The Merchant’s New Moat
In my previous post, I argued that site personalization may be entering a discontinuity. Historically, the site knew the user best — at least within the boundaries of its own property. It could observe browsing, clicks, purchases, watch history, dwell time, returns, and other forms of first-party behavioral signal, and use those to personalize ranking,…
Personalization in an agent-mediated world
I was recently speaking with a product leader at a media company about personalization across e-commerce and media, when the conversation turned to the future of personalization. Broadly speaking, site owners have to deal with two types of audiences: Frequent flyers: high-intent, high-signal users whose behavior you can model richly — but mostly within the…
What Is an Agent, Really? A Cross-Disciplinary View
In the first post, I suggested that we might benefit from a clearer way to think about AI agents — something I called agentics. Before we can talk about a science of agents, though, we need to confront an awkward fact: Different fields mean different things when they say “agent.” So in this post, I’ll…
Innovation Without a Brief
I owe a great deal of my perspective on innovation and invention to my years at HP Labs India. With its charter of “innovating for the next billion,” HP Labs India was, above all, a product and solution concept factory—something like a design house, but with a few critical differences that remain surprisingly relevant today.…
Gestural and Multimodal Interfaces, Revisited: From Pointing to Delegation
Gestural interfaces have been declared “the future of computing” many times over the last half century. And yet, outside of touchscreens and a handful of specialized domains, they have stubbornly resisted becoming the dominant way we interact with machines. This is often framed as a story of hype cycles and technical immaturity. There is some…
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