BRICS // Can SWARM Intelligence help Online Luxury Market?
Well, I spent last 8 months to study papers and articles on Swarm Intelligence. Could seem foolish, but this kind of topics gives me a sort of relax.
Wikipedia gives us a perfect definition of Swarm Intelligence:
“Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.
Examples in natural systems of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, fish schooling and microbial intelligence.
The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while ‘swarm intelligence’ refers to the more general set of algorithms. ‘Swarm prediction’ has been used in the context of forecasting problems.”
Can humans SWARM?
On the contrary of animal species, humans didn’t evolve the ability to swarm for we lack the subtle connections that other species use to establish real-time feedback-loops among members:
Fish -> They detect tremors in the water around them.
Bees -> They use high speed vibrations
Birds -> They detect motions propagating through the flock
The resulting systems are so tightly connected, the groups behaves as “super-organisms” that can think as one. And by doing so, these social species are able to make optimized decisions that far exceed the mental capacity of their individual members.
Could we amplify our intelligence by thinking together as unified dynamic systems? Would we be able to make better decisions and predictions and estimations and judgments? Research shows, the answer is YES. In fact, using technology, human swarms have been shown to beat the experts when predicting sporting events, financial trends, even the Oscar winners.
Artificial Swarm Intelligence
The technology is called Artificial Swarm Intelligence, and it enables groups to form real-time systems online, connecting as ‘human swarms’ from anywhere in the world. A combination of real-time human input and A.I. algorithms, a Swarm A.I. system combines the knowledge, wisdom, opinions, and intuitions of live human participants as a unified emergent intelligence that can generate optimized predictions, decisions, insights, and judgments.
Swarm Intelligence has been applied in a variety of areas including solving complex traffic and transportation problems, currency trade portfolio optimization, distributed job scheduling, designing sensor communication networks, routing in communication networks, Semantic Clustering of Web Documents, swarms of robot drones for surveying disaster sites, Military Swarm Robot Drone Armies, application of swarm intelligence to the design of analog circuits, and selecting optimal feature selection algorithms for machine learning.
Artificial Intelligence and Online Luxury Market.
What is the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Online Luxury Market?
Well, let me spend a few words about Luxury Market:
- Two years ago the amount of Luxury Global sales was $143 BN and according with Bain Company estimations in 2020 will be $250 BN
- Online: 10% of the total.
- We will have 194 MNL new customers coming from BRICS Markets
- The turnover of BRICS Luxury Market will be around $120 BN
- 80% of the things sold will be unbranded
Really interesting is the consumer behavior of this markets (online and offline)
The third step for Luxury buyers is really crucial (calls + emails) in the buying decision process.
But what is the problem?
Over 75% of BRICS Customers are NOT satisfied with their customer experience and
the 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience
Obviously the use of artificial intelligence could solve these problems, but unfortunately the issue is not so simple, especially if we adopt the perspective of the consumer (fig 1).
The absence of empathy and the cold user experience oblige consumers to abandon interaction with chatbots /virtual assistants.
A New Value Chain based on SWARM Intelligence and Personas
Ok, the assumption is that artificial intelligence alone can not solve the traditional problems of chatbot / VA (empathy / cold experience / no flexibility).
I think that possible resolution could be a New Value Chain based on SWARM Intelligence and Personas.
A new value chain in which the “automatic personas generated” drive (in realtime) the chatbot in the release of information. Since, the approach is based on a specific analysis of the social network (or website) usage it is also more empathetic.
That means to use the tech of “Automatic Personas Generated” to improve the machine learning.
If you want an example of automatic personas generated please check QCRI PERSONA a technology developed by Qatar Computing Research Institute
Here an example of the results
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence
http://www.learningmachines101.com/lm101-053-enhance-learning-machines-swarm-intelligence-particle-swarm-optimization/
http://jimjansen.blogspot.it/2017/04/persona-generation-from-aggregated.html
http://haewoon.io/
https://www2.deloitte.com/cn/en/misc/litetopicpage.global-topic-tags.annualreports.html
http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/luxury-goods-worldwide-market-study-fall-winter-2016.aspx
http://unu.ai/
