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Beyond Gen AI: Exploring the rise of interactive AI and AI companions

Alex Bulat
Oct 3, 2023

Time for some future tech insight… As everyone is stuck in the Gen AI bubble, we are already looking beyond! Good question: What is beyond Gen AI?

“What’s next is #interactiveAI: bots that can carry out tasks you set for them by calling on other software and other people to get stuff done,” said #DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman in a recent article by MIT Technology Review.

I tend to agree! Does this mean we will have Jarvis in the pocket (for those that don’t know should watch ironman the movie)?

Maybe, let’s look at some of the latest facts. There has been a lot of chatter about these AI companions and some very clear and early implementations. We have seen Microsoft’s move with CoPilot just last week, embedding it almost in all products they have, we have seen Google assistant aided by Bard, we have seen the latest partnership with AWS and Anthropic (which I wrote about this morning) which will probably be used to build the next generation of Alexa, and maybe the most obvious is the recent roll-out of new voice and image capabilities in #ChatGPT by openAI. Coding platforms and enterprise application like Salesforce and SAP are moving in the same direction, with SAP just announcing their own Generative AI assistant named ‘Joule’.

Looking beyond means looking at the current set of step that are being taken by the ecosystem, and the ecosystem has spoken! Interactive AI it is, is this the term we will coin or will it be Bot to Bot as my dear colleague Dr. Cara Antoine calls it, or machine to machine to human, or just as I like to call it, #AICompanions. I hope this brings some clarity to the future thinking we do, and to the new idea of interactive AI.

And for those that think that this is just a hype, I urge them to reconsider, because it is already embedded into the core of your day-to-day applications and all your enterprise applications as well, and the beauty is you don’t need a project manager to activate it and use it, it is already here! For the outsiders it seems sudden, but It has been a long journey, a long time in the making, over the last decades with all the chatbots and smart assistants we had.

Excited to see where this race and wave will take us!

Stay curious!

Meet the author

Alex Bulat

Group Technology Director
Alex is Group Technology Director, focused on helping our customers transform and adopt to the new digital age, and integrate new and disruptive innovations into their business. He is focused on driving the expansion and delivery of digital transformation and helping companies to get a grasp on future technologies like IoT, AI, Big data and Blockchain. He also focuses on how new innovations, disruptive technologies, and new platforms like Uber, impact the current businesses.