Ben Lamm

We are at the infancy of the biotech industry’s adoption of machine learning tools. But, over the next 20 years, a more “multidisciplinary and data-intensive approach to life sciences will shift our understanding of and ability to manipulate living matter.” However, lack of data sophistication is limiting the potential for rapid advancement right now. And, in my opinion, the more we wait, the more we will fall behind.

To mark the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park, Colossal CEO Ben Lamm shares how the movie influenced his company’s plans to de-extinct animals

To ensure AI fulfills its potential, we must democratize the technology to avoid allowing it to be yet another driver of inequality. Here's how we start.

We should all be actively involved in collective work, meaning work not focused on the next big quarter but instead on tearing down the collective apathy of our future.

The growing rift between technology companies and the U.S. government will harm our national security. We must act now to align private and public interests to rapidly scale our technology capabilities and ensure our tax dollars are spent wisely and, potentially, profitably. The best way to do this is to fund AI through a coordinated approach that brings together our country’s technology innovators and public servants.

Celebrities who back causes are more desired by consumers now

Technology entrepreneur Ben Lamm outlines three space opportunities for budding founders not interested in building hardware.

There are plenty of problems on Earth that need fixing before we imprint ourselves on another planet. Should we really be spending money and resources on space exploration when we haven’t adequately addressed our own terrestrial crises?

The biggest marketing moment of the 2020s won’t be the next Olympic games or the Super Bowl. It will be when we land on the moon for the second time. The U.S. government has plans to land on the moon by 2024 with both a male and a female astronaut. Like in 1969, it will be a moment that captures the attention of the globe. It will also fuel a major marketing gold rush.

While the Amazon plays a vital role in global carbon absorption (and we should continue to try and save it), between 1994 and 2007, our oceans absorbed 34 gigatons of the world’s carbon through algae, vegetation, and coral. In other words, the trees might not save us—but the oceans could.

AI and other tech are making it easier to reach consumers in this way

The lessons I learned can be used by anyone who’s looking to explore a new opportunity outside their current field.

Artificial intelligence is not the enemy here

Whether consciously or not, most of us are influenced by bias, and AI can highlight this in unsettling ways. But this isn't a reason to be afraid. It’s a reason to charge ahead, not only for the betterment of business and the growth of technology, but for the betterment of everyone.

The Future of Advertising

Millenials Are Killing the Deception Economy

A recent Gartner report predicts that by 2020, 80% of AI projects will remain alchemy — technology that might as well be magic — when it comes to employee understanding. This lack of understanding matters because when employees don't understand AI, implementations go wrong. Still, we shouldn't place the burden on employees to change. Instead, the tech needs to be more accessible, instead of expecting the skills gap to shrink. We need to make AI more user friendly, less wonky, so that we can… Show more

A recent Gartner report predicts that by 2020, 80% of AI projects will remain alchemy — technology that might as well be magic — when it comes to employee understanding. This lack of understanding matters because when employees don't understand AI, implementations go wrong. Still, we shouldn't place the burden on employees to change. Instead, the tech needs to be more accessible, instead of expecting the skills gap to shrink. We need to make AI more user friendly, less wonky, so that we can achieve increased and effective adoption. Show less

Information gleaned from satellites can offer fascinating insights into consumer preferences

What the space industry has taught us is that shifting from a 'me' to an 'us' mindset is motivating. Does your marketing reflect that?

In September 2018 the Pentagon announced it would invest up to $2 billion over five years in development of artificial intelligence (AI).

Legacy companies that do so often see a sizeable shift in ROI

The 88% of companies hanging out in the middle of their digital transformation journey are officially dead.

The opportunities in space exploration, tourism and colonization are vast, if you know where to look.

Without any rules in place, the probability of international conflict from an extraterrestrial incident is quickly escalating

History will remember Musk as one of our generation's greatest inventors. And yet we're doing everything we can to shoot him down.

The dissonance between the long-standing application of AI and the mystique that still manages to surround it has always been an underlying tension. However, the hype around AI seems to be reaching extreme levels.

Artificial intelligence could be man’s best friend in the race for survival. Worrying about robots taking away jobs is missing the woods for the trees.

The idea that you need to have a big company to use sophisticated technology is understandable as a belief, but it’s also wrong. While a lot of people think that great, transformative technology is expensive and unrealistic as a business owner, this simply isn’t the case.

