January 2020 — Carrington Malin

Blogs, writing, published articles, media interviews and other news
January 28, 2020
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Our AI first world is emerging standing on the shoulders of the mobile-first world, but it will also raise its own generation of AI natives

Google CEO Sundar Pichai called it a few years ago in a letter to company shareholders, when he said that we’re all moving from a mobile-first world to an AI first world. On the face of it, this seemed quite straightforward to understand. Businesses are seeing artificial intelligence become embedded into more and more processes, with software developers making it easier and easier for companies to leverage AI across their organisations. Meanwhile, consumers are already using a wide variety of applications that are supported by AI every day, drawing on Big Data, machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing (NLP).

However, Google’s corporate strategy is also a prediction of a new world to come and a fundamental shift in human behaviour. Our new AI first world isn’t simply a world where AI is embedded into all technology, nor just a way for organisations to improve performance and save money. Truly pervasive AI will mean that there will be few human actions where AI assistance is not available and for consumers, their first touch point for any brand will be AI. The early signs of this are clearly visible today.

Businesses are already trying to make our lives easier, whilst drawing in consumers to have deeper relationships with their brands, by using AI to provide consumers with more timely and appropriate interactions, prompted by personalised recommendations and communications. More often than not though, these AI supported communications are limited to certain channels.

AI is also being used more extensively to engage and converse with the consumer, exchanging information and providing feedback, 24/7. A recent survey of 450 customer service and support leaders worldwide by Gartner found that 37 percent are either piloting or using AI bots and virtual customer assistants (VCAs).

Gartner forecast that chatbots and VCAs will be used in 25 percent of customer service and support operations by 2020, although estimates today range from 23 percent to 80 percent. However, what is clear is that companies that have implemented chatbots are reporting reductions in customer calls, email and other enquiries, which Gartner says may be reduced by up to 70 percent of pre-AI volumes.

Crucially, Gartner also points out that AI will be a major force in shaping customer self-service. In the future, AI will empower customer-led approaches to service, where a customer’s preferred option may be i) do it myself, ii) let’s do it together iii) let my AI bot do it for me, or iv) let our AI bots do it together.

Today, when most consumers think about interacting with AI, they tend to think of a device or channel such as Amazon’s Alexa Echo, or Android’s Google Assistant or the Apple and Microsoft alternatives. More and more will have experience of chatting with AI bots via Facebook, Whatsapp or company websites, and an increasing number will talk to call centre AIs when contacting their bank, telecom or other service providers.

No doubt, virtual assistants are going to be instrumental in creating our new AI first world. However, these are destined to become a utility, embedded into almost every device, process and transaction imaginable. This means that whether you are watching TV, shopping at the mall or dining in a restaurant, your first point of contact with any brand could be conversational AI.

Every business, therefore, is going to be under increasing pressure to become an AI first business, and to do so at a speed that few today are prepared to even consider, even those in the midst of that very process. So, let’s take a step back and review the case of mobile-first marketing.

The phrase ‘mobile-first’ started to gain popularity about ten years ago. In fact, Luke Wroblewski’s book ‘Mobile First’ was published in 2009. This new approach to consumer marketing strategy was taken in response to the new generation of smartphones usage, which arguably began with Apple’s 2007 iPhone launch. Smartphones, social media and new location-specific services were driving demand for mobile broadband. And, in turn, marketing started to revolve around SoMoLo engagement (social, mobile and local).

As has often been the case, marketing technology lagged behind. Mobile marketing and services were prohibitively difficult manage and integrate with online marketing, CRM and in-store retail. Mobile marketing was, a first, limited to a few mobile channels and lacked integration with the rest of the marketing ecosystem, fragmenting customer journeys.

However, over the past five years we’ve seen mobile marketing become integrated. CRM systems, analytics, marketing managing platforms, advertising media placement, software deployment and payment transactions can now all be managed using integrated tools that allow more of a 360 degree view of the business. Brands recognise that consumers are using smartphones to do product research and browse options, even as they walk around their stores, and they now have the technology to offer and integrate mobile experiences with a wide variety of channels: whether they are paid, earned, shared or owned.

