As AI Gets More Personal Will Consumers Adopt It At Home?

The past few years have seen a revolution in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) within the enterprise IT environment. According to some research, 83% of companies now claim that the use of AI is a top priority in their current business plans.

This may vary from one industry to another, but the message is clear: AI has become extremely important inside most corporate environments. Companies are exploring how AI can boost productivity, increase efficiency, and generally improve the experience every customer has with those brands.

But most people have not yet seen their life outside work transformed by AI. There are millions of early adopters now exploring how they can create images, video, and music using AI, but it looks like a tipping point is coming for general consumers.

An interesting exploration of this was recently published in the UK by the BBC. Their technology editor, Zoe Kleinman, asked if the general public is ready to take a leap of faith and start using AI for everyday tasks?

The fact is that AI is becoming widely available to general consumers. Apple, Samsung, and Google have all launched AI services that are now integrated into all our phones. Amazon is launching an updated version of their Alexa assistant this year which will have far more complex conversational capabilities and agentic options – that is, the user will be able to ask Alexa to carry out specific tasks and then report back later.

Agentic AI is an important topic that will become a big technology trend in 2025 – for consumers and the enterprise. Inside companies it will allow each employee to manage their own “team” of digital assistants and for consumers it will allow us to ask our digital assistant to manage everyday tasks, such as searching for flight bargains or asking a company for a refund on a faulty product.

However, as the BBC asks, will the public adopt all these services? Even today there are many people who claim that they don’t understand modern technology so will AI go mainstream inside the 2020s?

One of the most important challenges for consumer AI services will be around access to personal data. For the AI to be helpful, it needs to know who you are and what your preferences are. This means that it needs to have access to a large amount of personal data.

For example, what if you have a counseling session with a psychologist. Would you like your AI assistant to summarize the session? Or what about if you had a medical appointment and your doctor prescribes a drug or treatment you don’t really understand. Would you be comfortable allowing your AI to access your personal medical records so it can give a second opinion on what the doctor has suggested?

The implication is clear. If we are going to accept that personal co-pilots or assistants are going to help us in our daily activities then we will need to allow them to access very personal information.

This can be true even for activities such as shopping. If you trust your digital assistant to start ordering groceries based on your historic activity then would you feel comfortable with a pack of beer automatically arriving every Friday? It might be an accurate order, but you might not want to share how often you are ordering alcohol or unhealthy junk food.

We will soon find out just how ready consumers are for AI and digital assistants in their personal life. It is radically changing the enterprise, but the uncertainty of privacy may mean that it takes longer to achieve widespread adoption outside the corporate environment.

Just because something is possible, doesn’t mean that people will do it.

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