By Germanas Kavalskis, Chief Communications Officer Yukon Advanced Optics Worldwide

“Trending” is the new buzzword for marketing events, where a message form gives way to content. Perhaps that’s why interesting content in such events is decreasing – not because it doesn’t exist, but because we want to be trendy and talk only about “trends”. 

And so, we often “trend” about future trends, talking a lot about robotisation, automation, optimisations, favoritisations, and nonsensisations. Rare is the event without a mention of blockchain (whatever that is). But the latest fashion of the past few years has been to talk about artificial intelligence (AI). We discuss AI so often, as if we not only knew how it should work but also as if we created it ourselves. 

But how much of the talk at events is reflected in the real world? 

At one business event, a telecom company executive mentioned that AI is already being implemented in their organisation. In reality, it turned out to be just another “chatbot”. But can we call a solution that does not independently construct sentences from a base of 1,000 words, but rather provides answers based on pre-constructed probable answer options, AI? It’s like calling a phone’s answering machine an intelligent robot because it speaks and even asks you to perform certain actions. However, process automation can hardly be considered AI. 

At various marketing events, you can hear company representatives pounding their chests, claiming that they know their customers well, that they pay special attention to them, and that all campaigns are organised according to the customer’s interests, needs, age, education, place of residence etc. In reality, if we do not buy data from Big Data companies, we know much less about our consumers than we try to show. 

Therefore, various upselling, cross-selling, down-selling, or remarketing efforts sound like beautiful words with little real meaning. Not long ago, I bought home appliances from a large online store. The seller was a market veteran, the turnover was significant, and they invested in technology (at least they like to talk about it in the media). It seemed that based on my shopping basket, they should suggest buying additional products that I might need. In the end, for at least half a day, ads were “chasing” me, suggesting buying the same products again. Not something extra, not what I might have been looking for a few days before, but exactly the same shopping basket. A question for whom? To keep it for future generations? 

I doubt that AI would suggest such an algorithm because it would already know that I purchased the items, and there’s no need to suggest buying the same shopping basket again after a few days. Especially if that basket is usable for several years. AI would try to predict my possible needs and would suggest other products in a similar category. And it would remind me about the purchase after several years because it would remember what I bought and, after a certain time, it would try to offer something new. But who today can boast about having and applying such technology? 

From time to time, I used to receive targeted offers for job proposals, but in recent years, I have started to receive all sorts of offers that are not related to my expertise. It was this kind of lightweight spam that caught my attention. And then there was the note that the offers were based on my experience and knowledge in the field. 

So recently, I received an offer to work as a German language translator. I pondered for a long time where in my resume the robot detected hints of the German language. I can only guess that such a thought occurred to him while trying to interpret the meaning of my name. So, if Germanas, then he must be German. 

In summary, “trending” is cool and sounds nice – at least in presentations, and it also looks nice. However, I would like to see “trending” also as a perceived boundary between the (not-so)distant future and the realities of today. Yes, the talk about AI is interesting, but it should not only be about the benefits it will one day bring but also show the challenges and difficulties faced when implementing such projects now, which often become the most interesting topics at events.