Four For Friday | Jan 26, 2024
LF104 | China's Silver Economy, the consumer longevity opportunity, Learned Services and AI as the killer app for innovation
Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!
China unveils a new $4tn silver economy strategy
China has launched a new ‘silver economy’ strategy to address its looming demographic transition; an aging population going from 300m today to 500m by 2050. The country is looking to grow its silver economy from $1bn today to $4.2bn by 2035 with a broad-based set of strategies includes 10 new industrial parks and public-private collaboration to develop new products and services. However, the strategy doesn’t address its aging workforce, a particular challenge since its retirement age is one of the world’s youngest at 60 for men and 50 for women working in factories (55 for women in white collar jobs).
Emergence of the $600bn consumer longevity economy
Wellness-focused magazine Fitt Insider profiles the fast emerging consumer longevity space, valued at $600bn by 2025 by BoA. It segments the market into: Eternalists, Externalists, Minimalists and Go-getters and Influencers.
‘Learned Services’: Using AI to deliver personalised services at scale
This article by Projects by IF points to novel customer experiences and business opportunities being enabled by AI: ‘learned services’. These daisy-chain different products services together into a unique personalized experience. They “help users create their own experiences with features and steps from multiple organisations”.
Similar to last week’s discussion of Rabbit and Tab, this provides a line of sight to deliver the multi-faceted seamless personalized user experiences (in line with the Hive concept).
We are increasingly seeing services that go beyond the step by step services provided by a single organisation or a group of organisations from a single sector, such as a government. Instead these services combine multiple services from multiple organisations into an all-in-one service and a single journey. Some early attempts at these services are the so called “superapps” like WeChat, Grab, and GoTo. Services provided by other organisations become features within these services. We are pushing this concept further into a world where generative AI is widely used. Rather than the generative AI capabilities being used to create new text or images, generative AI capabilities are used to learn and create a new service by combining service components, service propositions and service processes based on information provided by users. This will allow the creation of new service experiences.
Why AI is the killer app for innovation
Generative AI is emerging as a boost for innovation by improving and accelerating three processes in particular: ideation, data-driven decision-making, and rapid market testing such as A/B testing.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen