AI avatars from apps such as Lensa, which made USD 25m just days after launch.

Video, 3d content, and music are more challenging but in late development. We can expect to see and hear the ‘Mid journey of music’ very soon and keep an eye on Neural Radiance Fields (Nerfs) this year.

Marketing use cases

Generative AI will significantly impact numerous business operations, from logistics to human recourses.

Every industry is racing to understand how these new technologies will impact their business. In marketing, many think the most apparent and quick-to-scale opportunities lie.

Areas which repeat multiple tasks in slightly different contexts are ripe for efficiency gains. Large language models in SEO and social content can help manage diverse terms across ideation, copy, links, and more.

It can also help with universal everyday functions correcting, summarizing, and parsing everything we create, from emails to creative.

We will see a great democratization of automation and coding. On one end, simple coding jobs can now be done by anyone who can express their needs clearly as a prompt (think excel macros, JavaScript, or SQL database queries). As well as in optimizing.

While expert coders can debug and document their work far more efficiently, massively expanding their output. Already OMG teams are sharing ChatGPT-derived code to improve efficiency.

We should not consider the headline-grabbing models alone. As the sector matures, we will see new value chains emerge that can leverage existing large data sets.

Brands will be able to build new kinds of service on top of these models enabling capabilities that, to date, would be too expensive to consider.

We can expect to see services that create value from trusted relationships –our banks guiding life skills and education or groceries helping with health goals. This week, Amazon made a significant move by buying One Medical for USD 3.9 bn.

Where next

This revolution is not a surprise. We have been focused on developing the AI space for some time now, releasing ‘Retail Revolution’ reports since 2017. We track evolving consumer sentiment towards emerging AI capabilities, advising brands on how they should prepare and supporting technical development through hackathons and partnerships.

Recent breakthroughs have accelerated projected timelines – the capabilities we expected to see in 2025 are already with us, and adoption is scaling fast. Yet there are numerous challenges to be addressed.

For example, Intellectual property will need protection with an eco-system of mitigations and regulations put in place.

Accuracy and capability will grow as more resources are utilized, and approaches get more sophisticated. Q1 of 2023 is rumored to see the launch of GPT-4.

The utility will grow as these models are plugged into more specialized capabilities –for example, scientific calculation through Wolfram Alpha. We are democratizing knowledge and discovery as we have never seen before.

The past year has seen the beginning of the next phase of innovation. Some of the impacts are already with us, with many more to come. The winners of this business cycle will be those who most effectively utilize these new capabilities.