Brian Solis's Blog, page 17

2024 is Expected to Be the Year of Drone Delivery

Created with DALL-E

2024 is expected to be the year when drone delivery finally takes flight.

What’s different about this year?

Well, most regulatory hurdles have been cleared, opening the door for retailers, medical centers, and logistics platforms to start offering drone delivery.

During testing, visual spotters were required every mile. Last Fall, the FAA authorized some drone operators to fly BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight). Now, companies such as Zipline, Wing, DroneUp, and Amazon are about to take off.

The FAA is focused on developing a standard set of rules for BVLOS operations to make these kinds of deliveries routine, scalable and economically viable according to Axios.

Amazon has operated in 2 communities (Lockeford, CA, and College Station, TX) using drone fulfillment test hubs. This year, the company is adding a 3rd US site and 2 in Europe to further test.

Zipline has already flown more than 60 million commercial autonomous miles and is expanding.

Wing, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has completed over 350k delivers. It plans to use AI to make operations more efficient, including making decisions about where to safely leave the package (as they all will most likely).

Walmart is making deliveries within a 6-mile range of its Dallas and Christiansburg, VA superstores.

Does this mean fewer vehicles on the road? Maybe.

Noisy drones hovering around your neighborhood? Maybe.

Increasingly demanding consumers? Definitely!

Catering to the Accidental Narcissist

Innovation in customer delivery is welcome. It will also continue to foster “accidental narcissism” in consumer behavior, meaning the excitement will wear off. Anything new quickly, no matter how better or faster, inevitably gives way to “impatience as a virtue.”

Zipline CEO Keller Renaudo Cliffton predicts that people shift from excited to entitled within days.

“People go from science fiction to entitlement in seven days,” Cliffton shared with Axios.

During my days as a Principal Analyst, I found this to be the case time and time again in my research.

“For seven days, it’s pure magic. Then on day eight, they’re looking at their watch and saying, ‘You’re 30 seconds late’,” he continued.

And he’s right.

In my early research days around digital CX, mobile CX, and digital anthropology, I published research that visualized a new type of consumer, I called them Generation-C or Generation-Connected. This wasn’t a demographic group, but instead psychographic, where people shared digital and mobile-first behaviors and interests that resulted in similar patterns. The research also identified a new customer journey, beyond a traditional “cluster funnel,” we at Altimeter called the Dynamic Customer Journey. This research was so profound that it inspired the direction for my books, End of Business as Usual, What’s the Future of Business, and X: The Experience When Business Meets Design (listed in chronological order).

The moniker “accidental narcissist” playfully described how people change as a matter of just being human.

For example, with the “Time Study” I conducted with Rakuten Ready, we learned that even though BOPIS and Curbside were novel and exciting at the time, by a consumer’s second or third visit, parking wasn’t close enough, time wasn’t fast enough, lines weren’t short enough, staff weren’t dedicated to digital-first consumers enough. We heard, and I’m not kidding, “I don’t want to stand over there with those analog people.”

Nothing matters more than the speed of pickup. Credit: Jack Nunn

The same was true when I studied how long was too long to wait for an Uber before a user opened the Lyft app. Those number plummeted every year. I know people who carry two phones who open both apps to see which one is faster. They cancel the other driver when it’s clear who’s going to arrive later (note: I don’t support this behavior, but it is testament to “accidental narcissism.”

To this day, for instance, Uber advertisers how long average wait times are in cities using traditional billboards and signage.

The same is true for Uber Eats and Door Dash. “Impatience as a virtue” is one of the key observations that led to UX innovations such as tracking the car en route!

The minute I see that I can experiment with drone delivery, I’m jumping onboard (sorry neighbors!) And by the third time, I’ll probably start complaining about its time record.

DALL-E Prompt: You’re one of the best nature photographers in the world. You were out in a suburban neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, shooting pictures of new homes being built near vast areas of flatlands. Then you looked up and took a picture of a drone delivering a package to a nearby home. Share with me that picture. 

