At CES this year, AI innovations and activations covered the show floors. AI isn’t new – brands and consumers have been talking about it for years. What makes this year’s activations unique is that they convey exciting new implementations for this technological tool to catapult industry innovations and perpetuate greater trust in the technology in the coming years.
Smart Eye showcased Polestar’s driver monitoring system (DMS) on the show floor at CES this year. The premium driving cameras operate using Smart Eye software to track the driver’s movements, issue warnings triggered inside and outside of the vehicle, and can activate an emergency stop function if necessary. Safety was a top theme for the activation: “This technology addresses some of the main reasons behind fatal accidents and can help save lives by prompting the driver to refocus attention on the road – and can initiate preventive action when they don’t, or can’t,” Thomas Ingenlath, Polestar CEO stated at CES.
VML’s Creative Data Group Global Lead, Jason Carmel, led a panel at CES that explored trends in AI with industry experts weighing in on the promise, dangers, and potential of the evolving technology as a tool in their respective fields. “It’s never been more clear to me that AI has shifted from a parlor trick used only by technologists into a tool used across industries to make us safer, healthier and more productive,” he tells VML Intelligence.
Rana el Kaliouby, Deputy CEO at Smart Eye, spoke on the panel about how diversity and inclusion are important and impossible to ignore when creating and developing AI technology. Smart Eye focuses on improving and expanding data collection for machine-based learning, and aims to prevent and reduce AI bias to ensure the ethical development of these algorithms. During her panel, el Kaliouby emphasized that brand and consumer trust in AI is essential for the success of future innovations.
“AI is no longer science fiction. It is impacting food production and sustainability on a massive scale globally,” Carmel says, reflecting on his panel discussion with John Deere President of Agriculture and Turf Cory Reed. “[The company] put vision AI in their autonomous sprayers to identify weeds among crops correctly while driving 20 miles per hour. Rather than spraying an entire field with weed killer, it can spray those individual plants and leave the rest alone.”
Even the medical field is embracing AI innovation for the future. Inspired by DALL-E’s art generators, scientists are formulating blueprints for cancer and disease fighting proteins to duplicate with AI technology. David Baker, the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, told The New York Times that with the speed and accuracy of AI technology, “we can design these proteins much faster, and with much higher success rates, and create much more sophisticated molecules that can help solve these problems.”
OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI lab startup that created the ChatGPT service, is expected to be valued at $29 billion this year, more than double its worth in 2021. The bot regurgitates a sophisticated response to questions with clear, concise language, and the brand anticipates it will change the way consumers search, edit photos and text, and communicate with digital devices. Microsoft reportedly plans on investing $10 billion in the company, a bet on how the startup tech will advance web searches in the future.
One AI-powered robot-turned-lawyer by DoNotPay formulates cognitive arguments and responses for defendants in court. The bot will reportedly help one defendant fight a traffic ticket in court in February. Another from the same company can help consumers to negotiate their bills in real time.
As AI tools improve and evolve, brands, developers and consumers are learning how to co-create alongside it in order to leverage the technology to its fullest potential. “AI is helping to diagnose and treat disease, make financial investments, and operate our cars, delivery fleets, and farm equipment” Carmel says. “We are still early on in the application of AI, but it’s obvious that there are innovative applications to be made in literally every sector and industry.”
