Technologies are maturing and AI is the final piece in this puzzle: Dale Imerman

At the e4m TechManch held in Mumbai last week, Dale Imerman, Vice President of Immersive Technology and Artificial Intelligence at WPP shed light on AI-powered immersive technologies. He began his keynote session by addressing his role within the WPP ecosystem wherein he works out of the CTO’s team, with his focus areas being the top five markets for the company: the US, the UK, Germany, China, and India.

“I get to engage with a lot of teams and a lot of clients in this region, which is a big privilege, and I engage very closely with our data teams, our creative technology teams, and our global strategic partnerships team. And so I get exposure to all of our agencies across the globe and almost all of our different markets. And the role that we play is really a research and development role to uncover new technologies and to create new solutions that we can commercialize and scale so that our clients can benefit from these new cutting-edge innovations.”

Imerman added that he was not going to talk about AI in the realms of legal or ethics or fear-mongering or data privacy, and that while these are all very important issues, WPP has huge teams that engage around these topics and focus on them.

“I believe we're living in possibly one of the most exciting times that we've ever experienced as humanity. And so I view all of these advancements through a lens of optimism. And I try to speak about things through positive provocation. I feel this is how we get the best outcomes,” he said, adding, “I think it's very important that we contextualize what I'm seeing in the world at this point today. And so if we look at our inevitable context, going back sort of five to 10 years and looking forward five to 10 years, we're seeing a major shift in that the internet is moving from a 2D web to a 3D web.”

Imerman said the second thing we're seeing is the convergence of numerous technologies. “Now whether you call this the fourth industrial revolution or the singularity, these technologies are all maturing and it feels like artificial intelligence is actually the final piece in this puzzle. And at the same time, we saw that AR and VR, or immersive tech, is one of the key things that's emerging.”

“We look at this through a lens of something called the reality-virtuality continuum. And that continuum is showing us a shift from reality to augmented reality to virtual reality and ultimately to that concept that we call the metaverse. And it's not important how we define that, but we need to understand that this is a bit of a journey that we're going along that particular continuum,” he added.

“For me personally, the most immediate opportunity in this space is augmented reality. And I think it's also important that we look back in time as to what has happened so that we can see the trajectory that we've taken to help inform us about where we are right now and where we are going,” said Imerman.

Imerman went on to speak about the history of immersive technology and AI; hardware innovations like VR headsets, AR glasses, and the advancements of our smartphones; as well as software advancements like Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and computer vision, and how these are all coming together and contributing to the rapid growth and adoption of these technologies across every single industry.

“If I were to say to you 10 years ago, imagine a computer that can learn and adapt like a human, but much faster. You probably would have thought I was a little bit crazy, but that's the basic idea behind artificial intelligence. And immersive technology in parallel, including AR and VR, has also evolved and is creating very realistic and interactive digital environments,” he said.