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Former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones Becomes Bumble CEO; FT Features Supporting Quote by Brian Solis

© Joe Cummings, FT

Hannah Murphy, Financial Times (FT)

Lidiane Jones, the 44-year-old former Slack chief executive was announced as the successor to Whitney Wolfe Herd, CEO of Bumble, marking a handover between two rare female leaders in tech.

Jones has a difficult job on her hands. Shares in the female-friendly dating app have fallen around 80 per cent since its 2021 initial public offering. And in March, Blackstone — Bumble’s largest institutional shareholder — sold a 10 per cent stake in the app for a heavily discounted $300mn price tag. The $7bn dating market remains dominated by incumbent Match Group, which has snapped up rising players such as Hinge.

Brian Solis, head of global innovation at ServiceNow and a former Salesforce vice-president, says that for Jones to take over from Wolfe Herd is “an incredible validation” after the Bumble founder “fought against all the things that make it so difficult for women founders”.  By all accounts, the passing of the baton was a swift one. The line from Bumble is that Wolfe Herd had been considering a succession plan for some time, but a search had failed to yield the right candidate. Then she stumbled across a video of a Jones interview on CNBC from May, in which the then-Slack chief was calmly promoting the launch of “Slack GPT” — the platform’s generative AI chatbot. Wolfe Herd was impressed, and the pair were soon introduced through a mutual contact.

Please read the full article at FT.

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Generative Developments in AI – December 29, 2023

The latest in AI trends…

Google is expected to make dramatic cuts due to AI

The Information is reporting that Google is exploring a substantial workforce reduction, potentially affecting up to 30,000 employees. This is reportedly aimed at sales as Google’s own AI is expected to disrupt its Ads and Adwords business.

AI may affect more jobs beyond Google

Newsweek is reporting that cuts are likely across the board as companies consider AI and a potential recession. According to a Resume Builder survey, nearly four in 10 companies said they are likely to have layoffs in 2024. Four in 10 said they are going to lay off employees and replace workers with AI.

Generative AI will continue to grow, exponentially

J.P. Morgan maintains its bullish-outlier view of GenAI. They believe this is a seminal moment in tech.

The company wasn’t impressed by IoT, Metaverse, Blockchain, 3D printing, but it states that GenAI is very different. And that it is.

It’s expected to evolve at light speed. It will continue to outperform the typical person. As such, the typical person must augment their capabilities now with generative AI to perform extraordinary tasks. This will lead to a productivity boom.

J.P. Morgan also anticipates a mass-scale white collar job realignment.

Generative AI Spending to Top $1 Trillion Over the Next 10 years

Bloomberg Intelligence recently reported that the generative AI market is poised to grow at a 42% compound annual growth rate from $40 billion in 2022 to $1.3 trillion by 2032. BI estimates that generative AI is poised to expand its impact from less than 1% to 10% market spending of total IT hardware, software services, ad spending, and gaming.

Learn GenerativeAI

OpenAI published its “6 Strategies for Getting Better Results.”

The v1.0 of the GenAI Prism infographic is now available. It serves as a mental model to augment your work toward exponential outcomes.

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The Four Waves of Generative AI, We’re in Wave 2 According to Mustafa Suleyman

ChatGPT was the fastest technology to reach 100 million users. In 2022 – 2023, ChatGPT almost single-handedly changed the trajectory of mainstream computing and how people interact with information. Suddenly everyday users could shift between consuming and co-creating data with the assistance of generative AI tools. Though it had been evolving for years, OpenAI captured the zeitgeist with ChatGPT, and everything changed from there.

Now in 2024, we’ll see a shift from curiosity to strategic execution. Generative AI will get ‘smarter’ of course, but so will its users. They’ll uncover new capabilities, to unlock new possibilities, and perform work not possible before. Think of this time as gaining access to a ‘cognitive exoskeleton‘ that will take some getting used to. We’ll become increasingly augmented.

With each new flex and experiment, we’ll achieve new results, realize new opportunities, and inspire new behaviors, skills, and quests!

But generative AI is just a phase according to Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI.

He believes the next phase is interactive AI, bots that carry out specific tasks for you by autonomously working with other software and people to complete workflows.

