CES 2017: JUST HOW SMART IS AI GOING TO MAKE CONNECTED CARS AND CONNECTED HOMES?

Walking the exhibit halls and attending sessions at the mammoth Consumer Electronics Show, it was easy to identify the dominant theme: AI-enabled Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs).

• Manufacturers and suppliers of connected cars and homes are betting big on IPAs: overwhelmingly favoring Amazon Alexa.
• Impressionistically, Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana and others trailed some distance behind.

Natural language commands, queries and responses provide a vastly more intuitive UX. And these capabilities in turn make owning and using a connected home or car much more attractive. But there is a deeper potential benefit for the connected car and connected home sellers: developing context-rich data and information about the connected home occupants and the connected car drivers and passengers. This data and information include:

• Who is in the house, what rooms they occupy—or who is in the car, going to which destinations
• And what they want to do or see or learn or buy or communicate at what times and locations

Mining this data will enable vendors to anticipate (and sometimes create) more demand for their goods and services. (In a sense, this is the third or fourth generation version of Google's ad placement algorithms based on a person’s search queries.) Here's what this means for home and auto insurers:

• As the value propositions of connected cars and homes increase, so does the imperative for insurers to enter those ecosystems through alliances and standalone offers
• The IPA-generated data may provide predictive value for pricing and underwriting
• IPAs are a potential distribution channel (responding to queries and even anticipating the needs of very safety- and budget- conscious consumers)

A note on terminology: the concept of “Intelligent Personal Assistants” is fairly new and evolving quickly. Other related terms are conversational commerce, chatbots, voice control, among others.