Chris Duffey - Superhuman Innovation

Transforming business with artificial intelligence

Chris Duffey

Publishers note

Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publisher and author cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. No responsibility for loss or damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by the editor, the publisher or the author.

First published in Great Britain and the United States in 2019 by Kogan Page Limited

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licences issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned addresses:

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Chris Duffey 2019

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Chart design by Connor Delaney

Chapter opening graphics from Adobe Stock

ISBNs

Hardback 978 0 7494 9804 7

Paperback 978 0 7494 8383 8

eBook 978 0 7494 8384 5

Typeset by Integra Software Services, Pondicherry

Print production managed by Jellyfish

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

To my parents, who instilled in me the love of life-long learning

To my wife and two daughters, who are my constant inspiration

To my sister, who showed me what honest success looks like

Chris Duffey spearheads Adobes Creative Cloud strategic development innovation partnerships across the creative enterprise space.

Chris and his work have been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Inc., Adweek, Adage, Cheddar, The Mirror, The Drum, Campaign, CMO.com, NYPost, Business Insider, and have been featured by Google, McKinsey and Wharton in their digital marketing book. Chris also serves on Rutgers University Data Advisory Board and the Board of Directors for ANA NY.

Prior to Adobe Chris was an award-winning executive creative director, speaker, author and AI and mobile technologist. Business Insider named him as one of the industrys leaders on the top issues, challenges and opportunities in the fast-changing world of mobile marketing. He has been a creative consultant with 35 advertising agencies across all the major global holding companies: WPP, IPG, Havas, Omnicom, Publicis and MDC, and has worked across every major industry vertical. Chris is an accomplished author on the inevitable relevance of AI and mobile, with an affinity towards creating innovation for the most complex business challenges imaginable. The Guardian listed How mobile became mighty in healthcare, an article he co-wrote, in their top ten best healthcare stories of the year.

Chriss keynotes have received more than 50 million impressions. His sessions have been reported around the world by Access Hollywood, Extra, OK magazine, Hello, People, the Daily Mail, NYPost, Adweek and The Drum.

Throughout my career as a creative director and creative technologist, I have always been fascinated when human creativity and ingenuity meet and is then amplified by technology. We will explore in great depth in the upcoming pages how, over the past number of years, artificial intelligence has become one of the greatest technical advances. I wanted to celebrate the capabilities and possibilities of AI, but also to test its limits, not only by writing a book about it but actually using AI to help write it. Capturing AIs current and future abilities has been a journey of exploration which has led to a number of exciting discoveries. But there were also times when it became clear that in some instances AI was just not there yet. So, in the hope of showing how transformational AI can be, I assembled some AI technologies to become a co-author. What follows is an overview of my approach. Much like the writing process, my use of AI was organic and non-linear and often deployed a layering of different techniques.

In the early to mid-2000s we were in a similar new era of mobile. Clients often asked us to describe how a mobile responsive website or app was built. Before answering, the first thing was always to decide how many technical layers to peel back: what went into the visual design process, which UX tools were used, an explanation of software development codes, how to use iPhone or Android hardware capabilities and components such as chips, geolocation abilities. The list went on and on. Most recently this was done through full-day tech sessions with the introduction of the Apple Watch and health kit and Amazon Alexa. And, as in the early days of mobile and wearables, we are going through a similar conversation with the technical building blocks of AI. This lays the AI foundation for strategic and creative discussions on how, when and where to make best use of the technology.

Rather than starting out with how is it built or trying to use a specific AI technique, my general approach in using AI as a co-creation tool for this book was to begin with a fundamental question: what can this specific AI function do and how can it help? With this focus I used a number of AI APIs (application program interfaces) while writing. Although they made for a lengthy list, it included everything from using AI to compose responses on specified topics, the suggestion and prediction of contextual content that might be relevant, translation of multi-language reference materials and then summarization, sentence analysis and separation, constituency parsing to determine sentence structure and meaning, tone analyser to understand emotions and communication style in the text review stage, sentiment analysis to analyse and generate a summary of insights, characteristics and values inherent to the text. In the context of this book, the AI function or Aim is not a single sourced technology but rather a suite of technologies, many of which are open-source, each building on a different set of concepts, approaches and infrastructures. The conversational agent leverages a number of expert systems using AI and ML techniques such as natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) APIs. These techniques for example allow Aim to identify, understand and respond to key words, phrases, ideas and requests, and at times instances of recognition and understanding of experiences and reasoning.

The underlying aspects of the AI used in Superhuman Innovation primarily embody three systems: AI voice recognition, AI content understanding and summarization, AI content creation and generation. Voice recognition and continuous dictation enables human-to-system interaction through a voice-user interface (VUI) for tasks such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice editing, formatting, spelling, and sharing documents. AI content understanding and summarization technology reviews and abridges databases, articles or research papers into quick digestible content through approaches such as sentiment analysis, labelling and the organization of higher-level concepts based on contextual understanding. AI content creation and generation is the ability of the system to develop concepts and ideas to aid the content creation process. Writing algorithms to emulating the human writing process helped contribute ideas, titles, content and drafts.