Think of specialized AI partnering with other specialized AI to hand-off step-by-step each task as they’re completed until the overall work has been performed.

A simple example of an autonomous workflow could be prompted by a request to book a trip to a certain destination within a timeframe and budget. The system knows preferences, loyalty relationships, and favorite spots. It then finds the best route, timing, and price, books the flight, then books transportation to and from airports, books the hotel, books dinner reservations, then populates the calendar with all the information, and then prepares an tidy itinerary explaining each detail.

The user could then ask the bot to make any necessary changes to then be carried out autonomously.

Waves of AI

Wave 1: Suleyman describes the first wave of AI as one of classification and training.

Wave 2: Generative AI takes input data and produces new data.

Wave 3: Interactive AI where conversation becomes the user interface and autonomous bots connect to one another to execute tasks behind the scenes. Voice becomes the UI. (This is where Suleyman is focusing his work at Pi).

Wave 4: AI prompts us. Though Suleyman didn’t say this, I think about bots not needing direction on the horizon. Instead AI will learn how to help you collaborate towards outcomes. AI prompts us to learn how to prompt itself to achieve our desired states, to iterate toward new end-goals. AI then architects and executes the entire workflow autonomously.

The State of GenAI in One Infographic

I partnered with JESS3 design studio and Conor Grennan, leading generative AI expert and Dean of Students/Head of GenerativeAI at NYU Stern School of Business, to create v1.0 of the GenAI Prism. Even though the landscape is still evolving, the current iteration of the GenAI Prism is  the industry’s most comprehensive visualization of the Generative AI universe.

Version 1 is not reflective of the total landscape, but instead a snapshot of a moment in time. But more than just a visualization of the generative AI landscape, the GenAI Prism offers a mental model to mindfully and intentionally approach prompts and any work in which generative AI becomes a collaborator in work and life.

What’s next?

What do you see as the next waves of AI?

What new applications or devices are on your horizon?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

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San Francisco Examiner Names Brian Solis As One of The Ten Most Sought After Brand Evangelists

via SF Examiner

While the term “influencer” may be used too often in too many ways – real influence does exist. For brands it is the evangelist that is paramount. They possess the unique combination of having influence and the ability to elevate the storytelling for a brand. Some are creators, some are product experts and some are the most highly trusted experts in their field. Here is why each of these evangelists are in high demand.

With any of these ten you can see commonality, components that help people achieve the absolute apex of brand evangelism. But more interestingly each has a different and diverse background, skillset and come from a variety of industries. It doesn’t matter where you start but they all understand the value of connection, collaboration and bringing their unique insights to help brands navigate tricky spaces where they lack that specific expertise.

The list includes Brian Solis. Click here to read the original article at San Francisco Examiner.

Brian Solis

As a world leading digital anthropologist and futurist, Brian Solis is an 8x bestselling author, the world’s top superforecaster according to Entrepreneur and ZDNet’s top business thinker of the 21st century. 700,000 followers and bylines in Harvard Business Review, Adweek and more, Brian is one of the original evangelists.

Currently the Global Head of Innovation at ServiceNow he is also a highly sought after and engaging keynote speaker globally and the host of (r)evolution, a popular video series that has interviewed Shag, Katie Couric, Marc Burnett and more on technology, leadership and blazing a trail.

 

 

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San Francisco Examiner: The Ten Most Sought After Brand Evangelists

via SF Examiner

While the term “influencer” may be used too often in too many ways – real influence does exist. For brands it is the evangelist that is paramount. They possess the unique combination of having influence and the ability to elevate the storytelling for a brand. Some are creators, some are product experts and some are the most highly trusted experts in their field. Here is why each of these evangelists are in high demand.

With any of these ten you can see commonality, components that help people achieve the absolute apex of brand evangelism. But more interestingly each has a different and diverse background, skillset and come from a variety of industries. It doesn’t matter where you start but they all understand the value of connection, collaboration and bringing their unique insights to help brands navigate tricky spaces where they lack that specific expertise.

The list includes Brian Solis. Click here to read the original article at San Francisco Examiner.

