Philip Eng

Phillip- Great article! My company is dealing with the same problems with demand, supply, and production. Our team is particularly segmented between the selling department and the maintenance/customer service department- during the pandemic, our Sales team which works from home, was not effected in the slightest and continued to sell as normal. My production and customer service teams, both of which works in-house, were sent home for temporary pauses in production, and then were sent home to work from home- something that’s never been done before. While the two support teams struggled to find a groove that works for them, the Sales team continued to sell at full tilt. This has created a divide between departments farther than I’ve ever seen. We are currently trying to find ways to reduce this gap, and the only clear solutions would be to incorporate technology and new equipment that alleviates this divide. Currently trying to show my team the benefits of AI.

Thanks for this personal insight! While I don’t work in production, I definitely feel your pain as it is similar to what our company has dealt with. At the beginning of the pandemic, I honestly had not thought about all the new launches/products coming out that production had to put on hold while being in lockdown, simply because they couldn’t work from home. Luckily, they were one of the first departments to go back, while many of us are still refraining from doing so because of the nature of our jobs.

Similar to automation in production, I think the same can be said about warehouse jobs. What you said about e-commerce booming, but production being limited struck a chord. Not only did that happen 6 months ago, but what is continuing to happen is we are constantly backed up with e commerce orders/returns/exchanges; due to pandemic restrictions, we have limited staff in our warehouses. So while customers are able to shop online all day and get things sent to their door with the click of a button, we sometimes cannot meet those needs as quickly as we’d like. RPA and AI would definitely be helpful in the assembly line as well as warehouse!

Thanks for sharing Phillip! It’s really interesting reading about the struggles the manufacturing industry as incurred because of COVID-19. We’ve actually been on the other end of those struggles. Thanks to the appliance shortage (https://www.pennlive.com/coronavirus/2020/08/pandemic-causes-national-appliance-shortage-ive-never-seen-the-demand-like-it-is-now.html), it took us months to get a new washing machine after ours broke. It would have been a lot more convenient if manufacturing facilities had already perfected the AI and RPA technologies that you mentioned in your article before the pandemic so a new washing machine could have been available for us sooner. However, there needs to be some thought to the human side of this work. Manufacturing facilities employ such an enormous amount of workers around the world. What would happen to all of these people’s jobs if everything immediately became automated? I think that’s something that the industry is going to have to consider if this technology is ever perfected to the level where mass amounts of workers could be replaced.

Social distancing inside a production facility is not something I had thought of before. You are right, this could greatly speed up the integration of automation into the production process. This could be a double hit to works who are unemployed because of COVID and now have no job to return to because of robots.

Hi Phillip!
I think Apple and Microsoft have build two totally different app-download platforms, and I tend to think that their individual methods work best for their audiences… For example, Apple’s deep-pay but highly secure purchasing platform also utilizes a stricter sense of app approval- meaning some apps on the Microsoft store or other platforms never make it to Apple because their app requirements are usually much higher than other competitors. This results in a high-end play store, with only the best of the best purchased and displayed. On the other end, Microsoft operates as a more open forum, where coders that meet a certain standard can post their products to get to a wider audience without a lot of security and approval measures. This makes a lower-end economic play store that is attractive to a wider audience that may not care for the luxury or high-end of the Apple store.

I find it funny that Apple and Google are siting data security as the reason for the high fees. Apple is a little better, but they both do all kinds of things with our data that we do not want them to. My fear with this 30% is how much of it is being based onto the user. If a company knows it needs to sell at $5 to make a profit, and they know they will loose 30%, they will charge the user $7 to cover the fees. So, me as a user is paying two extra dollars because of Apple’s and Google’s money grabs.

Thank you for sharing this article Philip. I have just seen videos of a prank going around where a wife repeatedly speaks baby related words into her husbands phone and the husband becomes confused as to why he is receiving all these baby ads out of nowhere. I think this goes to show how well known it is that our everyday devices are actually listening and not just tracking our searches. Technology is such a new industry and is changing so fast that I think its hard for the government to keep up with laws and regulations to match its.

