Or quatercentenary. It’s this newsletter’s 400th issue. I understand that this may not be as important to you as, say, Priyanka Gandhi Vadera joining politics or Priyanka Chopra Jonas stepping out for dinner with her sister-in-law. If you visit Google trends you will realise that the only topics of interest to a large audience are politics, movies and sports. All of which broadly fall under the category of entertainment. The majority are not searching for topics like AI, RPA, IoT. One could conclude that most people are more excited by Black Mirror than the actual consequences of preparing for an AI-first world.
Of course, this narrows down those eligible to capitalise on an AI-first world to those who are actually paying attention. So while we were all drooling over yet another Priyanka all-black outfit with a nice coat, she was off investing in Bumble which helps with networking, dating and friendship using AI. The app claims 50 million users (I did download the app, but could not find a practical use.) and has a fancy long-form video ad which I could not understand. Her fellow investors include Serena Williams from that other popular category, sports.
See? The trends don’t lie. If you’d like to be where the trendy people are, you need to get into AI and robotic process automation (RPA). I had the privilege of meeting Bobby Patrick, CMO of UiPath one of the hottest firms in the robotic process automation (RPA) space. The basic premise is that everyone should have a bot and that it will take over the repetitive work, like, looking at Google Trends. Unlike humans it will not get distracted and click those juicy celeb links, nor will it get bored doing the same stuff. I like. We’ll have to evolve in order to handle this transition to having robotic colleagues – read the interview here to figure out how to survive and thrive.
400 issues ago, China had just overtaken Japan to become the world’s 2nd largest economy. WikiLeaks and Cablegate were big news. MakeMyTrip had just debuted on Nasdaq. Instagram had just been launched (how did we survive?!). And Google Buzz was buzzing.
It’s been an exciting ride! Looking forward to the next 400!
