Idea: 136
Saturday, 16 May 2015
By. IDEO Futures
Cacophony
— A.I. shopping assistants competing in a price war
I attended a brainstorm session at IDEO’s SF office. We broke into small groups. The prompt was to design an A.I. with a “conversational interface”. One group imagined A.I. shopping assistants competing in a reverse-auction price war. I was like, “Wow. Smart.”
Let me break that down for you:
> You start an iMessage conversation with “Caco” — short for Cacophony.
> You say, “Caco, I’d like to book a flight to New York on Friday.”
> Caco then invites Virgin America, United Airlines, and various other AIs to join the iMessage conversation.
> These AIs start making competing offers. You start negotiating with them. They start dropping their prices.
> You go with the best one.
Caco’s role is to:
— create a reverse-auction environment favorable to you, the consumer — without overwhelming you
— create a marketplace, bring supply (the providers) and demand (you) to the table
— make the purchase experience seamless — so you don’t need to leave iMessage — and take a cut of every transaction
? Flights? Cars? Hotels? Can you think of other verticals?
? Is this the next Kayak? ;-)
? Thoughts on the model? The UX?

