How AI is Impacting Our Futures, Commodities and Portfoilos

"Data is the new oil" as we have been told and in this article we are going to discuss why and how you can take advantage of this. Be it in your business, be it in your personal portfolio or as a creative.

Data driven insights have now taken over the way that we market things - services, brands, personalities and products. These are now required to take an even deeper look into their target markets, their geographics and make financial decisions on the basis of this to optimize their positioning, placement and pricing. Simple decisions and correlations have been discovered by AIs which previously eluded marketers, then factored in to drive increased sales.

In finance many advisory firms, banks and other financial institutions have feed their data sets to algorithms and have been surprised by the results as the AIs started to trade against one another, trade in concert with one another and bring a level of profitability to trading that was unprecedented. These new ways of doing things were a worry for a while as the AIs were still learning themselves and the markets were unstable due to the sheer volume of the trades, however with time the AIs developed and their strategies did too. Now we have options like choosing fund managers which are not people.

Creatives have started to experiment with artforms which are AI driven, feeding terms into the algorithm and generating products from these terms, some of the art is extremely abstract and some is guided towards the exact vision of the artist as they shape and "evolve" the art through different stages, with entire communities springing up around these ideas.

So what options are available to you as an SMME or as any other enterprise? Well some have been leveraging social media and the inputs thereof to drive greater reach, others choose to involve their search engines in their ad campaigns and focus on SEM or Search Engine Marketing however all have learnt that the best ways to understand and refine these models is through getting the best possible understanding of their existing market and learn to organically draw more from that market.

With regard to larger companies many different institutions have switched to the endowment structure ranging from Universities to High Schools and even the larger State Owned Enterprises have investment portfolios which they use as ways to sure up capital against the inflationary losses that tend to happen when holding onto cash, if this were to be with an AI driven fund manager which ticks the boxes then the organization has a lot to gain granted the size of their capital and the economies of scale that are applicable in the same regard. A larger asset base combined with higher sales and the opportunity to market even more effectively is an internal circulation of revenue that will allow any company to get into a better position and grab a market share that will keep giving.

As an individual? Well there are many portfolio managers to choose from why not choose a more efficient one? Tracking the progress of different AI driven portfolios and matching those against your own existing choices can give you an idea of which of the two would give you a bigger bang for your buck. However I cannot stress enough that doing your research and getting an understanding of the fundamentals of any portfolio is key, before you make a decision to get involved. Seeing the options, strategies and where they differ could prove to be the difference between having a portfolio that is well diversified, well found and returns investment gains and one that is narrow, rampant with speculation and in essence burns your money. Through risk, time horizon and return alignment an investor can put themselves in the position to reap exactly the rewards they are looking for - economy and market willing. I would like to remind all of our Gurus in the Making that they should not forget that past returns are not an indicator of future performance.

As families? Well much like the individual there are options to build financial structures which are aimed to generational wealth and there is a data element which the family can benefit from. I mean the exchange of data between family members as a form of "bigger" data but not on a big data scale. African families tent to range in size with many of the families falling on the larger end of the scale as such pooling the data that is gained through experience - be it social, business or financial - can generate a ripple effect which allows for a "brand" identity as a unit. This internal harmony and alignment can mean a better common understand or a better bottom line - Quintuple not financial.

As creatives AI is a space where it would really be about imagination. The exposure to large data sets can explain trends we do not really understand off the bat as the consumers. If a creative can harness these insights in the form their product takes, the brand persona they choose to communicate through or even the colours they choose to sell pre-packaged goods in, the marketing function could be boosted or the emotional response to a piece of art by gathering data on what colours mean to people on a generational scale and tuning into that value specifically in each of them. Running these analyses for longer periods allows one to gain more data and as such for your algorithms to mature and learn more too, who knows how long it is until blue goes from meaning confidence to being sadness exclusively?

AI is a tool that is out there and is changing the world as we speak, isn't it time you get a taste of what it can do for you rather than through you?