Are we moving from the generative AI era into the interactive AI era? I think so. Generative AI is great – it can save time, introduce efficiencies and broaden creative exploration. The technology has made exponential evolutionary leaps in a very short period of time,  jumping from mass accessibility to tool proliferation to creative workflow operationalization. But Generative AI, as it exists now, is bumping up against a wall inherent to its design. Human provides prompt, AI serves the output – a simple, linear transaction. But as magical as the results of this process can be, it is scratching the thinnest surface of AI’s potential.

The interesting thing is that the underpinnings of technologies that can do functional organization and procedural workflow management exist. We're getting to the point where interactive AI, with a little human interaction earlier in the process, could soon be able to make its own connections to be able to organize and orchestrate the kinds of actions that humans currently have to manage manually in order to get quality output. Will this have some job replacement ramifications? More than likely so, but it's arguably a sector of work that could introduce new efficiencies and management capabilities that free up humans for other creative tasks. The power to be able to aggregate different repetitive tasks into one output is huge.

Let's take photo sourcing as an example. If I'm working on artwork and need to use some stock photography I could go to Getty, iStockphoto, etc one at a time and curate my image selects in a lightbox for each of the services. But what if there were a tool that could go to all those sources, hook into embedded AI features already there, find photos based on parameters I set and aggregate them into one set of images for me to review? I would then only need to perform a single AI query, freeing up swathes of time for higher-level work. The possibilities are endless.