Is "USB Emily" finally here?

A 2005 challenge featuring Will Wright seems prophetic now...

Way back in 2005 when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my favorite conference session of the whole year was usually the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). It was a chance to watch some of the biggest design brains in gaming stretch and come up with some stunning ideas. In 2005, the challenge was to develop a game based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Easy right?

That year it was between Clint Hocking (Ubisoft) and Peter Molyneux (Lionhead) and Will Wright (Maxis). Now Clint and Peter did fine jobs but Will took a different path and thought up a product he called “USB Emily” that would be based on Dickinson’s personality and would interact with you as you went about your work (nice summary of the whole challenge). At the end of his presentation, Wright unveiled an idea to have a whole catalog of famous personalities that you could essentially plug in and interact with. That was 2005.

Now in 2023, we have this article, “Instagram spotted developing a customizable ‘AI friend’”. According to the article “users would be able to choose their AI’s ethnicity and personality. For instance, your AI friend can be “reserved,” “enthusiastic,” “creative,” “witty,” “pragmatic,” or “empowering.” Interesting and add this to what we’ve already seen with people developing AIs that can respond as if they were historical figures but I want to frame these developments in a corporate sense and how they might work inside our org.

For as long as I’ve been in L&D, the idea of a personal mentor or coach for each employee has been a glimmer in peoples’ eyes. As I recall though, we never really talked about the personalities of these mentors - kind of the thing that would make interactions with them compelling. Now think about what AI has enabled, we can develop profiles of different performance patterns within the org - the innovator, the connector, the coach, the program manager, and we can imbue them with personalities. Those personalities could be a generic high performer in those categories like Instagram’s or they could be based on relevant people like a Bezos-based mentor, or a Jobs-like coach or you pick which one you want. That choice, that agency, coupled with on-demand, hyper-relevant information couched inside a conversational UI could be exceedingly powerful. You could even shift the parameters of the interaction based on your own goals - getting a promotion, bringing in the project on time/budget, etc. The question for L&D is how to contribute value in this situation? What will your output be? What skills will designers and developers need to deliver those? Interesting times….