The swift rise of connected mobile devices forced marketers and martech developers to create integrated, cross-platform, omnichannel strategies and solutions that allow for a more seamless customer experience and give a business a 360 degree view of communications. This is important, since — as we’re seeing today — adding new channels into marketing management systems and CRM, such as AI chatbots, is no great hurdle to jump.

Just how integrated your mobile brand experience is, currently depends on where you live. China has the highest usage of mobile payments, with a mobile payment penetration rate of 35.2 percent. Alipay, WeChat Pay and other online payment apps are popular in almost all cities in China and this year an estimated half a billion Chinese will using their mobile devices to pay in brick-and-mortar stores, restaurants and other retail outlets.

Our future AI first world is obviously going to emerge standing on the shoulders of the mobile-first world.

Google launched its answer to Amazon Alexa in 2016 and, due to the widespread adoption of its Android mobile platform, was able to make the virtual assistant available in 80 countries and 30 languages within two years. Today, Google Assistant is available on more than 1 billion devices.

So, from an AI first communications point of view, businesses can already engage with consumers across a range of AI conversational interfaces, to include chatbots, voice assistants, call centres and email. What’s yet to be developed is the interoperability that allows a brand to chat with you via Facebook Messenger, then call you via an AI call centre and then, perhaps, greet you via an AI voice assistant when you walk into their showroom: all whilst seamlessly continuing the same thread of conversation.

Technology vendors such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Nuance Communications are all investing in the development of end-to-end conversational platforms that allow organisations to engage in complex conversations using the same conversation agent across multiple platforms.

It’s early days for end-to-end conversational platforms, but, for example, it is already possible to develop a virtual customer assistant using IBM’s artificial intelligence platform Watson, then use that VCA to communicate via Amazon Alexa or Google. If this is developed to integrate with IBM’s next-generation call center Voice Gateway, with a little help from a cloud communications platform like Twilio, the same technology can be used to make and receive voice calls, send SMS and converse with customers via Whatsapp.

The development of these multi-purpose conversational platforms will, ultimately, give organisations the ability to create, deploy and manage conversation agents anywhere the technology exists for a consumer to interact. Voice assistants are already starting to be used in automobiles, public transport, retail stores, museums, restaurants and many other scenarios. So, why not refrigerators, automatic doors, escalators and soda machines too?

All of this means that consumer expectations for AI first services are going to soar rapidly, putting pressure on businesses to not only cover the bases, but to innovate to create engaging customer experiences. To do this, organisations have a lot to learn very quickly. AI first communication requires technology, new knowledge and skills, customer experience and, of course, lots of data.

Unlike previous waves of technology that have required users to learn about how the technology works in some detail in order to derive value from it, conversational AI makes it easy for consumers to engage and benefit from an almost infinite variety of AI supported services without ever reading a manual.

Consumer adoption is going to be fast and, as people grow weary of mobile HTML pages and typing data requests, so they going to be more open to innovative new AI voice experiences. AI voice communication will simply become the path of least resistance.

In fact, as the next generation of consumers come online, they will be growing up with AI first services. Our latest Generation Zs and their successors will grow up ‘AI natives’, with their own needs, preferences, behaviours and habits developing in tune with the new AI first world. The only respite for businesses today is that for the next ten years most of their customers will, at least, remember how to deal with them without help from artificial intelligence.

This story first appeared on My AI Brand (Medium)


January 22, 2020
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I was delighted to be able to contribute to Damian Radcliffe‘s Middle East technology predictions feature for ZDNet, rounding up expert predictions for 2020 on 5G and 4G adoption, venture funding, retail tech and artificial intelligence.

I was asked: as the Middle East and North Africa’s spending on AI continues to grow, will the region ever become more than simply a consumer of artificial intelligence?

Read the full article here.


January 17, 2020
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The UAE is developing a sophisticated and far-reaching range of initiatives to attract 21st century skills.

In 2015, Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, coined the term ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ to describe our connected industrial society and its increasing reliance on intelligent information systems.

