Natural Language Interface and Generative AI - Conversational Platforms with CONSUMER at the CENTER
Dynamic Enterprises , Event Driven Platforms architecture , Fuzzy Non Binary transaction States , Conversational & Natural Language Interface , Generative AI - Why have we been building Binary query / search driven static systems??
Now is the time to build a CONSUMER-CENTRIC digital experience - Beginning of 5th Generation Digital Experience & conversational platform Decade. Lets realise Captain Spock for REAL.
The evolution of NLP / NLU / NLI systems , Large language models built on Billions of parameters and massive data sets, RNN to CNN to Transformers evolution of neural-nets and Generative AI have resulted in, the birth of new age Consumer Facing Conversational Platforms which have moved on from Web and a cleverly adapted but still a binary application in "Mobile apps" to a real world Fuzzy state interaction engine.
For a long time since the advent of Internet we have dabbled in Binary state systems with a static Database representation of enterprises and a very Sequential access to functionality be it web , mobile or any other form - Menus were replaced with search but the queries were really running on exact or approximate matches. While real world enterprises and businesses have always been fluid , dynamic and dealing with fuzzy states and transactions.
These were far from Natural human interface or real world business lifecycle. Voice based interaction made an appearance but with out "LLM and AI" the applications were still responding to a query with a If-Else response after matching parameters - Exact or approx - a match is a match- not smart not contextual and not real time and not personalised. They were merely filtering data adding in some context to build a condition for the query.
But Generative AI & Conversational platform have truly launched us into the 5th generation of Digital experience (after client-server , web , apps , search) which speaks in natural language , learns as it speaks and responds as it learns in Natural language.
Generative AI has seen several prognosis from several experts & industry leaders from Job killing innovation to a dangerous machine & robot run world to end of Human race as we see it to even being dangerous than a nuclear arsenal. These may or may not be true but LLM and Generative AI truly presents an opportunity to build next gen digital experience.
We now have a real opportunity to build dynamic , event driven Digital experience where customers don't have to have a search or menu driven interaction with the digital world. They can talk , converse , ideate , share , decide and finally fulfil.
This is a great opportunity to build domain specific conversational digital experience across several industries - Retail , Travel , Media , Banking , Leisure , Health care both Payer and Provider , Industrial , smart homes and cities and many more.
This is re-imagining digital experience not in terms of User experience but in terms of conversational paradigms that has never before been attempted. This means don't design data models , don't design rows and columns and entities , don't have a database , design events and scenarios (and not static products) and provide the system access to smart domain contextual models and system will respond. These models can replace the whole backend.
Technology transformation and Digital native experience is just about getting started. This decade will be re-imagining enterprises in terms of events and not worrying about data representation but thinking about domain rich models and letting the platform evolve learn and respond to customer - hyper personalised , revenue maximising highly satisfying customer experience.
This has been made possible with some amazing GPU advances from the likes of NVIDIA & now Google , emergence of transformers and other forms of neural-nets , 5G and other forms of connectivity and emergence of technologies like Web 3.0 , Dapps , Blockchain and many more (wait for Quantum Compute to create its impact).
Bring all these together and with some amazing compute at our disposal consumer experience is going to be transformed. We have now moved from "Human in the Loop" Paradigm to "Machine in the Loop" Paradigm. We need to think of platforms that can effectively use this "Machine in the Loop" and stop treating machines as Dumb Data managers used to save and retrieve data.
Lets start thinking of product and platforms as “Natural Language Conversation First” engines. Finally “Consumer” is at the center of the Digital experience - Not designers , Not Engineers , Not Architects , Not Product owners - CONSUMERS.
Welcome to 5th Generation of Digital Experience & Emergence of Conversational Platforms - Starting of the next decade. While we wait for Robots to turn up lets get busy Dreaming and Building next generation Conversational Platforms.
What do you think Engineers & Designers , are we ready to re-imagine True conversational platforms yet??