Prepare For A Future Of Converging Technologies And AI (Guest: Bernard Marr)

Andreas Welsch: 0:21

Today, we'll talk about how you can seize the opportunity in your business when multiple technologies start converging and who better to talk about it than someone who's an expert at doing just that and thinking about what the future holds. Bernard Marr. Hey Bernard. Thank you so much for joining.

Bernard Marr: 0:37

Hi Andreas. It's lovely to have you with me today and I'm super excited about joining your livestream today.

Andreas Welsch: 0:44

Wonderful. Hey, why don't you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, who you are and what you do?

Bernard Marr: 0:49

Okay. I'm Bernard Marr. I am doing a number of things. I do help companies understand future trends and how to get ready for them. And I work with boards of companies across pretty much any industry helping them to really understand what does AI mean? What are some of the biggest challenges, biggest trends that we're seeing today and how they will influence the industry, and how they can strategically prepare for this? I also write. I've written 23 books. My latest one is called generative AI in practice which looks at over a hundred use cases of how organizations can actually use generative AI and what it means for businesses and, different industries. And then I, do a lot of keynote speaking and community building. I try to engage as many people as I can on LinkedIn. We have a large community and large newsletters on the future of tech and business.

Andreas Welsch: 1:49

Like I said, I'm really excited you're making time to be with us today. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Bernard, what'd you say? Should we play a little game to kick things off?

Bernard Marr: 1:58

Why not?

Andreas Welsch: 1:59

All right, so let's see. This one is called In Your Own Words. When the wheels starts spinning, you'll see a sentence and when they stop, I'd like you to answer with the first thing that comes to mind and why, in your own words, to make it a little more interesting, you only have 60 seconds for your answer. If AI were fruit, what would it be? 60 seconds on the clock.

Bernard Marr: 2:25

Very good question. It would probably be, I'm just trying to think of a really versatile fruit that you can use for lots of different things. Let's say banana, because you can use a banana for lots of different things, and it has huge benefits across the world. It can help feed the world. I think there are probably better fruit, but that is the one that comes to mind in 60 seconds.

Andreas Welsch: 2:55

Awesome. Thank you so much. And it's shipped green. But by the time you use it it's probably ripe.

Bernard Marr: 3:02

Exactly.

Andreas Welsch: 3:03

We've, obviously been talking so much about generative AI in the industry. And I feel a lot of the conversations and focus has really been on just one modality. It's either text or image generation or video generation or synthetic audio. But I'm wondering, from what you're seeing when you're talking to all these people from taking a look through the looking glass, if you will, what's the next wave of gen AI driven innovation that, we'll see beyond those first low hanging fruit?

