I think one of the big challenges for AI is public perception. People think it’s much more advanced than it really is.

There’s also a common fear of AI—that it will take our jobs, make human beings redundant and somehow rule over us. In my view, I just don’t see this happening.

AI augments human capabilities. It can help us improve the way we do our jobs and enhance how we go about our daily lives.

Creating digital humans

At Soul Machines (link resides outside ibm.com), we believe that AI-based systems will be more helpful if they’re more like us—if we can interact with them, trust them and engage with them as we would human beings.

We’ve designed user interfaces with human faces and emotional expression (link resides outside ibm.com). As a result, engagement is much more natural.

For example, when you’re talking to one of our digital humans and smile at it, it recognizes that you’re smiling, which gives a hit of virtual dopamine, making it smile back. It’s a natural, emotional face-to-face interaction

By combining emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence, we’ve enabled highly personalized interaction. Our digital humans will recognize you, they’ll know your personality, they’ll know what you do and do not like.

All of this is enabled by our core technology, a virtual nervous system (link resides outside ibm.com) that we use to bring digital humans to life. This sits on top of IBM Watson and we use watsonx Assistant as a key part of our dialog interface.

Using AI to democratize personalized service

Most companies haven’t been able to personally interact with their customers for decades.

We think there will be massive disruption around this affecting many industries—like banking, finance, technology or automotive—where customers are going to expect more customized experiences. Being able to establish these types of relationships with customers will become increasingly more valuable.

With our digital humans, we’re able to democratize all personalized service to create these relationships. Each user gets an experience completely customized to them. More importantly, even though interactions are personalized, we can still ensure the accurate delivery of specialized knowledge.

We’re working with our first crop of customers at the moment—like Autodesk, Daimler-Benz Financial Services and Royal Bank of Scotland—to create really different and very powerful AI customer service experiences. Watson’s a big part of this work.

Starting your own AI journey

As with any new technology, I recommend starting small. Have a big vision but be prepared to start small and iterate rapidly and incrementally.

That’s been the secret to our customers’ success… starting off with initial implementations of Watson and virtual assistant technology, and then building from there by adding human faces and emotion.

We’re heading into an era where people will spend a lot more time interfacing with AI-based systems—our goal is to make these interactions more natural, satisfying and meaningful.