The risk of AI for small Businesses

In recent years, as a result of digitalisation, it is easier for entrepreneurs and businesses to reach consumers. Anyone can relatively easily offer all their products and services on large platforms, such as Amazon, Itunes and Google. The advantage of these digital products is also that anyone can easily find them by searching properly (Brynjolfsson et al., 2011). But AI seems to be a risk for long-tail businesses, as AI’s recommendations are often focused on more popular and likeable items.

Today, with the advent of AI, recommendations on products, services, and activities are increasingly being made for you. Everyone has some experience with the digital recommendations of big players. Nowadays, these recommendations are also becoming more and more accurate, as much more data can be used through AI. AI continues to learn more about our behaviour and what we want to consume, resulting in more accurate recommendations. But this also means that AI is more likely to recommend popular products and services. Popular products are valued more often and therefore recommended faster. Thus, these products are easier to find on the internet. So this can all come at the expense of small businesses and speciality shops.
AI is also getting the ability to increasingly dictate or influence our recommendations, which is also part of algorithmic determinism (Pasquale, F. 2015). AI can trap consumers in a bubble in which you are increasingly influenced by and that allows different interests to narrow (Kitchin, 2016).
With social media, it is already known that such a bubble can have dangerous consequences for society (Bessi et al., 2015). For instance, there are conspiracy thinkers who no longer get to see different news sources and thus get a monotonous world view. But where do we draw the line between AI’s recommendations and consumer behaviour. Big companies can now influence all consumers in what they can like and what they should consume. As users, we need to remain aware of the risk posed by AI and what remains our own choices.

How do you think AI influences your interests and consumer behaviour? And how do you prevent it from narrowing your interests?

References:

Bessi, A., Zollo, F., Del Vicario, M., Scala, A., Caldarelli, G., & Quattrociocchi, W. (2015). Trend of Narratives in the Age of Misinformation. PLoS ONE, 10(8), e0134641. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134641
Brynjolfsson, E., Hu, Y., & Simester, D. (2011). Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail: The Effect of Search Costs on the Concentration of Product Sales. Management Science, 57(8), 1373–1386. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1110.1371
Kitchin, R. (2016). Thinking critically about and researching algorithms. Information Communication & Society, 20(1), 14–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1154087
Pasquale, F. (2015). The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Harvard University Press.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0hch