While I understand that the data collected from voice assistants is very useful to marketers/advertisers, from a consumer side I do think it’s creepy when my phone pulls up an add for something I was just talking about! This is one of the reasons we don’t have an Alexa and we keep the microphone on our Google Home off (we basically just use it as a speaker). I mentioned this in another comment on someone else’s post, but I wish companies would be more transparent about this kind of thing. If I am going to use a voice recognition service, I think it would be more ethical for a company to tell me explicitly that they are going to be listening and pulling data from what I’m saying. However, like Chand mentions above, I do think the major problem is that the government cannot keep up with technological changes fast enough to create regulations that would protect us. Is it putting too much onus on corporations to expect them to behave ethically when there is no incentive to do so from the government?

I’m surprised with Siri that Iphone’s aren’t able to unlock our phones based on voice command. Google and Siri spend so much time listening to us that they haven’t enacted this innovation. When I think of the future, I think of everything being voice-activated. Communication is key to data tracking; instead, it’s in written or verbal form and then stored. Without proper government regulations, then I believe technology should halt. Technology is built upon replacing humans anyway, so consumers should want to regulate a happy-medium between us and the tech world.

I would not doubt that our apps are listening when “active”. My next-door neighbor swears that her phone is listening because of the same point you mentioned regarding adds displaying a short time after a conversation. Personally, I don’t use siri that often, so I just turn Siri’s listening capability off on both my phone and watch. I lean toward the side of caution when considering if I want to convert my house to a smart home, or not. It just concerns me how much access we are providing these platforms through all our internet connected devices with no barriers of entry.

I can’t count how many times I’ve come across an Ad after talking about what was being advertised (And though it may sound crazy I’ve even seen Ads after thinking about a product/service). Like everyone else mentioned, I believe this level of data sharing is unethical with permissions but I also see how consumers could benefit from being reminded of things that are on our mind, if permitted. For example, I believe that I have the worst memory especially for a relatively young person. I can think or even talk about something and if I don’t write it down, I can completely forget the topic, plan and train of thought. I personally would opt in to these devices listening to my conversations (sometimes) but I would at the same time want it to be my prerogative. Thanks for this post!

I am glad to see so many people taking steps to prevent companies from getting information on them. However, there is little you can do at this time, short of not using the technology. I found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S35_BfymTgE . It talks about how even on airplane mode and not connected to the internet, your phone still tracks and stores information about your travels. Then as soon as you hook it up to something, it sends all that data someplace.

As a marketer I am torn. On the one hand, I think the amount of real time data is unbelievable useful. Not just for mass customization, but also for measuring returns from those ads. On the other hand, I think it is a dangerously slippery slope. However, I see this also as a branding opportunity. Duck duck go has started making a name for itself as a privacy minded search engine. As more consumers start thinking about this, it will become a product differentiator. I also feel the all or nothing user agreements need to go. I should be able to pick and choose the sections I want to agree to. Even just having the choose over some will make me feel more comfortably with using a product.

This is a great post, especially since we have to read the case study about TikTok. It seems a bit crazy that TikTok is being forced to either sell its company or be banned by the U.S. It has captured the eyes of many millennials and teenagers, as said with how many users are on the app monthly and how long these users view the app compared to its competitor. If it is somehow able to change its protocols or avoid being bought out, I think it will eventually beat out the $20 billion evaluation. It now all depends on what will happen next. If it does get bought out, the social media industry will be forever impacted.

Great read! Really crystalizes the TikTok case study that we are preparing for next week’s class. I think the billion dollar question we have to ask ourselves here: is the juice worth the billion dollar squeeze?

With some estimates going as high as $30-50 billion for TikTok, Microsoft really has to feel that the app’s potential, in terms of its AI learning and user data for some 80 million users in the US, is of enough value to pull the trigger. There’s so much external pressure here that it can’t be an easy decision to make. Good luck to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella!

You are absolutely right. The value of TikTok is not the viewers and the content, although it is a nice bonus, it is the AI language itself. However, the question then is if TikTok would sell that part of the firm. They may be willing to turn over the data to appease the White House, but are they willing to turn over their AI program? They have been forcing US firms to turn over intellectual property for years to get access to the Chines market. Is it time for US firms to do the same?