The Futureproof Project: A Look Beyond Generative AI
By Adam Kleinberg
“AI will not replace humans. But a human with AI will replace you.”
That, according to Amit Shah, is something we're all going to have to adapt to in the sooner than you think future.
Amit was our guest speaker for the first online session of The Futureproof Project, a community of brand leaders that Traction has been curating to help one another turn Web 3.0 innovation into competitive advantage. The timely topic was generative AI.
Amit was formerly the president and CMO of 1-800-Flowers (Ironic side note: I wrote a blog post six years ago asking " Is Chatbionics the next frontier in AI? " and the example I used to examine the creepy factor of AI was 1-800-Flowers), and a management consultant at McKinsey, and currently sits on the board of Blue Apron, the Mobile Marketing Association, and is the founder of Instalily.ai, a startup that is applying next generation AI to address marketing use cases.
According to Amit, "We are on the precipice of a new computative revolution."
Until now, the balance of capability between humans and machines has been very clear. Machines are better than us at identifying patterns. That's why they are so good at tasks like spam filtering, weather prediction and fraud detection.
On the other hand, humans are better at things like poetry and TikTok videos. For now.
But computers are catching up. There are better models, more data, and faster compute times. In fact, the growth in computational accessibility has been exponential. The result is that AI models are learning faster, and as this diagram shows, surpassing human performance at an accelerating pace.
I'm sure many people reading this have tried ChatGPT in the last few weeks. People are fascinated by it. It took Instagram 2.5 months to reach a million users. It only took ChatGPT 5 days!
Currently, Generative AI can be used to create text, code, images, video and 3D images. The chart below covers some of the use cases that are currently able to be addressed with AI tools that are currently available (some better than others, of course).
According to Amit, one-third of all marketing emails that are generated TODAY are already built with AI. That is an astounding number!
AI won't replace human intelligence, but it will create bionic humans. Prompt engineering will soon become a critical knowledge working tool. People will go to school and learn how to calibrate the results they get back from AI bots by adjusting the language they use in prompts.
Several of the marketers that are part of The Futureproof Project are already making plans to enact AI to drive better products and solutions. Sunil Subhedar , the Global Head of Growth Marketing at Canva, shared two features that are already public leveraging AI to enhance their product. One is an AI text generator called Magic Write that lets you "simply start with a prompt and watch as copy, blog outlines, lists, bio captions, content ideas, brainstorms, and more appear in seconds." Another is a text to image generator built right into their UI.
Canva is using AI is to to help unlock creativity and create inspiration with future applications improving productivity. You can bank on more apps coming soon.
And very quickly, we'll see AI move beyond Generative Transformers to Action Transformers. We'll be able to use natural language prompts to promote computers to do all manner of tasks on our behalf.
Take a look at these use cases from Adept.ai , a company on the forefront of Action Transformers in AI. Imagine just telling your computer to log a sales call in Salesforce or to add columns to your spreadsheet and highlight outliers.
Check out a video of it.
Here's another video.
These use cases—and many more—will soon be possible on a computer. Your computer.
Here are a few other predictions that Adept.ai sees coming in the next few years:
- Most interaction with computers will be done using natural language, not GUIs. We'll tell our computer what to do, and it'll do it. Today's user interfaces will soon seem as archaic as landline phones do to smartphone users.
- Beginners will become power users, no training required. Anyone who can articulate their ideas in language can implement them, regardless of expertise. Software will become even more powerful as advanced features become accessible to everyone and no longer constrained by the length of a drop-down menu.
- Documentation, manuals, and FAQs will be for models, not for people. No longer will we need to learn the quirky language of every individual software tool in order to be effective at a task. We will never search through forums for "how to do X in Salesforce or Unity or Figma" — the model will do that work, allowing us to focus on the higher-order task at hand.
- Breakthroughs across all fields will be accelerated with AI as our teammate. Action transformers will work with us to bring about advances in drug design, engineering, and more. Collaborating with these models will make us more efficient, energized, and creative.
If you are a brand marketer interested in joining The Futureproof Project, drop us a line at futureprood@tractionco.com . This exclusive community of thought leaders is growing and gaining traction (pun intended). We'd love to see you join the conversation.
Traction's Neil Cohen has a podcast interview with Drift's Justin Keller on how to better align Marketing and Sales for everyone's success.
Recently, Traction introduced The Futureproof Project—an exclusive think tank to help senior brand leaders help one another to succeed in Web 3.0—at Brand Innovators Art Basel in Miami.
Marketing is in a time of rapid evolution. Get out your bitters and soda, because we are full-on experiencing the post-COVID hangover.