I Didn’t Write This, My Personabot Did

• Feb 24th, 2010
• Posted by Ron
• Posted in Fun Theory, Future, Good Ideas, Personabots, Photobooths, SMC Seattle, Seattle Events, Social Media

Last night’s SMC Seattle event at Swedish was one for the history books, or one for the future books, depending on how you look at things. The social media Twitterati were out in force, yet again, to sell out another SMC Seattle event which featured Gartner analyst Adam Sarner. Sarner’s talk focused on how the Web will look in the future as it relates to CRM – definitely an intriguing topic given the crowd on hand.

Basing the majority of his talk on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Sarner wove a tale of a Web-filled future where Personabots (automated, personality infused, self-learning, self-replicating, virtual representatives that will be used as a tool for facilitating life events) do our bidding in the virtual world, thus enhancing our actual lives in the meat space. Sound a little like the Matrix? My favorite example was a person sending out 10,000 Personabots on 10,000 speed dates to find women that the man would be compatible with.  Sign me up— that’ll cut my bar tabs significantly.

If you can get past the actual thought of thousands of Rons running around the virtual world, the leap to a future where online personas become testing and learning grounds for not only how we as humans live, but how businesses and brands interact in that future environment the possibilities open right up. Sarner spoke a bit about how brands would interact with Personabots in these virtual environments and take on characteristics of those Personabots they come in contact with by using the example of someone noticing a tennis racket in the back of someone’s car and using that as a conversation starter. Much in the same way, Sarner sees these virtual brand ambassadors taking stock of traits, likes, and dislikes in Personabots and using those characteristics to communicate in the virtual world. When you think about it, it’s basically what Facebook is doing when serving you ads already except it’s you, not your Personabot who sees the ads.

We try not to make wide-sweeping generalizations about what we think the future of computing and the Web will look like (we’ll leave that to Gartner), but you can bet we’re pretty excited to send our Personabots out into the wild virtual world to go skydiving.

Also, for those of you born in at Swedish (or have had a child there), you can join the Swedish Facebook page just for you: http://www.facebook.com/swedishbabies. Our very own Aaron Graham is a Swedish baby, so you’ll soon see him sporting his t-shirt.

Again, and we can’t say it enough, a big thanks to the SMC Board and Swedish for making this happen.  After getting a chance to try out the Da Vinci robot, we’re trying to write a business case for buying one for the SCG offices. We’ll let you know how that goes.

For a snark-free look at the talk, check out Veronica Sopher’s post Jeramy Rich’s post on the SMC Seattle site.

Local company PM Photobooth was on hand to take wacky pictures – Aaron obliged.