Yesterday Google open sourced many of the features in its Tensorflow artificial intelligence service.
Making the services available to the community will mean many more opportunities to develop the technology. It could well prove to be a turning point for Artificial Intelligence in making it more accessible to the general public and business community.
“I always believe small companies usually illustrate big shifts faster than larger companies. In many ways big companies are responding to the shifts being driven by smaller businesses,” says Andrew Anagnost, the Senior Vice President of Industry Strategy and Marketing at Autodesk.
Anagnost was talking the Dreamforce media contingent after a tour of his company’s San Francisco Gallery where possibilities of today’s design and manufacturing tools are displayed.
Those possibilities are changing business, not just in design but across most industries as the means of financing and building new projects changes along with consumer demand as production methods change.
Anagnost breaks these changes into four major trends – the way things are designed, how they are produced, the nature of demand in a world where things can personalised and the very notion of what a product is.
“What people expect in from products today is very different.”
“Every generation brings something new to design,” says Anagnost. “Imagine the generation that grew up with social media, online gaming, all the things that previous generations did not grow up with.”
This generation will be more collaborative and the idea of working in fluid, unstructured groups where many of the members will never physically meet anywhere.
Cloud computing is the other factor Anagnost sees as changing design as “it puts a supercomputer behind every screen”, which brings to the desktop great power in testing designs. “The designer gets a chance to explore options they couldn’t access before.”
That supercomputer at your fingertips changes all businesses, giving them processing power to carry out complex analytical tasks and modelling in all industries.
Another change to the production process is how people are financing their products. Increasingly platforms like Kickstarter are creating new ways for entrepreneurs to raise funds and also to test the market for a product before investing money and time.
“Before people would have to pitch their ideas to a larger manufacturer, an investor or a VC but now they can pitch it to anyone,” says Anagnost. “The means of financing products is now changing.”
‘Fabless manufacturing’ promises to change manufacturing by reducing the need for massive factories as micr0-factories start to change the economics of making products. These miniaturised robot factories are easily configurable and can be located locally rather than across the country of oceans.
Coupled with 3D printing, again it becomes cheaper and quicker to bring products to market and changes the dynamics of getting goods to market. “When it gets cheaper to deliver a complex product, the field gets levelled and more people can deliver innovative products to market,” says Anagnost.
The other trend within manufacturing is prefabricated assembly. While nothing new, improved design tools and manufacturing methods are making it easier and more efficient to assemble things like buildings onsite, coupled with 3D printing this is going to see massive changes in sectors like the construction industry.
Changing manufacturing and designs creates changed consumer expectations, as design becomes more accessible and personalisations easier customers are increasingly going to want products that meet their specific tastes and needs.
Another aspect to this is generational change, where younger consumers expect personalised products and don’t identify the same way with major brands as their grandparents and parents did.
“We’re going to see a move from rampant consumerism to a more selective consumerism,” says Anagnost.
This means markets are going to be far more volatile as the brand loyalty erodes in the face of a demanding customer. You’re only as good as the last conversation you had with your customer and if they aren’t happy they’ll go elsewhere.
The final factor Anagnost sees is the world of connected devices, increasingly consumers will demand products that have online functionality built in.
Increasingly we’re seeing this with motor cars and in the near future we’ll be seeing devices as diverse as motorcycle helmets and light bulbs being shipped with networked capabilities.
“Everything in your home is going to be connected in some way and people are going to have that expectation they will be,” says Anagnost. “Sensors are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. There’s an assumption of connectivity.”
What Anagnost and Autodesk are flagging is business is changing, barriers we thought were unsurmountable are increasingly falling. For every industry, easily accessible computing and manufacturing power is changing the competitive landscape.
Paul travelled to San Francisco as guest of Salesforce.
The Twentieth Century was defined by abundant and cheap energy while this century will be shaped by our access to massive amounts of data.
How do managers deal with the information age along with the changes bought about by technologies like the Internet of Things, 3D printing, automation and social media?
Management in the Data Age looks at some of the opportunities and risks that face those running businesses. It was originally prepared for a private corporate briefing in June 2015.
Some further background reading on the topic include the following links.
Only one in four Australian businesses are prepared for change says a report released today by telco Optus.
The Future of Business report is based upon interviews with over 500 business leaders across twelve industries and exposes a disconnect between managers’ beliefs of how ready their businesses are to confront change and the reality.
Over four hundred of the respondents felt ‘confident or highly confident’ in their organisation’s readiness for change while the survey found only 23% of these organisations are actually ‘highly ready’.
Organisations that appeared to be highly ready tended to be outward focused with almost all of them citing the desire to meet customer needs as the top trigger for transformation while less change ready businesses are primarily driven to change in order to reduce costs.
“Change ready businesses are not only prepared for, but also anticipate and predict change. Disruption is happening everywhere and businesses of every size and in every industry need to be prepared to deal with rapid technological change and shifting consumer expectations,” says John Paitaridis, Optus Business’ Managing Director.
While the Optus survey doesn’t produce any great surprises it does emphasise how the dynamics of change work, organisations that are outward focused are more likely to identify and understand change than those looking inwards.
Listening to the marketplace and society almost always beats those counting paperclips.
We aren’t prepared for the changes technology is bringing our society warns Vivek Wadhwa in Our future of abundance—and joblessness.
Vivek makes the important point that in the near future many of the jobs we take for granted today will be replaced by machines, this is similar to the warning from Andrew McAfee that a wave of innovation is going to overrun businesses over the next two years.
That innovation is going to cause massive disruption; as Vivek notes we’re going to see the loss of jobs in occupations as diverse as taxi drivers, farmers and – probably the most underestimated of all affected occupations – managers.
Of course this is not first time we’ve seen massive changes to our economy and over the last century farming has gone from one of the most labour intensive industries to one of the most automated.
The automation that changed farming though created millions of new jobs; today’s retail and food industries employ far more people than agriculture did a century ago and most of those jobs were made possible by the same technologies that reduces the need for farm workers.
Vivek acknowledges this in quoting Ray Kurzweil in that jobs are lost only if we look narrowly at the industries and communities affected.
Automation always eliminates more jobs than it creates if you only look at the circumstances narrowly surrounding the automation. That’s what the Luddites saw in the early nineteenth century in the textile industry in England. The new jobs came from increased prosperity and new industries that were not seen.
What we have to acknowledge though is the transition to a new economy won’t be painless and that millions of people will be dislocated and some communities will cease to exist – just as the bulk of the developed world’s populations moved from rural villages to industrial cities during the Twentieth Century.
The truth is we don’t know how that process is going to evolve; then again, neither did our forebears a hundred years ago.
A hundred years ago we were at the beginning of an age of abundant energy and that changed society beyond recognition in the course of the century, at the end of this century of abundance our society will be very different again.