Web 3.0 on iStyles?
Web 3.0 is frequently referred to as the next evolution of the Internet, where machine interactions start to become more prominent as machines start to understand each other. Artificial intelligence will drive the growth of this new era where the web will literally evolve by itself as machines learn from each other and from humans. All these mambo jumbo sound like the basic backdrop for “yet another” machine takes over the earth movie but if you dive into the details, you’ll find that the concept is not as far fetched as it seems.
I have always been a firm believer in the use of technology for businesses for a couple of reasons:
1) Technology, if implemented correctly, simplifies business processes
2) Technology usually results in cost savings in the long run
3) Business processes that are enhanced by technology usually runs more effectively and efficiently compared to a non-technical implementation
4) Algorithms are more predictable than humans and can be fine tuned to near perfection
5) Machine failures can be reduced to virtually zero through proper redundancy and procedures
6) Machines do not take breaks, sleep, eat or go on strike
This posting was inspired by the creation of a number of new bots on iStyles recently. As the number of orders increase, the manual stages of order processing start to become tiresome and time consuming. If something was not done to refine these processes, we’ll soon be doing nothing else all day but order approvals and processing, which is a painful and boring job. We would rather focus efforts on more exciting hobbies like the enhancement of the shopping experience and expansion of the product range, while leaving the boring stuff to our robot pals.
I will not go into the details of the technologies we employ for competitive reasons but an example of the order processing refinement will be to phase the shipping notification e-mails from the warehouses automatically into meaningful data that is then used to immediately trigger the shipping notification for our customers and update the orders accordingly. Such processing of information, I believe, is bordering on the edge of the much hyped Web 3.0 technologies, but without the artificial intelligence. The machines in the different systems start to understand each other and communicate via e-mails in our case. Such machine interactions remove the need for a human component to read the e-mails and manually “ship” orders as was the case in the past, resulting in near zero lag in shipping notifications and zero manpower required for such a stage at our end.
Over time, we will be developing more bots to automate other processes. In short, we are lazy people as we automate everything that we can through technology so that we can focus on more value add and interesting work. Many of the interactions and e-mails that are sent out are not written by humans, but rather, by intelligent agents that were taught to converse like us humans, but unlike us, they can access a wealth of information relevant to an order almost instantly for a richer presentation, respond and process jobs in record time, and complete tasks with virtually zero errors. Despite the automation, it is always important to us that the human touch is never lost as we train these bots to write what we ourselves would write.
Tom, for one, is not human and you can find him happily posting in the Blog Comments forum or in his little thread in the Off-topic forum. His job in the Blog Comments forum is to gather all mention of iStyles in any blog in the world and post the information accordingly. His role in the Off-topic is more for fun as users can chat directly with him. You will also find him sending e-mails to customers during the order approval process.