A world controlled by Artificial Intelligence is closer than you think…

Even if you’re not clutching your smartphone right now while reading this in a mobile app or browser, the chances are your mobile is within arm’s reach. It’s also likely you checked it within the past five minutes. Maybe you received a text message, a notification or some other form of alert or perhaps, like me, checking your phone has simply become a force of habit.

Our reliance on smartphones has changed the way we behave — both at home and at work. In fact, the rise of the mobile has contributed to a blurring of the boundaries between the two.

However, if you think mobile technologies have been disruptive up to this point, what’s coming next is really going to revolutionise the way you work and play. Here’s how I see developments in mobile impacting your day-to-day life in positive way.

Location, location, location

One of the biggest ways smartphones are poised to revolutionise the way we live and work is through location services. We’re already using them — you can use location to find the nearest restaurant, or the fastest route to any destination — but a lot of the potential is still latent.

For consumers and businesses alike, location holds the promise of delivering more personalised, more relevant services. We’re already seeing location-sensitive sales and marketing offers being delivered right to our screens. And if you add context to location, you make the process even more sophisticated. Your mobile app will know whether you are travelling, in a meeting, relaxing at lunchtime, or looking for store offers.

Plus, ever-more advanced analytics will work out what sort of content you have time to digest: a few words alerting you to a nearby offer, or a longer video that advertises or entertains.

Artificial Intelligence takes the wheel

Linked to this will be AI assistants that understand you as an individual — what you like, what you want, and how you shop or consume information.

Voice-activated helpers like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are just the beginning. Moving forward, more advanced face recognition will be able to read your mood, and pick up nuances from your intonation and expression, and act accordingly.

AI helpers will act as an orchestration layer sitting on top of a huge mountain of information, which they’ll be able to deliver to you through the full range of media — text, audio, images, video and virtual/augmented reality.

But they will also be able to access services such as communication (email, text, social media, voice and video calls), payment facilities (banking, shopping, utilities) and information outlets (weather, travel, market information).

Not only will the AI agent have the power and the data to act on your behalf, it will move on to predict your behaviour, organising everything from office meetings and conference calls to birthday cards, gym sessions and insurance renewals — all from your mobile device. This is when mobility will really come of age.

Collaboration

The ability to collaborate with others will remain key to mobile working and communications in the future. Although we are heading into a world with more automation (as I mentioned in my last article), having a strong content and collaboration platform will still be a requirement for enterprises of all sizes.

The workplace of the future looks set to be more mobile, distributed and flexible. It will have less of an emphasis on the physical desk and more on the worker’s ability to connect and work together with teams of people spread across geographic locations.

For more on how to ensure you have a content platform that’s ready for future mobility, take a look here at Box’s cloud-based collaboration service.

Alternatively, fancy meeting up to discuss things in more detail? If so, I’ll be at Box World Tour Europe on April 4th — register here.

Tony Cheema Senior Director, UK/I Field Operations at Box