The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a new era of precision, personalisation and automation. It is evidently reshaping the digital media and marketing landscape, making it more efficient and impactful than ever before.
Shubhranshu Singh, chief marketing officer, CVBU, Tata Motors is a true believer in the power of AI. He feels that we all are already living in the world of AI and it will only swell in the future.
“Most people have become conversant with AI after November 2022, when they started using ChatGPT - because humans greatly value conversational ability. They feel that anything that exhibits signs of language, is superior. Therefore, AI has acquired great engagement value – it’s like a toy and everybody has discovered it for the first time.”
Considering that Meta, has recently become universally available via WhatsApp, Singh mentions that people have begun to access it, ask questions, task it to imagine something, and when it pops up – people are truly intrigued.
He explains how we are already living in a world which is deeply filtered algorithmically, which is all forms of AI – narrow, broad to large scale AI. “GPT – the term itself stands for general purpose technology – it is as widespread as the arrival of the steam engine, or electricity of the internet. So, it is fundamentally transforming the meaning each part has to the sum of parts.”
AI: About Change & Evolution
Singh underlines that persistence hunting has been a human trait since time immemorial, and has helped the human species evolve. “But we are not able to chase ‘change’. Change or the computation of outcomes, is something that the human species still does not understand.”
He cited the instance that after a tree dies, it needs to be cut/chopped to use its timber. However, bamboo never dies – it auto-replenishes itself within a span of two or three days which happens due to a distributed root system.
“Artificial general intelligence is present across anything and everything that you do today, and this is the best version of AI ever. OpenAI amassed 100 million users within 60 days – this is the fastest aggregation of consumer interest ever in the field of technology. Much before this, the internet began in the 1960s, with the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) – after which we came to the desktop era and then the smartphones came in – so it has taken almost 50-60 years,” Singh furthers.
The evolution put forth through AI in the last two to three years has been so quick and disruptive, that the transformation set in motion by it has surpassed the one which had been put forth by the printing press (which is almost 600 years old) and other kind of previous technological innovations too, he adds.
He also points out that the more you consume AI, the more it consumes you. “And AI is not new, it has been around for a long time. The one common denominator – everything in our life that is changing today, is because of the universal presence of the cellular phone. The pace of algorithmic interactions and what is happening on one’s mobile phone screen is defining your life.
Today’s ordinary electric iron, the most basic cellular phone, or even a washing machine has more computing power today than NASA had in 1969 when they sent a man to the moon. The number of floppy disks it used to take to transfer data earlier, cannot be even thought of – that’s what it was like earlier. So, the quantum leap that the mobile phone has taken today as compared to what it was even five years ago, is unimaginable.”
Principles Of AI
AI is considered a software by most, which is not the case, he reiterates. For him, it is a distributed, diffused neural network. “Calculators give a summation of two numbers – the outcome of which is the same, no matter how many times the same data is entered. Contrarily, entering the same questions repeatedly on ChatGPT or OpenAI throws up varied responses each time – that is because it is learning as it goes along. This dynamic and inherent characteristic of AI of the lack of a predictable, stable and assured outcome is, however, its fragility and its power too. It is not following a protocol or a set pattern because everything manmade is bound and finite – AI is teaching itself,” he indicates.
Singh concludes by saying that even though the interfaces might differ, the basic principles of AI remain the same. “Use the trick of asking one about the other - Perplexity about Google, and Google about Perplexity – to know their capabilities and efficiencies.”
*Singh was present at the BW Festival of Marketing 2024
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