AI has become the new Ford assembly line, and I think it’s the worst thing that can happen to the technology.

Humans don’t handle change well, and nothing illustrates that more than a technological breakthrough. Of course, it’s nothing new. The same debates about media attend most every advancement. Socrates, the architect of Western philosophy, was wary that writing would make people more forgetful.

Heroes are not created equal. Most people recognize the name Sully Sullenberger, but far fewer can tell you what Alan Turing did during World War II. Fewer still could tell you that Turing was chemically castrated because he was gay, and committed suicide shortly thereafter. But thanks for bringing one of the most horrifying wars in history to an abrupt end, I guess?

Tech is suffering from a fundamental imbalance. Everyone wants to be a visionary without realizing they need to be salesmen, too. It's a widespread and shocking oversight. We constantly bemoan the lack of technical talent, citing shortages of talent in fields like engineering and computer science, but don't realize we're facing a similar crisis in a role that essentially every business needs.

Some brands are still wary of incorporating AI into their customer engagement strategy. They would argue that they’re technology skeptics—I would argue that they’re technology ignorant. If you haven’t already started implementing AI into your customer engagement touchpoints, you’re losing on all fronts. From cohesive brand messaging to higher employee satisfaction, AI is the tool you need for your business.

In an ideal future, automation will open new roles within a company in areas where humans best excel -- strategic, creative and managerial roles. According to a Gartner study, AI will create 2.3 million new jobs by 2020 -- that’s half a million more than it’s expected to remove. With such an affirmative number, people have assumed that AI will make our jobs easier, and employees who are replaced by machines will be moved up to more cognitively stimulating positions.

Artificial Intelligence will free us from the mundane, but how still depends on us

Despite the holier-than-thou reputation, at the end of the day, VC money is borrowed money just like any other. That means, explicit or not, there's a repayment timeline. For an entire fund, the payment window is usually 10 years, with the first five serving as the investment window and the latter five representing the window for the money return. Entrepreneurs slot in all along this timeline, with each subsequent year squeezing them a little tighter and heightening the expectations for a… Show more

Despite the holier-than-thou reputation, at the end of the day, VC money is borrowed money just like any other. That means, explicit or not, there's a repayment timeline. For an entire fund, the payment window is usually 10 years, with the first five serving as the investment window and the latter five representing the window for the money return. Entrepreneurs slot in all along this timeline, with each subsequent year squeezing them a little tighter and heightening the expectations for a quick-turn on obscene profits. Show less

Conversational insight is the most effective tool brands have ever had. Last year, veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg denounced online ads for ruining the online experience. The model is bad for everyone, as advertisers and online sites scrabble over quality control and the fight for cheap digital real estate.

With each new technology rolled out to market, the viable reactionary period for businesses is shrinking.

I cried this morning. I thought about how many people were relying on me to make the right decisions and how much those decisions had the potential to hurt the people I know and love if they went wrong. If I had a nickel for every night I fell asleep scared stiff about failure, I could fund my next five businesses.

The wave of digitizing and innovation happening in manufacturing officially has a name: Industry 4.0. It captures the breadth and depth of change sweeping through the industry. McKinsey has called it the "fourth major upheaval in modern manufacturing," likening the change to 1970s revolution, 1990s outsourcing and 2000s automation.

Bots have been hyped for years. 2016 was going to be the year of the bot. Then 2017. Chatbots have become the punchline for every snarky technologist feigning an understanding of where NLP, AI, and ML technologies currently stand. Which means we’re right on track.

At some point in the past 30 years, the business world made the mistake of equating change with progress.

The 2018 artificial intelligence landscape looks an awful lot like the Sharper Image catalog. It's chock full of products that were built merely because we can build them, and because they're marketable. Much like these products, too much of the AI on the market today is disposable novelty technology. Nobody conducted market research to determine the total addressable market for bacon toasters.

AI allows companies to explore the new channels and initiatives, and even test at scale, without betting the entire business or sacrificing current successful strategy.

IBM Watson’s 2011 debut stunned the world by defeating some of Jeopardy’s finest champions. Seven years later, Watson’s greatest achievement is, err, still that Jeopardy win oh so many years ago. The Watson launch was a mass market striptease that had the world in awe of the potential of AI. It inspired a generation of technologists to set their sites on AI. But while it helped to end the so-called “AI-winters,” it has yet to produce an enterprise-viable technology.

