This seems unlikely as we were all still sitting on inflatable furniture in 1997, listening to The Spice Girls and Chumbawumba.
Terminator told us that ‘Judgement Day’ was 29th August 1997 – Skynet, the ultimate rogue government AI system, became self-aware and decided humans were a threat. Its first move? Launch a full-scale nuclear strike on Russia, which then triggered a global retaliation.
Then Skynet started building its robot army of Terminators to wipe out the survivors and secure its own future. You would have every right then to be dutifully terrified of the moment of Singularity and the AI based future ahead of us.
There is no doubt the pervasive nature of tech as it slowly seeps into every aspect of our lives is going to lead to major changes for us all, and that the speed of this change is going to increase significantly in the coming years as the exponential growth curve accelerates. We only need to look at ChatGPT’s parameters (the measure of knowledge the model has learned) to understand how this is changing – on its initial launch in Chat GPT-3 had 175 billion parameters; by the time Chat GPT-4 arrived this had increased to 1.7 Trillion. This means in only two years, we have seen a 500% improvement in its capabilities. In addition to this its important to remember, this is the WORST it will ever be and the slowest it will ever be improving; it is only going to speed up from here.
It is perfectly reasonable then to be utterly terrified at the rate of change and frankly bewildered at how all of this will affect you in a positive way – but there is no need to worry.
Firstly, whilst the rate of change is significant and increasing, we are all on this journey of change together. Secondly, and most importantly, this opens up huge opportunities for us all to be more efficient with our time, reducing the volume of painstaking administrative dross that we all have to suffer with.
A great example of this is within my own business at Agency Express. We provide a daily For Sale board service solution to UK estate agents by way of storing their personalised ‘For Sale’ boards and then erecting, adjusting and maintaining their signage outside their marketed properties across the country. This means thousands and thousands of job requests are received on a daily basis from over 7,000 estate agency branches around the UK which are all fed into our business management system – Signmaster.
Signmaster then uses all kinds of tech wizardry to allocate the work to the correct franchisee, provide them with details of their stock requirements to complete the work and ultimately planning the job list route to ensure we are burning the least amount of fuel, and completing the most amount of work. The franchisee simply needs to complete the task and take a picture via the interactive mobile app to show the board looking awesome outside the house. That’s it, the tech does the rest.
If I look back in time to 1997 (when Skynet allegedly became sentient) to see how far we’ve come I’m reminded that back then literally everything was done manually. Route lists, stock management, invoices etc – all paper based, requiring a human to engage brain and not make mistakes. In a 27 years, we have gone from a completely manual process, to an almost completely digital one; however one key element still remains almost exactly the same – The franchisee putting the board up outside the house.
Try as it might, technology will not change the fact that humans are technical marvels all in themselves and the relationships they hold with other humans are what make the magic happen for franchise businesses. There is no such thing as B2B businesses or B2C businesses; they are all human-to-human businesses, and for now at least that cannot be replicated.
So be excited for what the future holds – the AI Revolution will change all of our lives in unimaginable ways, and I suspect for the better.
Afterall, Arnie hasn’t arrived in a ball of lightning yet, and that can only be a good sign for us all.
