As we race forward into the genAI age, moving at an exponential clip, it’s important we keep our ears to the ground and continue listening for the new signals that may become big trends.
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New Pricing Models for an automated world. How will SaaS pricing evolve in a world with AI agents handling tasks. Zendesk is pointing one clear direction - bill for when the agents work, not for the number of hours they’re on call.
New AI Business Model: Charging Customers Only When the Tech Works
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Where will the competition heat up? Here’s my Tl;DR for McKinsey’s recent scan of the places we’ll see the most activity, competition, disruption, new value creation…
McKinsey Report: 18 New Arenas for Competition, from Streaming to Space - InnoLead
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SIGNALs: New Language Model Architectures
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A “back to the future” moment, building on 1970’s work in symbolic AI, where the model learns to manipulate symbols (think math or logic) as opposed to text and tokens. The “neuro” part incorporates LLMs as just a part of the architecture, but at its heart, it’s processing concepts as symbolic constructs. Why?
It requires much less data to train, and affords far more accurate, explainable AI.
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From MIT CSAIL’s ai and robotics program comes a new player into this space of ‘frontier models’. Just released to the public On October 11, 2024, the Liquid Foundation Model (LFM). What is remarkable about is is the intelligence they achieves with 1/10th the memory footprint (and all the costs associated with memory).
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TREND: Agents (autonomous & goal directed)
LangChain State of AI Agents Report
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SIGNAL: GeoSpatial Inferencing (reasoning over regions)
Insights into population dynamics: A foundation model for geospatial inference
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TREND: Humanoid Robots
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Companies like Figure are taking us toward a future in which working with robots and collaborating with these (what do we call them, Androids?) will be as common as everyone having smart phones is today.
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SIGNAL: Me+Machine (10x my personal creativity)
Longtime jazz musician and drummer JoJo Mayer spent his Covid downtime well. Besides practicing a lot, he hired a team of AI/ML developers to build a digital twin of himself that he could play and improvise against. He calls the combined unit Me+Machine and he is now actively touring and speaking about the project and its implications for all creative fields.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URkxEAvavhw
"it listens to the input of my drumming and renders output according to how I play. It's like a backing track that listens to what I do. When I stop, it also stops. It renders variations on what I play and then I react to that. This creates a closed loop that uncouples the hierarchy of cause and effect"
"I think in this time we live in, where the future is coming at us with the accelerated speed and uncertainty, I think improvisation is possibly going to be a very helpful tool"
"the difference between human creativity and AI is that AI relates on interpolation, humans relate on extrapolation"
"Now we have the new tool of AI for music, but the nature of it especially in music and art, has more of an exploitive character than explorative"
"we [musicians] can reassign our creativity and our power to actually creating new platforms. if it's digital or physical it doesn't matter. There are lot of opportunities, we just don't look"
"there is a new opportunity, embracing a new type of freedom, even creating our own storefronts even if it's very small"
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<aside> 🧭 Life Trends In 2025 ”This recent Accenture Life Songs look-ahead is excellent. Their work feels prescient, especially its emphasis on the growing need for people to re-balance digital and and real-world time”
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/song/accenture-life-trends
If you want my Tl/DR for the whole thing, check out, https://www.innovationleader.com/report-tldr/accenture-lifetrends-key-trends-for-2025/
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<aside> 🧭 Mass Personalization (where genAI will shine) ”the customization of products and services at scale, using data and technology to cater to individual preferences while maintaining the efficiency of mass production.”
Examples: https://www.arcade.ai/ “ask our AI models to design a thing for you”
Bling It On_ An AI Startup Turns Shoppers Into Jewelry Designers — The Information.pdf
“Nike by You” https://www.nike.com/w/nike-by-you-shoes-6ealhzy7ok
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<aside> 🧭 Phygital ”the seamless integration of physical and digital experiences to enhance customer engagement and create a unified, immersive brand interaction.”
Example: 19 Crimes
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<aside> 🧭 Virtual ‘smart’ Mirrors https://digitaldm.com/virtual-mirror/ ****”interactive mirrors equipped with augmented reality and AI technology to provide personalized information, recommendations, and virtual try-ons for users”
see: phygital showrooms
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