When the next wave of artificial intelligence arrives, autonomous bots will be able to complete nearly any task humans carry out on their devices.
These AI "agents," as they are known, won't need to interact much with people to get things done. The bots will be able to figure out how to accomplish tasks on their own -- booking a flight, ordering groceries online or even playing Cupid -- all without you lifting a finger.
The technology is being hailed by techies as the next evolution of ChatGPT because it is capable of revolutionizing so many aspects of our daily lives.
Here are some ways AI bots might help you in the future:
At online travel company Priceline, an AI named "Penny" will be playing travel agent in the not-too-distant future.
The AI assistant, which today is a chatbot that customers message with, can already complete a booking within the chat, without people clicking on a button, said Cobus Kok, a vice president of product management at Priceline.
Eventually, Penny will also be able to phone hotels to make special requests on your behalf, such as interacting with the services and concierges you typically do, he said. Further down the line, Penny will manage all your travel necessities such as your car rental, and all it needs is your calendar. "I just want the car to show up and pick me up; you do the rest," Kok said.
If you're unhappy with the bots offered by travel companies, you could simply build your own. The AI startup Imbue is building a service that will let you DIY a bot for any task, large or small, said Kanjun Qiu, its chief executive and co-founder. Rather than relying on companies to build bots for us, Qiu said Imbue's service aims to give people more control in a bot-powered world.
Apple is also venturing into personal assistant bots, with a new Siri bot that can tap the personal data sitting on your iPhone to make traveling easier: It can pull up your passport number while you're on the go, drop photos from your travels into a travel note, and tell you how to get to your next hotel. The new Siri bot will arrive later this fall.
Next time you call a restaurant to book a reservation, you might be securing your table by chatting with an AI bot.
That's what restaurant-technology startup Loman AI is hoping. The company's 24/7 AI receptionist is already being used in hundreds of restaurants across the country, answering questions over the phone, making reservations and placing orders when customers call restaurants, says co-founder and CEO Christian Wiens.
"We handle 100% of the calls that a restaurant gets, because restaurant phones are an incredibly inefficient piece of technology," he said.
With Loman's technology, the AI receptionist can talk to any customer or even another bot. While reading a transcript of a Loman bot's call, Wiens saw that a Google bot had called it to check a restaurant's business listing, and the two bots conversed about the availability of high chairs and a kids menu.
The results showed that bots can interact via voice -- and that some kind of bot-to-bot communication is in the future, Wiens said. "It's incredible how quickly the technology is expanding its intelligence," he said.
For instance, Loman's bot could be talking with a barber shop's customer-service bot to ensure that your restaurant reservation and hair appointment don't overlap with other events on your calendar.
Deon Nicholas, co-founder and chief executive of customer service AI startup Forethought, is building bots for companies to communicate with their customers. It won't matter if Loman's bot is interacting with a Forethought bot, he said, because their goal will simply be to get the reservation booked.
Imagine a future in which you can get real-time financial guidance on your investment portfolio without waiting for your adviser.
One U.K.-based startup is helping companies get one step closer to that. When human advisers make recommendations, they use a variety of outside information, including stock prices and corporate financial numbers. That's all data AI can gather to tailor financial guidance for customers, according to Finley AI, a startup with a platform that helps financial firms build their own bots.
Finley's bot today is used to customize financial guidance for those firms' clients, and help their own advisers speed up their investment research. As it becomes more advanced, it will learn your financial circumstances, objectives and risk tolerance, and can be directed to buy stocks and set up insurance policies, said Elemi Atigolo, Finley's co-founder.
But there are risks to automating investments and giving bots so much access to your data.
"You should know what it knows about you, and you should have voluntarily given that knowledge," said Gregory Wayne, lead researcher for Project Astra, Google's AI assistant bot.
Even if we provide bots with explicit instructions and permissions on what they can and can't do, we are still ultimately responsible for their actions -- intended or not.
Finding love isn't easy, but having a wingman might help. That's what the dating app Grindr is betting on with its new AI-powered "wingman."
By year's end, the platform, known for facilitating dates and hookups between men, will begin testing a chatbot assistant to help people find their ideal match and figure out where to meet for dates. It will be able to do just about everything users can currently do on the app, said George Arison, chief executive at Grindr.
If you're a serial dater, it can be challenging to keep track of your favorite matches and conversations -- that's where the wingman will step in. If you're looking for a long-term connection, you will also get an assist: You will be able to ask the bot to dig up your best prospects based on cues from your own chats with other daters, not just what's on your profile.
And if you're just jumping back into the dating pool, your wingman will be able to build you a profile that will garner attention, and matches.
Right now, Arison's personal assistant books reservations on his behalf. But he says Grindr's wingman will do the same thing: "If my assistant was an AI, what's the difference?"
Once you find your match, your wingman will help you plan the first date, finding a cafe or bar for the meetup, Arison said. In years to come, the wingman will take things one step further, making restaurant reservations or buying tickets to a show for daters, all in the pursuit of romance. The wingman is expected to scale in 2027.
When you're racking your brain for something to wear, an AI bot might just be the answer to your prayers. Shopping bots are set to take over the tedious parts of buying an outfit: scouring listings, keeping an eye on sales and clicking "buy" so your outfit arrives on time.
For instance, "browsing" bots will interface with "buying" bots, whose sole task is to put your item in the shopping cart, said Bern Elliot, a technology analyst focused on AI at research and consulting firm Gartner. Many bots will be virtually linked to do smaller tasks like check inventory and product information, to complete the larger task of ordering the outfit, Elliot said.
Vertex, the AI platform built by Google's cloud unit, has a ready-made bot for retailers that can help shoppers find what they need and make purchases. Before a purchase is made, the bot needs explicit permissions from shoppers -- helping prevent them from running amok. To make bots even safer, retailers might also bake in the option to talk to a person, said Jason Gelman, Vertex's director of product management.
Others like the startup Skyfire, which built a blockchain-based payment platform for bots to make purchases from humans or other bots, lets customers set buying limits and verifies each transaction.
Retailers like Shopify and Amazon currently provide shoppers with AI chatbots that can make recommendations and answer product questions. In the next stage, said Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI for Amazon's cloud unit, bots will be built to do things like arrange returns, all without human help.
