David Schmaier

speaker

51 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

David Schmaier’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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3 Takeaways™ · AI: How It’s Being Used Now, What’s Next, and What’s After That (#231) · 7 Jan 2025 podcast

And we showed a live simulation where a customer in the pre-agent world tried to return a sweater through customer service at Saks Fifth Ave and went through the normal phone tree for customer service. If you know the name of the person you're trying to reach, type it in now. If you'd like to talk to somebody in one of our stores for our store directory, punch straight in.

That's not great customer service in our opinion. And so what we showed is a working agent that we literally built in minutes for Saks Fifth Ave with their CEO and their chief technology officer, where you could talk to this agent and literally have a conversation with the agent and say, Hey, I bought the sweater. It's a size medium.

I'd like to exchange it for a large cause it doesn't quite fit right. and you're literally having a conversation like you and I are having a conversation now, but it's not with the person, it's with an autonomous AI agent.

I'm sure you and all the listeners out there have used chatbots before. And this is way beyond that chatbot experience in a number of different reasons. First, the chatbot experience feels very robotic. And the reason it feels robotic is in many ways it is. It's programmed with if-then-else stuff. So if you say this, then it should say that.

And if you say that, then it should say this next thing. And first of all, that's very brittle because it's hard to anticipate what people say because people are unpredictable and the situations are unpredictable that customers have. So now with a AI large language model underneath the reasoning engine that reasons just like you and I do, now the AI can listen It can learn.

And with voice AI, as we showed at our Dreamforce conference, if you Google this sex video at Dreamforce, you can see this live. We created an agent called Sophie. We are literally talking to Sophie and having a real live conversation with Sophie. And in this demonstration, we show that Sophie offers to return the sweater via FedEx directly.

in three days, but the scenario we were showing is the customer needs it tomorrow, which is a real life situation that you couldn't possibly anticipate with the chatbot. And so the reasoning engine says, oh, well, instead of getting the new sweater by FedEx, you can stop by our local San Francisco store, which is three blocks away, and you can get it in two hours. Would that work for you?

and that's real customer service that's the kind of memorable magical customer experience that we think all of us want and in the year 2024 when you have an amazing customer experience you never never forget it and we think there's going to be more of that in this agent ai agent world and in our agentic future

Sure. We are working with one of the largest healthcare companies in the world. Healthcare is a big business for us. And there's a, what I would call fragmented customer experience with most healthcare companies today. You know, you get your labs, you go in for your physical, and then you get your diagnostic information. And then you go to a generalist who has to refer you to a specialist.

And it really is kind of maddening how complicated it is. And, you know, I'm not a doctor. And as far as I know, Lynn, I don't think you are. But you feel like you need to go to medical school because you're now the advocate for your own patient journey. And so what if you imagine this future where you had a medical concierge, your own AI physician,

that was working on your behalf every single day that was helping you throughout this entire process and reading the imagery looking at diagnostic information understanding your profile versus mine versus someone else's and it could really walk you through that whole experience that would include text or emailing it and be reading the email conversations back and forth. It would include voice.

So you might be talking to this AI agent. It might be not only looking at images, but reading images to understand what's going on. It might be accessing medical databases to look at other other people with similar types of lab results that you have to diagnose problems. And so our view is that AI works in concert with humans. So that might not all happen today entirely with AI.

And if there's a question that the AI can't answer, it transfers the call back and forth. So we think it's going to be AI and humans working together hand in hand. But this medical concierge example is a perfect example of how multimodal could be live in action in all of our lives coming soon.

Well, there's no question that AI changes everything. And the world will never be the same with generative AI and with agents and with robots and ultimately AGI in the future. So we're going into this AI future full speed. Now, that doesn't mean that there won't be any jobs in the future. Every prior technology revolution like the Internet and e-commerce and social

pundits have theorized that all the jobs are going away. And in fact, what you would find if you examine those other technology trends is employment, in fact, increased. It didn't decrease due to those trends. And so we still go into the bank branch, even though we have digital banking and we still call people, even though we can also slack them or email them using the Internet.

So it's surprising that the world doesn't change quite as fast

as sometimes people imagine and this is an opportunity not a problem and it's going to reduce a lot of the monotonous work so it's really going to stimulate human creativity i believe it's really going to stimulate innovation and it's going to allow us to do the best work of our careers but there's no question it's going to change what people are going to do in the future what they did in the past there are certainly occupations

in the 1900s that are not thriving today. And there's new disciplines like computer programming or becoming a data scientist that didn't exist 100 years ago.

Can you talk about that? It makes perfect sense, Lynn, if you think about it. So now I have an AI agent that I can talk to, that I can text with, that I can read my emails and understand them, that really understands who I am and what I want. And now I can put that AI agent into a physical device. And so that will happen in business. like the Waymo example in the autonomous car.

That will happen in the household where I think there'll be personal robots, literally right out of iRobot from Isaac Asimov and that AI future. We're going to put these AI agents and this semantic reasoning capability with guardrails

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