Bernard Marr: 3:38

Yeah, so what I am seeing is that we will see much more multimodal applications of generative AI. So for me, it's really important to understand that AI is not just chatbots. And it's not just image creation. There's so much more because AI, especially generative AI, can generate computer code. It can generate voice and music and images and entire scenes. And this will transform pretty much any creative process, pretty much any industry, and pretty much any organization. And the point I'm making is that this transformation will be so big that if you don't think of your organization as an AI enabled company, you will simply, slowly be overtaken by those who do. And the same probably applies for your job. AIs won't take your jobs, but people who can use AI and especially generative AI more efficiently and effectively than you can, they will. So it's about seeing yourself as an AI enabled person in your job and seeing your business as an AI enabled business. And the, these tools will become much more powerful when we bring all of these different modalities together. So for me, a really good example is where you, in a video game design, for example, in the past video game designers created these in a multiplayer game, for example, they created these different characters that you encounter in a video game, and they have to basically script the conversations that you can have with those players in the future. Video games can be completely transformed where the AI can generate completely new worlds for you, including those characters where those dialogues that you can have are AI generated, where the music that plays in the background is AI generated. And so I was at CES in Las Vegas this year, and I was impressed by organizations like Mercedes, who are now experimenting with the ability of generating music in your car that is being based on where you're driving and how you're driving. So it will sense your mood, it will sense the environment, and then automatically use generative AI to then compose the right music for you. So it will transform so many aspects of our lives that I'm super excited with all of these modalities coming together into one. And the other thing I'm excited about is about the fact that AI is just one of a number of hugely transformative technologies that, that we are we are seeing today. So if we wind the clock back a year and a half, it was all about the metaverse and extended reality. And I feel that there's a huge possibility here of generative AI to enable this immersive world because if you are a company thinking I would like a destination somewhere in an online world where I have more than just a flat screen and I have an immersive experience for my customers where they can try on things and try out things. And this was super difficult in the past because you basically needed to attract someone from game design to help you develop those worlds. And now I can type a few sentences into a chatbot and say, please create me a digital headquarter for my metaverse store. And it can do this for you and you can then co create this and play around with what you want until you're happy with it. So it will democratize so many different aspects of our lives, whether it is making music, whether it is writing, whether it is designing digital worlds, or even designing the real world objects. I was just recently talking to an architect firm about what this might mean for them in the future. And again, I can see a world where you have an app that allows you to design anything. And this app has all the building intelligence built in. So it has all the building regulations and all the local laws that you might have to comply with because if I designed my own house, I would come up with something crazy. Maybe that would never be allowed. So here you can put some of the constraints on in the app and say, okay, if you want to build a new house somewhere in California, in this place, this is what it needs to look like. And then you can start building it. And then you put your VR headset on and you can walk around it and experience it. And the generative AI will create it for you and create those virtual environments until you're happy. And all of this for me is super exciting. And this, we could talk about pretty much any industry now and how this merging of these technologies will enable this. And I believe just the extended reality is my, I don't really like the word metaverse. Extended reality is my favorite word when it comes to these immersive digital 3D worlds that we will see more of in the future. That could trigger its own industrial revolution. AI, traditional AI, could trigger its other industrial revolution. Then we have blockchain technology that again is transforming lots of different sectors. We have new technologies like quantum computing that will accelerate what we can do with AI. And we have huge innovations in material science and nanotechnology, huge advances in gene editing, for example, and AI is enabling us to do all of this so much better and so much faster. If you think about developing a new drug, for example. First, you need to find out some of the gene markers that identify what causes a certain disease. And then you need to find out, find a new medicine that might help you target those causes of this disease or even the genes itself, and that was super complicated in the past, still is, but AI can make this so much faster through simulations. Just one little thing like the protein folding project that Google has done that suddenly enabled us to see the shapes of proteins of over 200,000 proteins, that previously would have taken us billions of dollars and it took us five years and a million dollars to just to figure out the shape of one protein. And this technology, this new insight that AI has given us enabled companies to come up with a new coronavirus vaccines because we could identify those proteins and target them. So it will transform pretty much every aspect of our lives and all of these technologies merging with each other. Interacting with each other, quantum computing, making AI faster, AI making digital worlds easier to build, and so on. We create this new environment of hyper innovation, and I believe a new industrial revolution at a scale that we've never seen before.

Andreas Welsch: 11:23

That's awesome. Thank you for, sharing that, right? I feel where we're so caught up in the here and now and whatever, drafting product descriptions and blog posts and whatnot, that those, more future looking things are maybe not as apparent to us. So hearing you talk about those and what it has already enabled, like the protein project that you mentioned, I think, right? The value of that is clearly visible. The other aspect that you talked about when it comes to the extended reality that I find really interesting is, yes, you want, and you need to have a presence in these immersive worlds, but we still live in a physical world, meaning, if I try something on in that extended reality, I still want to wear it as a real person. So that connect between that real online immersive experience and the physical world, getting that package delivered, managing payments, getting recommendations, these kinds of things, that's super fascinating to me.

Bernard Marr: 12:21

Yeah. And this is actually a really good example that I talk about in my book that currently, online shopping, especially if you want to buy clothes, is really limited because you can go to a store, you can see different clothes, they might recommend stuff to you. But what you as a consumer want to see is, okay, how does the shirt look with these trousers and those shoes? And currently I can't do that. Even better, do they, will they actually fit me? So that's a huge problem with massive return rates and for online shopping, because people just buy three different sizes and hope that one of them fits. And then they return the other two that didn't. So with AI, this will make it so much better, especially generative AI. So you in the future will have a scan of yourself. You can use your phone to scan your body and then the AI will know what. The cut of the actual garment is you can then combine those different garments and see what they will look like on you. So you can try them on virtually on your actual virtual body that represents you. You can combine outfits and then you can put yourself in an, in a different environment. So if you say, I want to buy a suit for a cocktail party or dress for a summer party somewhere, you can then ask the AI, okay, now put me in this cocktail environment. Put me into a summer party. And you can then fly around yourself a few times and check yourself out and say, do I look like I want to look? And, that will again, accelerate the whole and improve this whole online buying experience. And make it potentially even better than what we can do in a store now, because in a store you can see yourself in the dressing room. Yes, you can try them on, but hopefully with gen AI and extended reality combining, we will be able to do this even better in the digital world.

