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NEAR FUTURE

Ben Smith Semafore Editor in Chief

Max and I spent three days last week at the ad fest in Cannes, where everyone was talking about AI. (In two successive meetings, executives bragged to me that their companies had more than 10,000 agents each!)

Until Thursday, nobody had brought up Sam Altman and Jony

 Ive’s planned AI-based “companion” device, Io, which previewed

 last month with a soft-focus buddy video that drew wide mockery

 in tech marketing circles. But at the end of my trip, one of the

 smartest marketers I talked to brought up the video to note that in

 Altman and Ive’s world, nobody has a phone. There are no screens. Certainly nowhere to put an ad.

Io may not be what kills the iPhone Ive designed for Steve Jobs.

 But this marketer argued that Ive and Altman have accurately

 sensed the deep popular demand to get away from our little

 screens. We’d spent a week talking about the fast, scary, but

 ultimately incremental changes AI could bring to the media

 business: magical video production, efficient ad buying. A world

 that turns away from handheld screens — to glasses, voice, other

 humans, whatever — is harder to imagine. But what if the changes

 are faster and more radical, and the ubiquitous smartphone is

 displaced as abruptly as it arrived? That’s scary for advertisers, of

 course, and raises questions about how to deliver everything from

 journalism to entertainment that we haven’t begun to answer. 

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