THE ROBOTS ARE COMING

This morning I attended a fascinating lecture at the Club at the Ivy about Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and the impact it will have on the digital industries. Jonathan Seal, Director of Strategy at Mando told us that Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook are all heavily investing in AI and he thinks this will be the battle ground of the future. If you can use AI to work out the context of a person then you can give them something very relevant and lock out the competition and own that space. The rise of the robot concierge means that consumers will ask a robot to interact with a brand instead of going directly themselves which means that brands will need to start marketing to machines. Devika Thapar, Watson Solutions Leader at IBM talked about the 4th Industrial revolution with an AI-First World. Automation is not new but AI and the Internet of Things are new.