There have been all kinds of technologies that have somewhat come and gone to and out of the digital signage sector – generating a lot of interest and discussion, but not really catching on.
Remember bluetooth beacons?
Artificial intelligence is getting a huge amount of attention lately, and I think the prospects for its adoption and adaptation are wildly different from many easier, narrowly-focused technologies. The possibilities and impacts are huge, I suspect, though I doubt many people can really envision where this is all going. Because it is moving too quickly.
AI has, of course, been around digital signage for years – primarily via computer vision audience measurement platforms like Quividi and AdMobilize. But the dizzyingly fast emergence, expansion and maturation of generative AI tools likely opens up all kinds of possibilities.
My AI-mad son Scott sent me a link last night of a toolset that allows a rough, hand-drawn sketch of a wire-framed website to be converted to functioning HTML in seconds. Sift through Linkedin and you see mind-blowing images and videos created by keying in a handful of text descriptions.
This guy posted a useful summary on Linkedin listing 20 tools (there are more) …
The implications for auto-generating visuals for screens and marketing materials for online and email are obvious. I know we’ll see AI voice applications because I already had CMS software CEO tell me about the work in his lab. And I think there will be a PILE of other stuff.
- Scheduling will be likely faster and easier and probably much more nimble and responsive;
- Monitoring will be smarter;
- Data-driven templates will get more sophisticated and automated;
- The factors that inform, shape and trigger content will be broader and faster;
- And on and on.
That said, I am not a coder and decades removed from operating networks, so I am observing these developments from the bleachers. I would love to hear from companies that are dabbling in, testing, implementing and maybe even actively using these emerging AI tools.
Let me know (dave@sixteen-nine.net) what you are doing, why and how it works. I’ll happily take everything from quick summaries I can roll into a large post, or guest posts if you have a story to tell and can control your advertorial/aren’t-we-awesome urges.
Note … a good sign of how this is still evolving is how things don’t always work.
This was my prompt to generate an illustration for this post:
put the phrase “generative AI” on a TV screen mounted on a wall
This is what I got (my son tells me blending text with images is a work still in progress) …