Andreas Welsch: 14:13

I'm always wondering with these scenarios what are the haptics? What's the feedback, right? That we're used to, or that maybe we want to see. I was talking about a virtual reality to a group of students that I teach on management information systems the other week. Ikea has this amazing app where you can take pieces of furniture and show what they look like in your room and you can make them larger and smaller and turn them and everything. And it was interesting because even that group of 18, 20 year old said yeah, I would still want to see what does the fabric look like if I sit on it? Is it comfortable? So I'm always wondering how are we able to bridge that or how big of a factor is that? We've talked about retail, we've talked about immersive worlds, fashion as one of the examples, life science, healthcare. But what are some other opportunities that you see for business leaders in more traditional industries? What can they do? What can they prepare for when all of these technologies converge?

Bernard Marr: 15:22

Yeah, I think really important is for businesses to take a step back. And what I see a lot of is this FOMO effect, this fear of missing out, that organizations say, okay, everyone is now thinking about the metaverse. Everyone's now thinking about generative AI. Everyone is now thinking about blockchain technology and we better do something with this. So instead of doing that, step back and look at your own strategy. So the first step is to really understand the capabilities of these technologies. And this is where I see my position in the world. I help organizations demystify some of these technologies, explain them in a really easily understandable way, and understand the practical applications of these. And then, actually, take a step even further. Once you've understood those technologies, instead of starting with your current strategy, take a second and say, is our strategy actually still relevant? Because if you think about, pretty much any industry, if you are an entertainment company that makes news, for example, then this will have real implications for you in the future. Because we might have news that is completely personalized for you, where I sometimes get annoyed. Okay. My, my app that I'm using for my news understands a little bit about my interests, but every article I read, it's not personalized to me. So it might explain AI and I understand AI already. I want to know the deeper implications of it. And in the future, news will hopefully be able to do that. It will understand what you already know, will give you much more relevant content, maybe even in a format that you prefer. So if you say, I like to listen to my news, I want to watch them, I want to read them. It can then deliver this in whatever format you like. And even if you say, okay, I want my news to be rapped to you. I recently saw a really cool, my kids showed me this guy on TikTok that basically is a raps to teach people math. And so I thought this is quite cool. So if you like rap music and this is the way you want to learn stuff, then maybe this is what you want. And if you want your favorite rapper to rap the news to you, maybe even in VR, then we can do that in the future. And this obviously has real implications in terms of what the strategy of a media company will be in the future and how they produce content. But in the same way, it will transform super traditional industries like fishing. This is something, an example I talk about when I talk to execs. Fishing is one of the oldest industries in the world. And if let's say you're a super cool example, a fish farm in Norway wanted to use AI to help them solve two problems. One is that the fish all grow at the same size, and this naturally doesn't happen because when you have these fish in the pens in the sea, you normally dump some food in it and the fish fight for the food and the stronger ones get more food and the weaker ones get less food and that therefore they grow to different sizes. And the other problem is diseases. So if you get sea lice, for example, they can then spread very quickly throughout the whole pen, unless you figure you find the problem. The fish that is infected and take them out. And this was really tricky. So what they've installed is a face recognition system for salmon. So they use 5G to connect the sea pans to the shore. They now have a feeding system that recognizes salmon based on the spots on their face. They can uniquely identify each salmon and they will only issue feeding pellet a day for the salmon that hasn't eaten yet. So they now have solved this problem. Every fish now grows at the same rate, at rate to the same size. And they have high definition cameras that use machine vision to identify sea lice. And because they swim around little circles, they've created this little system where fish has to, there's a little, narrow bit, and if they've detected sea lice on any of the fish, they can take them off into a different chamber and take them out. So for me, this is just so cool. But even if you're not a fish farmer, a fishing company, and you say, okay, what do I now need to plan for the future. So if you're a fish farm, a fishing company today, you need to have people on board that understand how to use data because we can now use satellite data and other data to predict a really safe journey. They can predict where the fish will be. When we get to the fishing grounds, they use technology like sonar to measure the density of the soul of the, before they release any hooks or nets, but then. Slightly thinking ahead, we will have more automation and we have more self driving ships. And the big limitation in fishing boats is that I need to have housing for people. I need to have provisions for people and they need to come back every now and then to see their family. In the future, we don't need to do this. We will have completely autonomous fishing boats. So if you plan for the future, this is where you want to go at the same time. If you plan even further ahead. There's already a company, a restaurant in Tokyo that will do 3D printing of sushi, and you can even submit your genetic fingerprint to them, and they will then customize the sushi with the right ingredients and nutrients for you that are right for your body. So I can see a world where we won't need to have fishing boats going out into the sea and dredge the ocean floor and destroy habitats and destroy our oceans when we can do all of this synthetically. So you can 3D print tuna in the same way we can already produce cultured meats. Genetically, they are identical. We just have to figure out how to make them nicely. And, so in the future, my hope is that we won't have fishing boats and we will have amazing fish, amazing meat, generated in our home, 3D printers personalized to us. So we could go pretty much through any industry in the world and think about this. But with businesses need to do is figure out other implications for their own strategy and then look at their own products and services and say, what does this now mean for us? My services, how can I make them smarter, more intelligent using AI? And then I need to look at my own operations and think, how can I automate things? How can I augment things to make them better and more efficient? And if you do those two things, you will figure out how to use these technologies and make a real difference in your organization.