Brian Solis

As a world leading digital anthropologist and futurist, Brian Solis is an 8x bestselling author, the world’s top superforecaster according to Entrepreneur and ZDNet’s top business thinker of the 21st century. 700,000 followers and bylines in Harvard Business Review, Adweek and more, Brian is one of the original evangelists.

Currently the Global Head of Innovation at ServiceNow he is also a highly sought after and engaging keynote speaker globally and the host of (r)evolution, a popular video series that has interviewed Shag, Katie Couric, Marc Burnett and more on technology, leadership and blazing a trail.

 

 

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Generative Developments in AI – December 27, 2023

The latest news and trends in generative AI…

The Future of Generative AI Headed to Court

The New York Times is suing OpenAI for using copyrighted IP to train its LLMs without credit or royalties. This could be OpenAI’s “Napster” moment. Here’s the filing.

At the same time, Apple is reportedly striking deals with media companies to train its AI using IP.

One of these two will define the future of generative AI.

A New Wave of AI Devices and Maybe Phones are on the Horizon

In other news, Jony Ive reportedly hired Apple iPhone and Watch designer Tang Tan to join him at LoveFrom. Experts believe that the team is working on an AI phone or device with Sam Altman, potentially creating the next “iPhone” moment.

With Humane first out of the gate with a consumer-facing AI device, 2024 might just set the stage for the next device war.

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Forbes: Brian Solis on AI for Marketers

Sandy Carter’s latest article in Forbes explores the optimistic and cautious perspectives of AI heading into 2024. The article features thoughts from Brian Solis.

As we approach the brink of 2024, the entwined paths of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and spatial computing are not merely transforming industries; they’re also sculpting new ethical and societal contours. With every conference now an AI Conference including the upcoming CES in Vegas, everyone needs to think not just in terms of technology. In exploring how these technologies will evolve, it’s essential to examine their wider implications – from both the optimistic ‘Santa’ viewpoint and the cautious ‘Grinch’ perspective.

Brian Solis is a leading AI Influencer and is the head of global innovation at ServiceNow.

He had this to say, “Marketers should approach AI by thinking about how they want customers to feel rather than aiming for transactional engagement. AI can help your marketing become, ironically, more human. And when customers feel engaged it enhances their experience and likelihood to take action. That’s what customer experience is all about…the feeling someone has in the moment. AI can unlock digital empathy to create meaningful experiences.” Brian recently published the GenAI Prism with JESS3 to help executives understand the rapidly shifting generative AI landscape.

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Introducing the GenAI Prism Infographic: A Framework for Collaborating with Generative AI

NEWS: Introducing the The GenAI Prism, the single most comprehensive representation of the generative AI universe.

JESS3 design studio and Brian Solis, digital futurist and best-selling author, announced the release of the GenAI Prism v1.0 infographic along with Conor Grennan, leading generative AI expert and Dean of Students/Head of GenerativeAI at NYU Stern School of Business.

Jeremiah Owyang, Venture Capital Investor at Blitzscaling Ventures, and my friend and former colleague, shared an observation that there are more than 10,000 generative AI projects in play right now. As the famous saying from the movie JAWS goes, “we’re going to need a bigger infographic.”

The effort took over six months to complete and included a panel of experts to help us assess the maturity of each category and company for impact, adoption, and potential. It’s safe to say that we consider this version 1.0 and there will be many iterations over time. Please see below for download links.

About

The GenAI Prism organizes the landscape of generative AI companies that automate and augment how people create and work in their personal and professional lives.

More than a visualization of the most popular generative AI logos, the GenAI Prism offers a mental model to mindfully and intentionally approach prompts toward more intentional outcomes and insights.

The GenAI Prism is a reference guide that to prompt human creativity and imagination to collaborate with AI toward more thoughtful, effective, and extraordinary outcomes. 

GenAI isn’t here to do the work of people or replace them, but instead it serves as a creative partner to augment human output. It enhances, accelerates, and boosts the work we do today while also allowing us to perform and create outputs we couldn’t do before. 

