Is the AI revolution an open door for ‘small tech’?

Rebecca Sykes, associate partner, The Brandtech Group

While tech can be a winner-takes-all sector, no one should feel victorious if the AI we champion does not reflect the society we deserve to live in. Generative AI has recently amazed many with its apparent magic, but we must not let the thrill of exploring its capabilities distract us from recognizing its biases.

Let's champion the tech making the excitement around generative AI an inflection point that empowers, not marginalizes. Examples? MissJourney’s generative AI alternative creates artwork exclusively of women, celebrating female professionals – if you ask the more mainstream platforms to visualize a professional, less than 20 percent of the results are women.

Hugging Face’s open-source DiffusionBiasExplorer, meanwhile, lets users combine descriptive terms and see first-hand how AI models map them to racial and gender stereotypes.

It’s important that the ‘big tech AI race’ that promises to propel society into the future doesn’t simply deliver the same things as in the past. Smaller tech companies will have a huge role to play in preventing that.

Justin Wallace, senior creative technologist, Momentum Worldwide

Web3 offers a new level of ownership – ownership of data, identity, digital assets and privacy. But there’s a huge problem. The barrier to entry right now is too high for most people to take advantage of those benefits.

Before service entities like Google ruled the web, it was companies like AOL that held the crown. Companies that provided access were synonymous with how the internet was changing our lives. Web3 is going to be the same. Meta is scrambling to be that usher. People don’t want a road paved by a company. People want to chart that course collaboratively. People want authenticity over anything. Open access to a new and thriving community will bring more innovation than any tech company past its darling days.

Oliver Budgen, chief executive officer, Bud Comms

Small tech’s recent wins seem to have catalyzed an acceleration in big tech’s rollout of competing AI solutions. Big tech may also end up helping to propel small tech forward. The spate of layoffs at Google, Meta and Amazon will likely create a wave of newly unemployed engineers and leaders who have the vision, skills and motive to go on to create their own disruptive technologies, with the speed and agility advantages of a startup.

ChatGPT has deservedly snatched the headlines as the case study of a relatively lean company creating disproportionately world-changing innovation, but others are having just as much impact.

MidJourney is a great example of an AI-powered image generation technology that will transform the creative industry and probably deserves as much attention as ChatGPT. By now it’s likely you’ve already seen ad creative made by a computer without realizing it. This is going to have significant ethical implications for the industry at large.

Paige Power, client partner, Kepler EMEA

With so much swirling around the metaverse, web3 and AI, it’s only natural for more brands to be taking a stance on decentralizing away from tech giants. While there’s so much temptation to be the first pushing decentralization, it’s important to not enter too soon or do it for the sake of being able to say you are doing it.

Web3, the metaverse and AI are about people having more ownership and control over the digital landscape. As businesses, creating real purpose behind their approach will be what separates those who really make an impact in entry, versus those who disrupt progress. We have to value history, like when traditional media channels were the dominant force. Businesses that successfully moved into the digital space didn’t simply switch to digital for the sake of it.

Continuing to be a consumer first means leveraging emerging businesses, but also understanding that the tech giants will also have a place in the ecosystem.

John Campbell, managing director, Rabbit & Pork (part of the Tipi Group)

Speech recognition and speech synthesis are two of the core technologies behind Siri, Alexa, AI, and captions on YouTube.

These technologies allow Alexa to understand your speech, and they can create the voices used for automated messages found in call centers. As you would expect, Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure are all major players in this market. However, these providers tend to cater to the masses in terms of the speech they recognize and the voices they generate. This has led to specialist companies launching for untapped niches.

Niche providers include SoapBox Labs specializing in recognition for children’s voices; Speechmatics has coverage of 48 languages and can deploy on-premises, something the larger providers don’t currently offer. Speechly can perform moderation which identifies profanity and hate speech. Well Said Labs produces synthetic voices, in real-time, which are more lifelike than larger providers, and in a wider range of accents.

Alistair Robertson, creative partner, Nucco

AI will revolutionize customer experience by driving personalization and engagement through the roof.

Just look at Chat.D-ID, the ‘almost human’ personalized assistant. Or what Duolingo is planning with AI tutoring.

It won’t be long until many of our interactions with brands (especially DTC and retail) use this type of personalized functionality.

Take your weekly click-and-collect grocery order: instead of navigating the polished but faceless e-commerce site, you just speak to an AI assistant who can tell you when there’s an appointment, notes down your order, can offer you suggestions based on what you bought last week and what you might be missing and wishes you a cheery goodbye. All at your own convenience.

Henry Daubrez, chief exec and chief creative officer, Dogstudio/Dept:

There are a few AI tools that are less visible but can help with defining your own models without hardly any technical knowledge. This can mean avoiding legal issues, but also building your own design style.

Leonardo AI is already an interesting contender, with a vertical solution allowing you to go through the different steps of a project. AI tools can generate an entirely new line of products by reducing coding time from weeks to hours, and costs from thousands to hundreds. When combined, these elements create a whole new creator economy.

Sam Drew, head of innovation, 2Heads

A decentralized web promises to reclaim all your personal data in user-controlled data ‘pods’, shareable to businesses on our terms. This presents a blistering opportunity to unlock personal metrics never before ventured, on the basis that users, presently, are not prepared to offer such data to unknown marketing data corporations, feeling that their data is completely uncontrolled.

Imagine a world where you are empowered to govern content delivered to you, based on your current cognitive state; your reality augmented with a virtual layer that automatically transforms based on neuro-mapping achieved by, say, EEG sensors installed on your wearable technology, such as augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) glasses.

Keep a keen eye on emerging AR innovators, such as Nreal and Xiaomi, with Google and Apple clearly in the pipeline to release flagship AR technology. To stay ahead of the curve, we must be fully prepared for a revolution in the way we’re marketed to and how our personal data is managed.

For more hot takes and cold hard looks at the emerging tech landscape, check out The Drum’s deep dive on AI to web3.