Читать книгу Artificial Intelligence for Asset Management and Investment - Al Naqvi - Страница 28

I vividly recall the experience of buying a new car about a decade before this book was written. I visited several dealers and inquired about various features. It was not my first car. I had purchased a total of nine cars before that. When buying cars, I tend to ask lots of questions. From typical car performance attributes to its physical features, I asked dozens of questions. I looked at domestic cars and foreign cars, at sedans and SUVs, at electric and gas cars. Eventually I ended up buying a car. Looking back at the questions I asked during my car buying escapades from 1992 to 2010, I realize that the nature of my questions did not change much. Then I made of list of questions I was asking to buy cars recently, and suddenly a list with very unusual questions emerged: “Does this car park itself?” “Does it stop itself if a peril develops?” “Does it drive itself?” Stop for a moment and ask yourself what just happened. We are asking questions about a thing (the car) and associating some level of sentient or intelligent behavior with it. Something has changed. We are expecting things to be intelligent. In the past, beyond humans, such a question may have been asked for a horse or a dog or a cat—“Would this animal be able to return home?”—but not for an inanimate object. What changed?

Of course, we are now living in the intelligence era. What was once uniquely ours, intelligence, is now expected to be part of inanimate objects. This means that as consumers we expect products and services to be intelligent and to display intelligent behavior. Intelligization of objects is not a small shift. It introduces many different types of business dynamics as it alters the fundamental drivers of competition.

For instance, one key factor intelligization introduces is that in addition to all other product or service attributes, the fundamental driver of competitive advantage can also be the intelligence embedded in your product or service. For examples, consumers would now compare cars not only based on factors such as quality and safety but also based on autonomous driving features. Intelligence has become a primary attribute of competitive differentiation. People may compare smart phones, their bank services, credit cards, home security systems, financial advisors, and even sofas and toilets based on product intelligence.