Rise of the Machines

Whose responsibility is it to predict the future?

If you run a business, and certainly franchises are no exception, then a certain percentage of the burden falls on your shoulders. What do I mean?

Well, it’s not a particularly big jump to say that the businesses who do the best job of predicting the future are going to be the businesses best positioned for growth. If you are correct in your predictions, then logically you’ll make choices that make your business more valuable when those things come true.

Back when I was working as a consultant, I participated in a project having to do with how information and technology would change in the decades to come. We spoke to many many experts on the subject and developed a number of “scenarios” about what the future may look like.

While the details of many of those scenarios have been pushed out of my memory over the years, I will never forget the scenario we ended up calling “Rise of the Machines.”

In this version of the future, the vast majority of information transfer is completely out of the hands of humans. We, as a species, are simply no longer important in terms of making connections around the world. In our stead, artificial intelligence handles all of it. And the machines go about their merry way for the rest of time…

(Sounds a little dystopian, doesn’t it?)

So why am I writing about this today?

On an more intellectual note, it strikes me that there’s not a lot that has occurred in the past few years to make me believe that this version of the future is any less likely to occur. Machines (FranFunnel included) make up and higher and higher percentage of our interpersonal world every day.

On a more practical note, today I got to bear witness to FranFunnel (a machine) not hearing back from a person but rather hearing back from a machine!

Here’s the automated text message that FranFunnel sent the lead:

And here’s what we got back:

Yep! That’s two machines talking to each other on behalf of humans. Pretty trippy.

Back to what this all means.

The ways that people are communicating with each other is changing. Fast.

If you believe that your business is well positioned to “predict the future” by having systems that handle this complexity for you, then good. If you’re the 99% of other businesses out there, that’s why we’ve built FranFunnel. We handle this problem for you, so you can focus on the things that you’re good at.

Not predicting the future.

This article was written by Eli Robinson, General Manager of FranFunnel.

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