Dear Reader,
I'm at IMEX America talking with event professionals about creating amazing experiences. It's also nearly Diwali, my favorite holiday and a time when we are attending many South Asian experiences in person to celebrate and also support my wife's book about Diwali (read more about that below!). And in stories this week, you'll real about a creative insight from the world's quietest room, what a sensory haptic ai device might teach us about the future of pets and more, and how expertise of all sorts is being scaled in AI people might actually trust.
Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!
Rohit
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What I Learned About Events From IMEX America
I've spent the early part of this week at the IMEX America Trade Show here in Vegas, which is the largest trade show for the business events industry. Nearly every destination, hotel and venue are all pitching themselves to event planners in the hopes of attracting more live events in the coming year and beyond. As I spoke with attendees and attended sessions, I got a new appreciation for what event planners go through when planning events often more than a year before speakers like me ever show up.
Everyone at IMEX believes in the power of in-person gatherings. In most companies, the budget to run an event needs to be a priority amongst the many other things that money could be allocated for. In this sense, everyone is cooperating together to convince the business world to spend more on events.
You have alignment throughout IMEX on destinations. The team from one city would rather you book your event there and not anywhere else. Within those cities, there are different hotels and venues that want to stand out as the best option for their market. Then you have the chain hotels - where one would rather you book an event at any one of their properties (regardless of destination) than to take your business to another hotel group. And the format for the event is all pre-booked meetings, which leaves little time for serendipity or human conversations.
The point is, you could experience IMEX and choose to see an us vs. them environment where someone wins only at the expense of someone else and everything is transactional. But then there are the attendees. I was part of some wonderful gatherings of event planners who support one another in groups like Club Ichi. I sat in on a session led by my friend Andrea Driessen all about sending people messages that matter and connecting more deeply. Event planners are masters at creating moments for human connection. That was the central irony of this week and the entire event for me.
On the surface and in its format, IMEX feels like a cutthroat place where destinations go head to head for dollars and every meeting has an endgame. But outside the trade show floor, it's also a place where people in the notoriously high stress events industry find support, bonding and real human conversations. Of course, this isn't really a surprise when you consider the humans attending are the ones who have dedicated their careers to creating these sorts of spaces for the rest of us. Naturally, they manage to find and build it for each other too.
Welcome To the Next Generation of Empathetic Tech - Haptic AI Companions
What will make AI more real? When my dog sees me coming, there's an anticipation of play. His tail wags. I see him getting excited. Our interaction is physical and that's what makes it real ... and impossible for AI to duplicate. Perhaps not anymore. The Trutru Haptic is a device built by a Hong Kong University that can simulate real sensations:
"An amorphous, jelly-like creature with a diffused glow, TruTru is designed to be held close, clipped on, and kept nearby. Its advanced haptic system can replicate textures of natural and man-made materials like stone, sand, feather, and fabric as well as ephemeral sensations including rippling water, falling rain, and the flutter of wings."
The Trutru can glow when anticipating touch. It has four modes that respond to context clues, mood, and intention. It has settings to optimize for sleeping, meditating and even a mode that is designed for interacting with kids during play. Future imagined uses include clinical settings to aid people dealing with anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, Autism, or dementia.
On one hand, the idea of AI technology like this becoming more attuned to human needs and offering another dimension of empathy is a great thing. The other view is that this continues to strip away the elements of experiences that feel genuinely human. What do you think? Would you get a Trutru to try for yourself - and why or why not?
What the World's Quietest Room Can Teach You About Brainstorming
Imagine a room so quiet you can actually feel your own heart beating. It exists already and it's known as an anechoic chamber. Over the past months, there have been several videos of people doing everything from popping a balloon to screaming just to see how it sounds. Having this sort of silence, apparently, is it's own form of sensory depravation with many people sharing that the experience just feels unnatural in many ways.
This sort of experiential room, though, opens many possibilities for how creators of experiences might make something new and different or augment existing experiences. I love stories about places and experiments like this because of the chance they offer to imagine the unimagined. This is how I like to brainstorm. No end point or objective. No revenue target. Just a new technology as a basis for thinking in new directions. To that end, what's the best idea you can come up with for how to use a room like this? Best idea wins a signed copy of Non-Obvious Thinking and I'll share it in the newsletter next week!
AI Matchmaking and How Expertise Is About To Be Scaled
There is an elite $2000-per-month matchmaking service called Three Day Rule that made news this week for their choice to create an AI matchmaking app based on their methods. In a dating world where some people are resorting to paying for a billboard to find a potential husband, people are desperate for alternatives. Talking about the value that a human matchmaker has always had over algorithms, founder Adam Cohen-Aslatei describes the reason for creating the app like this:
"He’s become convinced that [human] matchmaking is the most effective dating option out there. He argues that, on dating apps, users are looking for a match that meets their requirements on paper—standards that, oftentimes, are preventing them from taking healthy risks. Matchmakers are trained to take those preferences into consideration while also encouraging clients to try people slightly outside their comfort zone."
Users will report back on whether they feel this new app does truly recreate the human touch, but the story does point to a wider insight. The future of AI tools that people truly love and advocate for may all start this way: with a real human expert deciding to recreate the best of what they do in an automated way that scales. An AI tool that can make sculptures might be a fun but frivolous exercise. A tool created by a renowned sculptor, though, to bring their work to more people? That would be different.
Of course the question is whether enough real experts would be willing to have themselves duplicated (and perhaps eventually supplanted) in this way. Yet in the case of business experts, there are already prominent examples of brilliant minds allowing AI tools to be trained on their insights to allow them to coach more people than they ever could in person. Every expert that chooses to do this can legitimize the idea for another expert in a related (or unrelated) industry.
