The Promises and Perils of AI

The observation that we started to make in the early part of last decade was, boy, we're going from those companies that are building software to make stakeholders more efficient to building new health systems and new education systems and new neo banks and whatnot. Right. And why was that happening? And the reason that was happening was because by having platforms like Facebook, Amazon web Services, iPhone, we had essentially started to have a way to organize content, community, commerce, now care online. And the act of doing that essentially became these closed loop product development exercises because you could rent all aspects of scale that you needed. You could rent computing, you can rent manufacturing, you can distribution, consumer access. And so it all became about mass personalization. So if in the 20th century we had scaled all of our systems, corporations, banks, power plants, hospitals, we were now starting to go from that mass production and mass scaling to mass personalization. So, you know, managing your diabetes or teaching you in a personalized way on Khan Academy, or giving you your own kind of a financial management service online. So that's the trend that started to happen. Why was that possible? It was because we could have an implicit understanding of the consumer and their needs and have these product development loops. Well, guess what that is. You know, you went from, if you remember big data to machine learning to AI over the last 15 years, you started building this deep intelligence around people. And the thing we started observing as well, those product development tactics were okay when you were building games and you were trying to influence people's engagement in games. When you start doing that around healthcare, somebody's health, you can't to your point earlier, move fast and break things. If you're teaching somebody, you can't just experiment with different features to see will they learn better or not. It's actually, it's somebody's educational journey. You can't play with that. And so how do you do that responsibly? That is what we started thinking about in the context of AI. I think AI is not a thing by itself to go invest in a lot of companies and just like mobile isn't the thing, but using how you use AI and how are you accountable, transparent and explainable in your approaches became a core focus for us because that's what it was going to take to build responsible companies. And, and that is what led us to writing that book and sort of putting our frameworks out there around it.