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Customer Experiences Must Incorporate Smartphone Capabilities
Google gave us an update of Gemini - their "universal AI assistant" during the Pixel 10 smartphone rollout on August 20, 2025 at a live...
4 min read


Are Consumer Experiences Ready for Autonomous AI Agents? No.
In late August, Taco Bell recently announced that their rollout of AI voice assistants to take drive-thru orders had mixed results. It...
2 min read


Use AI To Reduce Toil - Not Layoff Employees (AWS Summit 2025)
The AWS Summit in NYC balanced product announcements with customer stories and demos, showing both AI's potential and its current...
6 min read
Math On White-Collar Job Elimination?
More articles this past week with headlines around CEOs talking about how AI will eliminate jobs. Latest article in the WSJ on July 3rd...
2 min read


AI Customer Service Agents Fail Without Quality Data
In the absence of knowledge or insights based on high quality data, humans may not make the best decisions. I say "may" because they are...
3 min read


Why Are We Obsessed With Virtual Assistants? (Figma's Config 2025)
I had the opportunity to listen to John Lewenstein of Anthropic give a talk at Figma’s Config event in early May 2025 in San Francisco....
2 min read


GenAI Services Will Redefine Personalization
Augie Thumm took over his father’s bike shop (Thumm’s) in my home town of Warren, Ohio when I was just out of college. My parents bought...
3 min read


Anthropomorphism of AI Agents: Yes? No?
There has been a lot of buzz this year surrounding AI Agents - how they code, will replace humans, how humans will manage teams of AI...
2 min read


Should We Outsource Our Thinking To Machines?
I recently reviewed two pieces of academic research on the impact of use of GenAI tools on a human's critical thinking abilities. The...
5 min read


A Perspective on CEO Andy Jassy’s (Amazon) 2024 Letter To Shareholders
Amazon (including AWS) is investing heavily (billions - hundreds) in generative AI. This is no secret given its public plans for chips,...
4 min read


AI Funding Is Growing - And Bringing Entrepreneurs to San Francisco
The San Francisco Examiner published a summary of Pitchbook’s Q1 2025 Global VC First Look . A few key take away’s: 1) VC fundraising is...
2 min read


Use Your Words: Teaching Prompt Engineering (Google's Whisk)
Whisk is a "new experimental tool that lets you use images as prompts to visualize your ideas and tell your story." Everyone knows the...
2 min read


Nvidia Keynote 2025: Missing: Consumer Use Cases
Technologists leave consumers out of the agentic AI conversations - still.
3 min read


Retain Human Element In Sports’ GenAI Use Cases
Background: I had the privilege to host a panel of female executives in sports management for a panel discussion at Oakland Roots and...
2 min read


Apple Reinforces Measured Approach to GenAI In Consumer Services With 16E
Apple launched its smartphone portfolio's latest device (16E) on February 19, 2025. As an analyst, I’ve covered Apple for nearly 20...
4 min read


Virtual Agents (and Assistants) Aren't Ready for Mass Consumer Use Cases
To be clear, the technology is impressive - its aspirations, capabilities, and more. Using it involves too much friction today for most...
2 min read


Bring Humans Back Into Agentic AI Discussions
Too many genAI stories lack a human component. It feels a bit like Kevin Costner’s 1995 movie Field of Dreams. “Build it, and they will...
3 min read


Context Will Make Conversational Interfaces Better Sources of Answers Than Search
Search is a big business. Google has grown its revenue from search ad revenue from $45B in 2014 to $175B in 2023. During the same time...
3 min read


Robots: Are Consumers Ready for GenAI-Powered Agentive Machines?
Physical Intelligence raised $400M in “early stage funding” in November 2024. In doing so, they pulled the spotlight back towards...
5 min read


Ascension to Modern CX Leadership
I had the privilege and opportunity to attend NICE’s annual analyst summit last week. NICE assembled a world-class team to accompany...
3 min read


The Gifts of GenAI for Consumers
GenAI headlines scream about the “unprecedented productivity gains” that this transformational technology will deliver to the workforce...
4 min read


Figma Config 2024Figma Config2024: Transparency and Truth About Design Today - Including GenAI
Had the privilege and opportunity to attend Figma’s Config 2024 event at the end of June in San Francisco. I attended so many inspiring...
3 min read


Apple's 2024 WWDC Shows Off How Evolutionary GenAI Is - Less Revolutionary
Apple may not have its own large language model (LLM), but it will be just fine. Apple has long tapped into artificial intelligence to...
5 min read


Power and Limitations of GenAI in Consumer Applications Today
Illustrations of the power and limitations of genAI are rapidly evolving. I had the opportunity to attend Snowflake’s Developer Day on...
4 min read


Will Virtual Assistants Be The Killer Consumer App for GenAI?
Possible, but not plausible in the near term. Sam Altman believes they are poised to do so (see article from MIT Tech Review.) I've been...
2 min read


Smartphone GenAI Arms Race Heats Up with Google I/O Announcements
Google mentioned “AI” 121 times in its keynote today at Google I/O. At a high level, the speed, large context windows, and ability to...
2 min read


It's 2050 And Your Website Is Deserted. Why?
(Repost from LinkedIn from 10/31/2023) Websites will play a less prominent role in future consumer digital experiences for three core...
4 min read


It's 2050 and Your Website is Deserted. Why?
Forrester Research Websites will play a less prominent role in future consumer digital experiences for three core reasons: The digital...
4 min read
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