Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 19

The Age of the AI Chatbot Salesperson Might Have an Unintended Side Effect

Training an employee to do upselling (and be good at it) is notoriously difficult. When it’s done right, it can drive significant revenue for many types of businesses though so it’s not surprising that some are experimenting with letting AI do the job. An article from WIRED this week showcases a few examples of vendors working on this sort of technology via chatbots that interact with customers as they are placing orders for something like pizza for delivery. The thing that’s even more interesti...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities, by Thomas Heatherwick

Imagine a graphic novel that offers a compelling argument for why our cities can be more than just boring backdrops for daily routines. That’s the vision in Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanize and it comes to life through lots of examples, stories and visuals of exactly how cities could be more interesting and exciting. You may not see yourself as someone who is actively “designing cities” and you probably don’t work in urban planning, but the beauty of this book is how approachable the author makes t...

The Revolution of Self Driving Cars Is Not Going to Be Easy

Would you leave a tip for your driverless taxi? This past week a security researcher named Jane Wong shared leaked screenshots apparently showing the autonomous taxi service is planning to experiment with letting riders leave a tip. Before your temperature rises too much, it’s important to note that the tips would go to charity, and you can select the charity … so we can all just calm down a little. The positive PR is probably one big reason Waymo maybe be trialing the feature.

Creating a...

The Stories Within the Story About Why DeepSeek AI Is Such a Big Deal

The big AI news of the week was Chinese startup DeepSeek releasing their AI model which seemingly offers similar functionality to ChatGPT. The news has apparently shocked the tech community “popping the US Big Tech bubble” and sent the share prices of several big tech players rocketing downward. This is the story that seems to be getting the most attention—how a startup from China could upend so much momentum and domination of the generative AI ecosystem that had previously been mainly US-based ...

The No Book: An Inside Look at Tim Ferriss’s New Book (and How He Protects His Time)

In case you’re not familiar with author Tim Ferriss, here’s a crazy fact about him: If he’s in a time when he isn’t checking email (usually for three weeks at a time), he deletes all the emails he has received and asks people to resend them if they are really that important. Tim’s first book The 4-Hour Workweek was a global bestseller. In this new book (his first in over seven years), which he is releasing as a serial with two chapters at a time, Tim writes about all the techniques and scripts h...

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week: Dubai Future Foundation

One of the most forward-looking nations invests heavily in future planning, and much of their planning, research, insights and project efforts are all published freely online. This is the wealth of futures information you’ll find on this government sponsored website from the Dubai Future Foundation.

These insights along with the publications and research published by the UAE Government Development & Futures Office are just as useful as many trend insights websites that require subscripti...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Long History of the Future by Nicole Kobie

Wide-eyed predictions of the future are fun to read, and even more fun to write. Yet for every book that promises to predict the future, there remains a nagging problem at the heart of those predictions: that future, which should already be here, continually seems far off. Why isn’t tomorrow’s technology already here?

That is the tantalizing question Nichole Kobe aims to answer in this book. Through a series of chapters tackling the most common future technology predictions, from driverl...

DEI May Be Dying … But Here’s What Could Replace It

When Jennifer Brown and I first published our book Beyond Diversity in 2021 it was moment of big momentum for DEI. Amongst the many other books published at that time, there was an underlying sentiment of “blaming and shaming” people that we tried our best to reject. You don’t change minds, we felt, by alienating people before you even have a chance to start a conversation. This week, longtime DEI practitioner Lily Zheng shared a similar perspective in their timely criticism of the typical DEI m...

The Library of Lost & Imaginary Books

There are books mentioned within the pages of other books that never existed on their own, but what if they did? That’s the fascinating story visitors can explore at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan where you can either show up with your own idea for a book or help recreate an imagined title from another book. The bookbinding equipment at the Center is traditional and the experience is physical and nostalgic—though probably most of the people visiting were not born when books were first mad...

Flash Superhero Movie Director Proves We’re Not Great at Learning from Failure

The Flash movie came out in 2023 and by box office standards, it was a flop. A story making the rounds in entertainment trade publications this week was all about comments the movie’s director Andy Muschietti made in recent interviews attempting to explain exactly why the movie failed. According to him, it performed poorly because “it wasn’t as widely appealing as everyone hoped it would be.” Not exactly a stunning insight. He goes on to say, “I’ve found in private conversations that a lot of pe...