Design

The design of the GenAI Prism is intended to ‘refract’ the GenAI ‘light’ to slow the speed of a fast-moving genre. Doing so allows viewers to reflect on the spectrum and understand the significance of each wavelength.

The GenAI Prism provides a visual workflow to put generative AI to work. It’s designed to future-proof human ingenuity by helping users formulate exponential outputs before the prompt. With practice, formulated prompts will unlock capacities not previously attainable to deliver exponential outcomes unimaginable just last year.

History

The GenAI Prism follows the successful Conversation Prism series by JESS3 and Brian Solis dating back to 2008 – 2017. The Conversation Prism was designed to categorize the emerging Social Media landscape. Like the GenAI Prism, it also empowered users to be more intentional with their efforts to network, create, and build communities around their vision. 

GenAI Prism FrameworkCenter: Vision

You are operating at the center of the prism. It’s your imagination and vision that will shape what emerges on the other side of the prompt. 

Halo 1: Risk vs. Reward

Every prompt can feed different LLMs or language models in different ways that carry inherent risks and rewards. Because data is involved, some models and prompts must be evaluated for trust, and how that data is used to further train LLMs. It’s important to understand this as you also consider the potential rewards. Private data in certain models is no longer private.

Halo 2: Intended Outcomes

As you endeavor to bring your vision to light, consider the potential outcome you’d like to achieve. 

1) Are you solving a problem?

2) Are you exploring new horizons to create something net new?

3) Are you optimizing or automating an existing process or product or service or works?

4) Are you augmenting something to perform exponentially?

5) Are you experimenting?

Halo 3: H1 Genre

These refractions represent the H1 genres for generative AI services and apps. 

Halo 4-5: H2 Categories/Companies

Services and apps are organized into H2 level categories which aim to arrange them by capabilities, activities, and outcomes.

The logos represented in each do not reflect the total spectrum of light. They represent those refracting the brightest light at the time of this experiment. 

Halo 6: Results

The outcome you’ve envisioned and subsequently achieved, is now classified by type. 

1) Was it iterative or incremental to what exists today?

2) Was it innovative? Did it create something net new? Or introduce new value?

3) Did it augment something that’s in motion today to exponentially impact output?

4) Was it experimental and did it provide insights into what to do or not do next time?

Halo 7: Engagement/Networking

William H. White wrote in 1950 that the great enemy of communication is the illusion of it. GenAI is new. It’s evolving. It’s incredible in terms of its potential, but also confusing, and even daunting. But the path to the future is forged by those who explore new horizons and live to tell. Our vision, and our investments into outcomes, and how we learn and communicate those learnings, will help us, and those around us, grow.

Download

Download the hi-res version and see its evolution at JESS3. The GenAI Prism is also available to download at flickr.

Significance

It’s been said that AI won’t take jobs, but those who use AI will have a strong advantage over those who don’t. Studies already show that with vision, creativity, and a commitment to experimentation, work not only accelerates, but also elevates the quality of output. In one such study, Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick in partnership with social scientists at Boston Consulting Group found that consultants who used AI finished 12.2% more tasks on average, completed tasks 25.1% more quickly, and produced 40% higher quality results.

The ultimate goal with generative AI is to enhance or more so, augment, the creative power of humanpotential, incorporating this technology to create and perform more thoughtful, effective, and extraordinary projects.

The GenAI Prism also serves as a guide to futureproof human ingenuity. The technology isn’t here to do the work of people or replace them, but be part of a workflow that puts AI in service of people. With practice, prompts will unlock capacities not previously attainable, especially by small startups, to deliver exponential outcomes.

Composer, musician, and avant garde artist Laurie Anderson once said, “If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology — and you don’t understand your problems.”

The same is true for GenAI.

Anyone seeking to displace people with genAI doesn’t understand their existing problems or potential opportunities.

Augmentation is the key to becoming a next-generation AI-first business.

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Harnessing Serendipity: A Guide to Mastering the Art of Creativity, Connection, and Collaboration

David Adler, along with James Cornehlsen and Andrew Frothingham, authored the new book, Harnessing Serendipity. I’ve known David for years. He’s the Chairman & Founder, BizBash. He’s also a friend.

