Overview: Digital Transformation

Spectrm is one of the first ventures that allows publishers to create and manage so-called chatbots for delivering content to audiences over messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger, Slack and Telegram... niche articles, only available on certain publications, seem to be more popular than general news that’s widely available elsewhere... …

How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door... Smart young things joining the workforce soon discover that, although they have been selected for their intelligence, they are not expected to use it. ... After a few years of experience, they will find that the people who g…

When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence... Memorial bots ... seemed both inevitable and dangerous. ... is it really what’s beneficial for us? Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? ... Today’s bots remain imperfect mimics ... Any suggestion …

This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

Reaching consensus with groups larger than 5 people on any other platform or service is a pain. Discuto helps you get everyone on the same page.Discuto highlights controversies and suggests where to dive in the conversation, making the decision process easier to manage. What's more is that it only takes a few seconds to set up your first discussio…

it is very clear that ‘Digital Transformation’ is a difficult, ambiguous, misleading and even potentially dangerous term and we have to get better at explaining it... It’s not about digital or technology ... it does have everything to do with business models, people, culture, leadership and change... We should be aiming for nothing less than Hum…

A financial incentive and a paid coordinator were essential to the success of the project. The intangible that made the project really work, however, was the willingness on the part of Media Consortium members to work with each other... not have been possible without a trust-based network in place... At the beginning of the project, outlets asked…

This idea is counterintuitive for us bot-developers because it seems to go against the whole idea of natural language processing.But I quickly realized that suggesting questions was really important... who wants to physically type out an entire question?.. SelenaBot ... also does a quiz ... shows you tour dates, social media updates, lets you lis…

“We were keen to test on small niche audience... Bots will work better when they are more targeted.”... On the transfer deadline day ... 43 percent of chatbot subscribers clicked through ... On an average day ... closer to 23 percent. engagement is high because an individual is choosing to engage with it and the experience is ... personal... ca…

Within five years robots and so-called intelligent agents will eliminate many positions in customer service, trucking and taxi services, amounting to 6 percent of jobs... The bots of 2021 will be much better at understanding human language, and they will be better at learning from users and increasingly able to handle more complex scenarios.

This report is the first in a series to be issued at regular intervals as a part of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100).

Work management... the current state-of-the-practice in task management. Task management tools formerly were limited to a list of tasks... Nowadays, the most competitive tools incorporate social communications, like chat, @mentions, and messaging: these I consider work management tools, like Asana, Trello, and many others. I recently published a G…

Most bots today are a simple one and done... draw a crowd, people play with them temporarily only to disregard them minutes later... a huge opportunity for those of us who can create a remarkable experience... Here are a couple of insights:

Instead of pushing news, it’s going to gather news. ... It’s not only going to tell you funny, interesting, and insightful stuff. (Although it will.) It’s also going to ask questions... depending on whether you’re a conventiongoer, a protester, or watching along at home. And it will use those reactions and inbound information to inform BuzzFeed Ne…

to connect with protesters and delegates on the ground ... and to experiment with what it looks like to deploy a bot as a reporting assistant.Now we’re delighted to share the code behind it:

One of the most critical elements to creating a great bot is copywriting. The right words can keep your users engaged for hours while the wrong ones will leave them running for the hills... Your chatbot should have a single minded focus and anything that does not adhere to this focus should be stripped away.

so far, there has been no killer bot... we’re only four months into this... I believe we’ll look back on the early emphasis on “conversational commerce” as a mistake... natural language processing and artificial intelligence are not yet accomplished at managing human-like conversations... instant interactions are key.

some examples of a blended interface, bringing the best of the command line and GUI paradigms together... — notifications and quick input from the conversational side, along with a rich and intuitive experience from the GUI side... Each message has the potential to be a ,,, bite size applications like a photo carousel, media players, mini games, i…

This is the future of mobile news, as Quartz envisions it. In the app, which launches today and is Quartz’s first, you don’t read the news; you chat with it.

In response to "The Tyranny of Agile"... Don’t get me wrong — in theory it sounds great to release half-checked, bug-ridden websites for your users to check in the name of agile... But websites delivering actual governmental services really badly IRL can ruin people’s lives...

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

the company's newest tweak to its membership program is one that puts listeners in direct conversation with the company's staffers. The idea: Give Gimlet's members access to the company's Slack team

chatbots and other conversational services should be given the right to link to websites without the threat of legal action.

META Ventures provides venture capital fund management, entrepreneurial training and innovation consultancy to cities, regions and national governments in several countries, as well as EU Institutions.

we’re falling asleep at the wheel. Most people in charge of shaping cities ...  haven’t realized what is about to hit them and the speed at which it is coming...The advent of autonomous vehicles couldn’t have happened at a better time. Or a worse one. Here’s how to steer towards the better outcome.

enterprise software helps the user answer one or more of the following questions:What’s important? (Surface relevant information)What do I do next? (Support decision making)How do I do it? (Facilitate action)... the conversational interface answers all three of the above questions better than the software tools we have today... Dashboards today …

Here are some considerations if you are thinking of building a conversational product or weaponizing an existing product for the bot age.

Key takeaways from this post include knowing what’s needed to understand user activity, and seeing some pipeline architectures that support this analysis.

Salesforce’s Peter Coffee offers a singular analysis of the meaning of singularity and its key consequences.

Slack, already an indispensable tool within newsrooms, is becoming a surprisingly effective community tool for publishers as well... quickly become a source of stories, with members providing inspiration or even direct contributions.