In 2003 Nick Carr declared that IT had become a ubiquitous commodity with no competitive advantage. Since then cloud computing has eliminated any remaining strategic value in traditional IT organizations. You are not going to outrun your competitors because you purchased better office supplies. Speed is now the commodity we’re all bidding for. To win you need to produce radical efficiency gains, the likes of which haven’t been seen since businesses went digital in the first place. Those gains… Show more

In 2003 Nick Carr declared that IT had become a ubiquitous commodity with no competitive advantage. Since then cloud computing has eliminated any remaining strategic value in traditional IT organizations. You are not going to outrun your competitors because you purchased better office supplies. Speed is now the commodity we’re all bidding for. To win you need to produce radical efficiency gains, the likes of which haven’t been seen since businesses went digital in the first place. Those gains will be brought to you by artificial intelligence. Show less

Most brand experiences will be delivered through AI by 2025. The only question is whether your brand will still exist.

You don't need to brainwash your employees, but they should be obsessed with your mission. I laugh out loud when I hear executives yammering on and on about building great cultures. It sounds good at first, until you soon realize it’s just a bunch of the same Care Bear speaking points the marketing department dreamed up over a brown bag lunch or stolen from Facebook or Google.

We are more comfortable having conversations with machines than ever before. In fact, by 2020, the average person will have more conversations with bots than with their spouse. Twenty-seven percent of consumers weren’t sure if their last customer service interaction was with a human or a chatbot.

In 2017, we finally began to see chatbots break into more mainstream usage among consumers. There are a number of factors propelling this usage, from the rising influence of messaging services over social networks to businesses finally committing to an AI future where bots and automated assistants will play an increasingly important role.

Fueled by the exponential proliferation of big data, advances in AI have grown with unprecedented speed over the past decade. Programming AI is no longer an arduous process of building it line by line. Rather, AI is able to learn by itself, from itself. And the market has taken notice. In 2016, the enterprise market demand for AI-related products reached more than $8 billion.

In 2015, the shift from social to messaging ultimately created the perfect environment for the bot and automation ecosystem to emerge. While the bot market still has some maturation to do, we’re already seeing an outgrowth of conversational commerce that I call “conversational care.”

Bots hit the scene so quickly in 2016 that many people have started to wonder if they’re just a temporary fad that will give way to a new technology this year or next. What these people fail to realize is that bots never mattered. They didn’t matter when Microsoft announced its Bot Framework; they didn’t matter when Facebook announced its bot platform. They still don’t matter today.

There is a difference between an entrepreneur and small-business owner.

It’s not just about tech, it’s about experience. The tech industry would have you think that bots are fundamentally changing the way we interact with the web. Some argue that bots mark the end of the era of mobile apps. I argue that your business shouldn’t care about what bots mean to the tech world. Focus on what they mean for your customer’s experience with your brand.

2016 was all go for bots. Now, it’s a question of sustainability. In this post, I lay out the risks of brands moving too fast – how it’s possible to buy too much AI, walk before you run, and do too much too soon when it comes to your AI and conversational interface strategy. Then, I laid out key considerations for responsible approach to bots.

In just eight years, the smartphone has changed how people interact with the world and with businesses, from customer service to commerce to content and beyond. And more change is coming. Every company that has a mobile app or call center is going to have to interact with customers through myriad channels. Messaging will become the primary path for customer interaction over the next five years. It will displace call centers. It will replace or augment mobile apps.

To stay alive and thrive in today's oil and gas industry, updating archaic software is a smart start to attracting top talent.

When we hire, brilliance and experience are essential, but what’s just as crucial is culture fit. Here are my rules for how to build a killer business.

Link on Chaotic Moon Blog:
http://www.chaoticmoon.com/chaos-theory/6-tips-building-amazing-company-chaotic-moon-ceo-ben-lamm-breaks-abj/

We combined next-gen technologies with digital behavior trends to create an Immersive Learning system that can train students and entrepreneurs on anything, anywhere, with better neurological results.

When it comes to the future of in-car technology for developers, service providers, and retailers, they need to think about the 3 Cs: Connectivity, Context, and Consultation.

Title Changed By Publication: If You Can't Beat Them, Buy Them

A look at the Internet of Things/connected device ecosystem, outsourced R&D, and Kickstarter as an incubator for corporations.