Harnessing Serendipity is a book written for visionary and creative leaders to unlock the potential of artful collaboration.

The book features invaluable insights from 65 thought-leaders and change-makers across multiple industries, including me! Thank you, David!

This curated group of “collaboration artists” share their stories, philosophies, and methods, to help you rethink your approach to problem-solving, innovation, and how to set and achieve your goals.

I’d like to share my story with you and encourage you to read the book. I learned so much from other leaders across different industries and fields!

I remember this interview vividly. I was on the pool deck at the W Hotel in Nashville. I had just finished presenting to Tractor Supply about the potential new futures for rural retail innovation. When I received David’s call, I sat in an empty cabana, looked out across the city of Nashville, and savored this entire conversation.

Brian Solis
Global Innovation
Combines Digital and Real-World Experiences to Reach and Influence More People

“I approach things not just as an experience designer, but also as an introvert. And the idea of connecting and collaborating isn’t intuitive to me,” Brian Solis begins. “In fact, it’s frightening The only reason I do it is it’s a mechanism to get certain ideas shared and acted on at a broader level.”

Ironically, despite all this hesitancy about collaboration, Brian is radically changing the state of the art of collaboration—both through his former role as Global Innovation Visionary and Strategist at Salesforce  and now as Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow. This is someone who works with hundreds of executives at some of the biggest organizations around the world to help them innovate and transform. Before that, his role as a digital futurist and principal analyst at Altimeter Group helped transform the technology industry and how business leaders approach innovation and digital transformation. Plus, this introvert has published eight best-selling books and keynotes events all around the world!

Now, he’s gone, “from thinking, writing, and studying innovation to being able to practice it at scale,” he says.

Brian’s not kidding about being an introvert.

“Connecting with other people has been a forced behavior my whole career. Never has it grown on me to become second nature. If I slip, I have to catch myself by saying, ‘If you don’t go to this or meet these people, you’re not going to be part of this conversation.’ And as the Cluetrain Manifesto famously observed, ‘markets are conversations.’ It’s a constant emotional battle that doesn’t go away.”

While he may not be personally inclined toward collaborative experiences, Brian makes himself participate. He sees collaboration as an element of wellness that’s essential to having a balanced life, and this drives him to think about how to make things more inclusive. He wants to understand, include, and represent “the voices that don’t always come to the table.”

“Everyone deserves opportunities to collaborate,” Brian Says, but that collaboration has to be exercised. The more you do it, the better you get at it.

“Inclusive collaboration models benefit from greater diversity,” he adds. “They make an organization stronger. Collaborative organizations will be more flexible, responsive, and valuable than autocratic ones.”

Brian sees hope in how evolving uses of technology can involve more people and improve how we work together.

“You can connect the extroverts and the introverts and those in between through online and real-world collaboration in ways that are intuitive and productive. Most of the collaborative exercises and tools that we traditionally use are not designed to give everyone a voice or optimized to bring out their best ideas. But now, digital and a global pandemic have accelerated what I call ‘digital introversion,’ where you can be more in control of the stuff behind the screens. It’s self-empowerment for connecting more and doing more.”

He sees the emerging challenge as an opportunity to reimagine what the experience is supposed to be, taking advantage of platforms and human nature to foster inclusivity, creativity, and collaboration. You’re not adapting the physical world to the virtual world. “You’re creating an entirely new experience that enhances what it is that you do in the real world. It’s a different mindset.”

Putting this thought into context, he says, “Especially in the events, networking, and conference/tradeshow worlds, many people are just taking what they do in the real world and putting it in a virtual space. That just doesn’t work for everyone. You need to think about experiences from the perspective of social media and game design. How can you create more immersion, interaction, and personalization in ways that maximize the platform to unlock intuitive and transcendent experiences? How do you bring everyone to the table, give them a voice, and motivate them to share their ideas?”

Brian regards empathy as one of the most important tools he has. He speaks about taking into consideration the feelings and aspirations of someone else, and keeping in mind that not all ideas can be extracted from each individual the same exact way. In his work, he extends the concept of empathy to what he calls “Digital Empathy.”