Andreas Welsch: 22:42

Thank you so much for sharing. Facial recognition for salmons. I haven't thought of that yet. Let's hope it's GDPR compliant.

Bernard Marr: 22:50

Yes.

Andreas Welsch: 22:52

Now you touched on a number of great points here and especially also what do leaders need to be aware of if they want to succeed in the future? What would be some additional advice there, right? Certainly look at your strategy, but also look at where your future strategy is going to be. What are some other aspects that you're seeing that you can share maybe in a minute or two here before we get close to the end of the show?

Bernard Marr: 23:16

Yes, so really important to understand that very often is the hurdle is not technology. The hurdle is very often organizational culture is understanding is everything related to people and we talk about AI and these huge transformations that might bring is sometimes instills fear in people. So we need to engage everyone. We have to have these open and transparent conversations in our businesses and for business leaders, this is really, after they've understood this, looked at their strategy, they need to create a culture that is open to all of this, where people are encouraged to experiment with these technologies, use them, where we have open conversations, and also opportunities to learn, because if we don't do that, people will be left behind, your organization will be left behind. So we need to figure out what will humans be doing in the future, and how will they share their knowledge, their workplace with intelligent machines. And my hope is that all of this will make our workplaces more human and we can actually bring what makes us truly humans. Things like our emotional intelligence, our creativity and creative problem solving, our critical thinking, all of these amazing skills of interpersonal communication, all the skills and things that really truly make us human. We will bring more of these to the table and can outsource the things like data analysis and, automate some of the things that AI can do really well. And so for business leaders, it's important to engage people in this conversation and then give everyone in the organization, the opportunity to learn and train and retrain to some extent to be ready for this revolution.

Andreas Welsch: 25:11

I can say I feel very validated in what I've seen firsthand as well by what you've just shared, right? It's really a people topic. And that's, at least for me, one of the key takeaways also when I talk to, leaders, really make sure. Like you said, it's about people, it's about culture, it's about enablement, it's about also transparent and sincere communication where things are going and helping everybody understand the potential is, but also what their individual role is. Now, we're getting close to the end of the show, Bernard and I was wondering if you can summarize the three key takeaways for our audience today.

Bernard Marr: 25:48

Yeah. So key takeaway, sometimes we talk about AI as this hugely hyped up tool. I think in some cases it is definitely overhyped, but in many cases it's not hyped enough. I think, especially when we think about how transformative it will be when we, when it interacts with all these other technologies to create this hyper innovation cycle that we will see. Another key point for me is that this is much less about technology and much more about humans. So engaging people, making it human centric, helping humans to be more human by using this technology and not less. We're not competing with them. They are augmenting what we do and they will give us superpowers. And then probably another point that I haven't actually talked about when you when you asked me the last question. Though actually I haven't mentioned ethics and using this in a way that complies with laws and where we look at potential biases and how these, and some of the risks that come with these technologies. So looking, applying it well, applying it in a way that is transparent, that complies with the regulation, I think is really important. And approaching it in an ethical manner, I think is, another really important top tip.

Andreas Welsch: 27:16

Thank you for summarizing that. I think those are really three key points that we all need to be aware of as we're looking at introducing AI in business. And to your point earlier, right? Fighting the FOMO a little bit too. So really appreciate you sharing all of that. So like I said, we're coming close to the end of the show. Thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your experience with us. It was a really, valuable session looking further into the future of what's possible. Thank you, Bernard. Thank you very much, Andreas.