There are many use cases emerging with artificial intelligence and genAI. But it’s difficult to look past the early use cases – customer personalization, data sorting, productivity tools, and so on — to understand what may be on the not-so-distant horizon.
Canvassing across the industry, people are exploring what some of these unanticipated innovations may look like.
“The next era of AI Innovation will not be about hyper-productivity or personalization,” said Ben James, founder of 404, Bittensor Subnet 17. “It will be about autonomous creativity.”
Ultimately, “we can see a reality where AI does not just generate content but serve as architects of entire worlds that opera, think, evolve and respond as dynamically to both human cues and AI-driven inputs,” said James. “Today, AI technology an easily generate text, an entire piece of art, a song or a 3D rendering. But the real shift and undeniable breakthrough will come when AI is fully capable of designing persistent digital spaces that grow and thrive organically, following their own rules of governance, aesthetic and even cultural and operational dynamics.”
This raises questions, James continued. “Could AI develop its own creative movements that rival the revolutions of the past? Will virtual worlds become intertwined and as culturally significant as ours? What happens when AI becomes the influence and humans look to this technology for inspiration rather than the other way around?”
We are on the verge of a shift “where AI no longer serves as a handyman tool which follows passive cues,” he said. “Soon, we will see humans and AI collaborate as active teammates in the creative process – redefining what we know about imagination, creativity and artistic collaboration. The future of AI is not just about what it can create, but how it begins to define its own creative identity.”
AI may even help facilitate and even predict human communication in new ways, via “interpreting wave-based signals,” said Devansh Agarwal, senior machine learning engineer at Amazon Web Services. “I am talking about waves like ultrasound waves, electromagnetic waves or even WiFi. AI is being used to understand these waves.”
AI insights and management may truly transform how day-to-day life happens, said Agarwal. “Imagine speaking without using your vocal cords, smart glasses that monitor if you’re chewing properly, farmers tracking animal health remotely, or security systems detecting human presence and motion through Wi-Fi signals.”
For example, Agarwal explained, while at Cornell, his team was able to “demonstrate the usage of ultrasound waves for predicting speech by analyzing silent mouth movements. The user just moves their mouth and not produce any sound with their vocal cords.”
This is possible, since “when waves interact with objects, they undergo phase shifts or amplitude changes, carrying rich information,” Agarwal points out. “Before AI, extracting meaningful insights from these signals was incredibly difficult. Now, with AI’s ability to analyze subtle variations, we can decode what caused these changes with unprecedented accuracy.”
Google’s project Soli initially broke ground in this area, employing a miniature radar chip that detects motion and understands nonverbal cues. When first conceived in 2015, the designers “had tried using electromagnetic wave-based technology for human computer interaction,” Agarwal recounted. “But at that time AI was not as mature so the project had failed to take off. ”With recent advancements, I am confident more new similar technologies will come to life.”
AI is finding service as an early warning system for a range of requirements, inside and outside, said Rita McGrath, professor at Columbia Business School. AI can be employed to ”conduct computations and run experiments that would be too unwieldy or expensive for people to calculate manually. You can take in more evidence, do the calculations and come up with the best solutions, based on artificial experimentation without the cost and risk of doing things in real life.”
For example, “AI can look at early warnings of various kinds in arenas like public health,” she added. “For instance, wastewater can be sampled for evidence of diseases like COVID19, then AI can rapidly analyze the patterns and see where potential outbreaks might be lurking, before they would become obvious due to doctors’ visits and hospitalizations.”
AI can facilitate experimentation “on a very rapid scale in ways that could never happen in real life,” McGrath added. For example, “Kraft-Heinz has built a digital twin of its whole supply chain – a virtual version of what they have in reality. Then, they can bring in a signal from the real world – say a supplier is going to be late, or there is a delay at the ports. What they can then do is simulate how the whole system might respond. They can run literally hundreds of simulations and have the system recommend the optimal response.”
RTB Ruhan, CEO at Null Station, sees a future of “AI-powered synthetic influencers that fully run themselves. These would not simply be virtual characters created by a team, but AI personalities that could learn, adapt, and build relationships on their own.”
Current virtual influencers such as Lil Miquela “still rely on some form of human script and decision making,” Ruhan illustrated. “That’s going to change. Soon AI-driven personalities will be able to create content, negotiate brand deals, and even evolve their personalities through audience feedback.”
AI-powered influencers have many other talents as well. They would be able to “fluently speak dozens of languages, personalize every interaction, and never miss a trend,” she said. “For brands, this would be a major game changer. Instead of being reliant on unpredictable human influencers. They’ll have AI personalities built from the ground up for their audience scalable, always available, fully malleable. They’ll be able to roll out campaigns all over the world, adjusting tone and messaging for different cultural contexts all in real time.”
Ruhan goes so far to predict “people will become emotionally attached to these AI influencers. Some may even prefer them over a human influencer, because AI won’t have scandals, burnout, or inconsistency.”
