It is an understatement that artificial intelligence (AI) has dominated the business and innovation headlines this year. As a statement of fact, billions of dollars in investment in both private and public markets have been directed towards companies providing services and products with AI as an enabler or derivative of their focus.
As AI begets generative AI, providing information and intelligence at scale without human and kinetic inputs, it further begs the question if there is a future for legacy sources of information such as digital and physical libraries, and even online generic encyclopedias like Wikipedia. The idea and concern that if we feed data produced by gen-AI to other AI systems, we can eventually do away with these legacy systems, has not been tested and could end up becoming a flawed experiment with serious consequences for the future of knowledge and innovation.
Bringing this home and for the foreseeable future, marketing and brand building could continue to be a project supervised and midwifed by human elements despite the pivotal role that AI would play in micro-targeting and intelligence synthesis. AI will continue to enable content and ideas but could continue to rely on the human touch for meaning, context, and importance.