“I call digital empathy a love language,” he says. “Look at millennials and centennials, or Gen Y and Gen Z. They are digital-first, or digital-native, communities. The connect, communicate, and act differently. Their desired experiences are different. The better you integrate technology into a real-world setting using human-centered approaches, the more intuitive (and better) it is for them. You’re essentially designing for a native platform for human connections to foster the electricity of both digital and physical engagement. You’re not using digital to be digital. You use digital as a means of engaging both brain and biology, naturally. You bring the best of physicality and digital together so that everybody’s operating in a way that’s second nature.”

Brian is frank about the challenges involved in getting people to do things they aren’t initially inclined to do. “As an experience designer, it’s your job to design for specific experiences and outcomes [think customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), brand experience (BX)]. But you can’t assume. You can’t impose your experiences and outcomes upon people. You have to work to align people around shared interests, objectives, and outcomes that people can work towards in a meaningful way. You need to bring people together around a shared purpose, a series of missions people are mutually vested in achieving. This is why the best experiences start with empathy. You have to understand and become the people you’re trying to engage.”

He illustrates this idea with a story about Muhammad Ali. “Ali said, ‘I don’t like working out, but I do visualize what being a champion looks and feels like.’ Collaborating is a form of exercise, but you’re doing it in a way that visualizes what the shared desired outcome is for everyone.”

Ultimately, the best way to get a sense of the power and sophistication of Brian’s approach is to listen to him describe it in use.

“We were working on an experiment around strategic networking using AI, near-field communication (NFC), and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). The question was, ‘how do you get people to network when not everybody is a networker and how do you get the right people together from the onset?’ The premise was that you want to foster the type of engagement that takes advantage of why people are there: There’s usually a shared set of interests, favorite experiences, and desired aspirations and outcomes.”

“The solution involved designing this really cool and fun quiz to get everyone to participate,” he continues. “People got the quiz before the event. Whether you were extroverted or introverted, you felt it was your safe space, so you were motivated to answer the questions because you knew it would shape your experience. They were designed psychologically to nurture participation and bring out the type of information that was going to set the stage for the right types of connections and collaboration.”

The quiz allowed the team to skip things like icebreakers or random networking elevating the ability for people to find people like them. “Different people react differently. We fed a customer database where we used AI to match people with shared interests and outcomes and complementary modalities. Then we created a geolocation button that we placed on event badges so we could connect people on visual maps or through sound/lighting as they got closer to people that were interested in the same things. You could also view a digital heat map to find people and optimize your time on site.”

Brian describes it as “strategic serendipity.” It stripped out the awkwardness of ‘What do you do?’ or ‘Tell me more about you.’ “It broke down barriers and fostered meaningful connections, faster and accurately.” And it prompted connection between people to leapfrog the idle chats to get to productive and collaborative conversations sooner. People saved time, energy, and were able to get the most out of their experiences as a result.

In closing, Brian returns to the importance of designing for emotion inspired by empathy.

“There are only two kinds of experiences that people remember: those that suck and those that are extraordinary,” he says. “Everything in between is just transactional and forgettable. Too often, collaboration has been thought of as work that’s largely transactional and absent of emotionality. We have to design for feeling, for emotional connectivity. That’s where empathy becomes instrumental. Empathy and digital empathy are how we connect the dots between people to accelerate creative and strategic serendipity. Human-centered design partnered with technology then plays the role of enabler and facilitator. This amplifies opportunities for problem-solving, invention, and innovation. And that’s just want the world needs, solutions and community.”

What We Heard and Learned

The moment is right for reimagining connections and collaboration…this is our “iPhone moment.”

Realize that you and those on your team aren’t reflective of the audience or the total prospective audience. You have to understand them to engage them.

Gain and practice empathy. Practice empathy and digital empathy and speak the love language of those who connect and collaborate differently.

Align people around shared interests and aspirations and make connections and journeys intuitive, experiential, and constructive.

Challenge yourself. Design against the best, most innovative experiences, outside of your industry.

Please read the stories of 64 other collaboration artists in Harnessing Serendipity. 

 

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