As with previous industrial periods, this revolution will have a profound impact on our world, not least of all changing the nature of work and our relationship with it. However, in the short term, many of the dynamics will appear familiar, such as the increasing demand for specialist skills that serve new, upcoming industries and the competition among employers to hire those skills.

His Highness Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, on Sunday launched two new initiatives supporting the National AI Strategy to build capacity in AI talent. Announced at a retreat organised for AI experts by the National Programme for Artificial Intelligence, the new initiatives are part of a far-reaching policy to ensure the long-term availability of talent at many levels, to help ensure the country’s competitiveness in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In light of fierce global competition among nations for leadership positions in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the fluid state of the global AI talent pool, winning our new talent wars will require more than simply outbidding competitors. Today’s policymakers must recognise that they need to attract both home-grown and international talent, leverage human resources that are located around the world and create ways of building long-term relationships that will continue to support the availability of talent. It’s all about building talent ecosystems, rather than simply planning to acquire more people with the right skills.

The UAE government recognised the scale of the talent challenge early on and has been developing a wide range of initiatives to attract, train and develop talent, nationally, regionally across the Arab world and globally.

But what did the previous industrial revolutions teach us? The workforce requirements of the first three changed our planet forever. In pre-industrial societies, more than 80 per cent of the population lived in rural areas. Drawn by the promise of jobs in new industries, people flocked from the countryside to towns and cities. By the year 1850, more people in the United Kingdom lived in cities than rural areas and by 1920, a majority of Americans lived in cities, too. The mass movement of people resulted in far-reaching economic, geographic and social changes that have made our world what it is today.

The changes that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring are also destined to shape the future of human existence. Artificial intelligence is set to transform the nature of nearly every single one of today’s existing jobs, eliminate job roles that currently employ millions of people and create millions of new jobs, including many roles that have not yet even been imagined. Furthermore, the pace of change is accelerating, powered by faster technology development and so putting more pressure on business, economic, political and government systems than ever before.

Critically, for the global competitiveness of both business and nations themselves, the supply of talent to fuel the development and implementation of artificial intelligence systems is in short supply. It’s a highly dynamic pool of talent that is changing rapidly, following different rules to past waves of tech-related talent and it includes people that are more independent of industry and location.

At a UAE government level, an AI Programme has been created in partnership with Kellogg College at Oxford University to train UAE nationals and help them accelerate the delivery of the national AI strategy. The first batch of 94 participants graduated in April 2019.

On a regional level, the One Million Arab Coders programme launched in 2017 incentivises Arab youth at large to acquire new skills, graduating 22,000 programmers in its first year. In 2019, several new modules were added to the curricular, including an ‘Introduction to AI’ module. The UAE also launched a One Million Jordanian Coders’ Initiative in Jordan and a One Million Uzbek Coders’ initiative in Uzbekistan.

Meanwhile, in the country’s tertiary education system, a number of AI education programmes, degree courses and research centres have been introduced to UAE colleges and universities over the past couple of years. In October, the UAE announced the world’s first graduate AI university — Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. The research-based academic institution offers fully paid scholarships for masters and PhD courses starting September 2020.

The two new initiatives launched this week add further appeal to aspiring AI talent. The AI Talent Hunt programme will create an AI laboratory drawing together national and global expertise to solve real world issues, while a competitive AI Challenge Programme will be rolled out in partnership with Microsoft.

In the race to attract 21st century skills, the UAE is already engaging talent at multiple levels and has begun to build a reputation as an enabler of talent, rather than simply a destination. This effort, combined with its goals to become a global hub for AI research and entrepreneurism, could well encourage much sought-after talent to stay in the UAE, or, at least, keep coming back.

This story was first published on The National


January 10, 2020
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New ‘Thank My Farmer’ app will help coffee drinkers further support the farmers who grow their beans

The global coffee industry is now worth some $200 billion (Dh734.64bn) a year, yet the average income for coffee farmers has not changed in two decades. This is according to UK advocacy group Fairtrade. Meanwhile, most coffee drinkers are blissfully unaware that for every $3 to $5 cup of coffee they buy, the original coffee producer may actually make less than 1 cent.

