The AI Embodiment Exchange
A New Digital Marketplace for AI Powered Digital Humans
My new book coming 2025: WORKING TITLE
“The Digital Human Cardiac Coach…And the Internet of Digital Human Health Coaches”
Note to Readers. If you’re an investor, you might want to read the last paragraph then come back to here.
Seven years ago, when CardiacMan and I created the world’s first Digital Human Cardiac Coach, we saw the need for the commoditisation and re-use of novel technology and AI Corpus assets in order to accelerate adoption and avoid the massive global duplication plaguing cardiac rehabilitation. Importantly, this would not be at the expense of localisation and customisation to meet essential cultural, language and organisational variations.
With the Digital Human Cardiac Coach, we created innovative patterns, methods, assets and AI guided conversations across various topics, that we saw could and should be applied in other digital human health domains. Our focus has been on health illiteracy, and accessibility of services. Similarly, there were valuable assets developed by others - such as culturally-specific instructional videos - that could be part of a Digital Human Cardiac Coach project for a localised high-need community deployment.
To achieve the potential global impact and scale, a model - or architecture - was necessary in order to avoid siloed duplication in the digital human health world. As creators and designers, we knew that we couldn’t just focus on our initial creation of the Digital Human Cardiac Coach - and ignore the evolving ecosystem into which it would operate and on which it would depend.
Commoditisation of avatar “faces” and language technology is already well underway but not so the creation of the much more important “brain”: the AI Corpus. Potential investors should think about this. Every health system, government or private sector, and many sub-units within these systems, creates and constantly has to update its cardiac rehabilitation and recovery education materials (many are still paper based). Duplication and the lack of accessibility in the legacy health world drives unmeetable economic costs. This largely paper-based legacy cardiac rehabilitation model was not resilient to the pressures of the COVID pandemic: cardiac rehabilitation globally was shut down.
“Graduating” patients, those who have completed recovery and rehabilitation, are still lifetime heart patients because the disease doesn’t disappear. They always need up to date information about maintaining their health, advice on what activities are safe for them, how to access relevant goods and services and so on. The AI Embodiment Exchange can certainly meet these needs at the level of the individual health systems.
But the AI Embodiment Exchange could also deliver everything required to individual patients, and become the lifetime concierge of everything they need covering both free information and services and those they might wish to buy.
So seven years ago, we documented the concept of the “AI Embodiment Exchange”, based on my commercial proprietary MBA research in 1998 at the Melbourne Business School “The Information Exchange”. I talk about the Information Exchange in my book “Nadia: Politics | Bigotry | Artificial Intelligence”.
So many people having read my book, contacted me, wanting to know more about this concept. The global interest has been quite phenomenal. So here’s some background on The Information Exchange, before diving into the AI Embodiment Exchange.
The Information Exchange©
In 1998, I was undertaking commercial research in my MBA program at the Melbourne Business School, on the coming disruption of financial services driven by the evolution of electronic “information brokers” and what I saw as common patterns of information rich “conversations”.
From this research, I published an article in 1999 “Cyber Sectors Set for Power Shift”, which described an electronic revolution that was about to rock the world of financial services, where the power would shift to the customer.
These conversations by customers at the service delivery interface, were an expression of their needs and frustrations. The power would eventually move to the customer when the customer no longer needed to go into and out of websites; no longer imprisoned by websites. Understanding these conversations as an expression of people’s behaviour would change servicing models.
It was at this same time (1998) that Sergey Brin and Larry Page published their academic paper that started Google. The paper “The Anatomy of a Large- Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, was presented at the seventh W3C international conference in April 1998, in Brisbane Australia.
Heady days indeed, 1998. An investor contacted me through the Melbourne Business School, after reading my article about my research and model for information brokers and conversations. I was wary and decided to keep my IP to myself, as I knew it was powerful and did not want to be limited in how I used it.
I would go on to apply the conversation model in government, disability (Nadia) and healthcare: even so, this is still largely uncharted territory ripe for disruption at the scale that Google has brought to search. But this disruption we envisage is about contextual conversations within a bounded/constrained domain, not Large Language Models (LLMs) or ChatGPT type applications. Our specific interest is contextual conversations in healthcare to reduce the impact health illiteracy and lack of accessibility.
