You might argue that Sundstrand – the chief executive and founder of Swedish video tech pioneer Phyron – would say that, wouldn’t he? The company has been developing its own AI-powered software, and has designed it to be able to identify the best and most relevant selling points of each individual car and combines still images with a data feed, facts and figures about the car, brand imagery and retailer services into what Phyron calls “relevant, highly effective videos”.
This rather seems to ignore the potential for mass unemployment in the car trade. In Ireland, some 30,000 people are employed either directly or indirectly in the process of selling and servicing cars, and a fully enabled car-sales chatbot could take an awful lot of those jobs out of commission. And, indeed, wouldn’t need to be paid commission.
The process works by Phyron’s tech using a data feed from a car dealer, including at least three still images and key product details. The AI then identifies the key properties in the images, including various shot angles, interior elements and exterior highlights, and then strips out the backgrounds and replaces them with a neutral one.
Relatively simple AI tech such as this could be the thin end of the unemployment wedge, unless its creation and deployment is handled incredibly delicately. A report by Goldman Sachs earlier this year suggested that generative AI – that’s AI that is truly indistinguishable from a human, blowing the Turing Test out of the water – could replace the equivalent of 300 million jobs globally.