Consumers, as always, wield all the power. They not only play a pivotal role in pushing for higher service standards, but also higher standards of corporate, social and environmental responsibility. In response, many companies have invested in making it easier for consumers to learn more about the products they are buying and the production process. However, transparency has proven difficult to deliver for many food products, including commodities such as coffee and tea.

So, how does a socially conscious consumer make informed choices about what coffee or tea they buy? How does one have any certainty about the sustainability of farming practices or the impact of their purchase on the farmers themselves?

A new blockchain initiative unveiled at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020 in Las Vegas may shine a light on the way forward. Farmer Connect, an independent ecosystem of coffee farmers and the coffee industry, and IBM rolled out ‘Thank My Farmer’, a mobile app that allows consumers to view information drawn from a network of farmers, traders, roasters and brands.

Built using IBM’s blockchain food safety solution, the new app helps close the gap between a consumer’s coffee purchase and the farmer who grew the coffee beans. Using blockchain to ensure the integrity and security of the data, IBM Food Trust allows all coffee industry partners to share food information, creating a more transparent and trustworthy global food supply chain.

According to founder and president of Farmer Connect, David Behrends, the aim is to humanise each coffee drinker’s relationship with their daily cup of coffee. The app will allow consumers to play an active role in sustainability governance by supporting coffee farmers associated with their coffee brands. The app also gives consumers an opportunity to donate funds directly to farmers around the world, or to help fund sustainability projects in the farmers’ local communities.

Many in the food industry have been developing blockchain solutions to help make the supply chain traceable and more transparent. Last year, the 180-year-old tea producer Assam Company and US-based technology firm SmartFarms unveiled plans to develop a blockchain solution to trace tea leaves from the farm to the cup, together with a consumer app that would also allow consumers to thank farm workers directly.

Agricultural commodities typically pass through many intermediaries before being offered to consumers as a packaged product. For example, smaller coffee and tea farmers in developing nations may sell crops to larger producers, before produce changes hands between a number of exporters, importers, traders, roasters, distributors and retailers. The complexity of the supply chain and lack of technology at the source makes it prohibitively difficult to inform the consumer exactly how and where coffee was farmed.

In our globalised economy, commodity prices may change with seasonal highs and lows in consumption, especially good or poor crop harvests in the countries where its grown, currency exchange rates and new import tariffs. Coffee prices enjoyed a high of $3.06 per pound in 2011, but have been unstable ever since, falling by more than 40 per cent over the past three years to a low of less than $1 per pound last June.

Although prices have increased during the past few months, the extended instability of global coffee prices has left farmers in Africa, Asia and South America struggling to stay in business. Consequently, many farmers simply aren’t able to pay the wages to workers that they would like to.

Under normal circumstances, a coffee or tea drinker in Europe or the US may only be aware of the product brand and price, or perhaps the commodity prices reported in the news. Consumers may feel the impact via changes in product pricing, but few are normally aware of how swings in commodity prices affect the farmers and farm workers.

Fair trade labelling has helped some promote transparency and benefited fair trade farmers. However, it doesn’t solve the issue of how to bring transparency to global supply chains.

If these new initiatives using blockchain are successful, then consumers may soon be offered more certainty that the food brands they buy not only taste good, but are good for the farmers too.

This story was first published on The National.


January 6, 2020
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Now that the New Year has arrived, I’m not about to tell you how to develop your 2020 marketing plan. I’m guessing that this is, at least, completed in draft and perhaps already approved and has been used for other 2020 briefing and planning. However, could you improve your marketing plan’s presentation?

Although you may well have worked long and hard on your marketing plan, you may still be in the process of improving it before sharing a final version with your wider internal audience. Perhaps you intended to add a few tweaks over the holidays, or maybe you’re creating a shorter version of your plan in slide format to help communicate your plan internally. Whatever you choose to do, it’s important to have a marketing plan ready that is easy to understand for internal stakeholders across your organisation. We’re all ‘in marketing’ these days, so making the effort to improve your marketing plan presentation is time well spent!

Continue reading this story on Linkedin.