That brings us to the AI Embodiment Exchange: what it is and why it’s needed.
The AI Embodiment Exchange©
Embodiment is about the contextual experience of people interacting with conversational interfaces. Aspects of embodiment might include whether human-like or abstract; different personas; brand markings; the voice; mannerisms; conversation topics; the language, including slang, idioms, and words with special meaning. Embodiment can also be augmented by other features and content such as maps, graphics and video used in context to explain or expand on specific topics. Embodiment is far more than what a digital human looks like and the facial expressions, voice and gestures it might use.
The AI Embodiment Exchange would enable the re-use of common conversational elements and patterns from various domains. A domain is a group of like interaction models from which conversations can be co-designed and constructed for specific industries and capabilities/processes such as call centre, coaching, influencing and advising. Regardless of domain, the patterns of conversations are common, and I cover this in some detail in my new book coming in 2025.
There is the need for different digital human personas: our interest is having a variety of different Digital Human Cardiac Coach personas to meet and reflect the needs of communities served. Developed by different digital human companies, or individual creators, an increasing variety of personas maximises the level of engagement with individuals, and increases opportunities for re-use and localisation.
Noting of course, that a digital human persona is about much more than the look. The contextual conversations and the information transference that occurs across all persona types and interfaces, are dependent upon and is driven by the corpus. And by “corpus”, I don’t mean LLMs or ChatGPT. It is for this reason, that the components of the corpus are not only valuable novel assets, but are assets that can and should be re-used and leveraged.
For example, the Digital Human Cardiac Coach conversation modules that we have developed could be re-used by other digital human health coach projects. This would facilitate scaling and lower digital human development costs and schedules whilst still allowing scope for personalisation and localisation. Importantly, re-use minimises duplication, an unnecessary and avoidable cost plaguing cardiac rehabilitation globally.
Of course, such re-use on a licensing basis generates value to the Exchange. Re-use also means that creators of these assets, and content creators, have licensing revenue potential.
The AI Embodiment Exchange could also operate as the “Digital Human Name Registration Service”. Similar to Domain Names Registers, the “Digital Human Name Registration Service” would be a fee generating service, offering registration of digital human unique names, images, and features.
The provenance and authenticity of the digital identity of a person’s digital human replica is a challenge that no government is examining. And yet the future is coming fast, where people will have (some already do) their own digital human replicas for a variety of purposes. Associating the identity of the digital human to its human owner will be a hallmark of a future populated by digital humans.
And as the global digital human industry booms, issues around provenance and IP become increasingly complex, as evidenced by the recent case of avatar company Ready Player Me Inc.
This month (July 2024), the avatar company Ready Player Me Inc. was hit with proposed class claims that it created Illinois users' digital characters by scanning, storing and using their facial data without first obtaining informed consent. A Facial-Scan BIPA suit involves allegations under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which regulates the collection and use of biometric data such as facial scans. The law requires entities to inform individuals in writing, explain the purpose and duration of data use, obtain written consent, and implement security measures to protect the data. In this context, Ready Player Me Inc. faces a proposed class-action lawsuit for allegedly violating BIPA by creating digital characters using Illinois users' facial data without informed consent, potentially breaching privacy protections mandated by the act.
Neither the relevant IP Registration Service nor the relevant Domain Name Registration Service would have helped in this case, and illustrates the gap in this burgeoning market that the AI Embodiment Exchange operating the “Digital Human Name Registration Service” might address. The AI Embodiment Exchange could provide not only licensed access to the re-use of assets, but importantly, the verification of the provenance of assets.
Who might run the AI Embodiment Exchange, and the commercial model, is discussed in my new book, “The Digital Human Cardiac Coach…And the Internet of Digital Human Health Coaches”. Out later 2025.
Potential investors take note. The operator of the AI Embodiment Exchange, will be able to bypass the health systems altogether should they wish, and go straight to the hundreds of millions of heart patients around the world using the Digital Human Cardiac Coach app on their personal digital devices or virtual world. And whilst our conceptualisation of the AI Embodiment Exchange started with our work on the Digital Human Cardiac Coach, the functions of the AI Embodiment Exchange would not be limited to the Digital Human Cardiac Coach, but would operate as a new utility servicing the Internet of digital humans.