There is more to AI than the mere task of speeding up a process or making it more efficient. In the field of ethnography, machine intelligence offers us an incredible opportunity to improve the accuracy of our work, both in our understanding of the present and of the future.
In this keynote, I outline the framework of ‘maps’ that we use in the design and development of their AI Anthropologist. I talk about how our AI systems not only enable new types of analyses (those of you who are our clients know what I mean) but also improve the sheer joy and sense of enjoyment in the act of conducting ethnographic research. In essence, it allows our team of Anthropologists to achieve the feeling of flow and focus on the parts of the research process that they most enjoy doing – using their large brains to interpret the key meanings in the context of a topic or trend without having to worry about organizing, sorting, and managing the data.