The Rise of the Intention Economy: How AI Assistants Are Transforming Consumer Choices

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CAMBRIDGE, England — Imagine scrolling through your social media feed when your AI assistant chimes in: ‘I notice you’ve been feeling down lately. Should we book that beach vacation you’ve been thinking about?’ The eerie part isn’t that it knows you’re sad — it’s that it predicted your desire for a beach vacation before you consciously formed the thought yourself. Welcome to what some experts believe will be known as the ‘intention economy,’ a way of life for consumers in the not-too-distant future.

A new paper by researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence warns that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT aren’t just changing how we interact with technology; they’re laying the groundwork for a new marketplace where our intentions could become commodities to be bought and sold.

Dr. Yaqub Chaudhary, a visiting scholar at the centre, stated, ‘Tremendous resources are being expended to position AI assistants in every area of life, which should raise the question of whose interests and purposes these so-called assistants are designed to serve.’

For decades, tech companies have profited from the attention economy, where our eyeballs and clicks are the currency. Social media platforms and websites compete for our limited attention spans, serving up endless streams of content and ads. But researchers Chaudhary and Dr. Jonnie Penn argue that we’re witnessing early signs of something potentially more invasive: an economic system that treats our motivations and plans as valuable data to be captured and traded.

Concerns About Privacy and Autonomy

What makes this potential new economy particularly concerning is its intimate nature. Chaudhary explains, ‘What people say when conversing, how they say it, and the type of inferences that can be made in real-time as a result, are far more intimate than just records of online interactions.’

Early signs of this emerging marketplace are already visible. Apple’s new “App Intents” developer framework for Siri includes protocols to ‘predict actions someone might take in future’ and suggest apps based on these predictions. OpenAI has openly called for ‘data that expresses human intention… across any language, topic, and format,’ while Meta has been researching ‘Intentonomy,’ developing datasets for understanding human intent.

Consider Meta’s AI system CICERO, which achieved human-level performance in the strategy game Diplomacy by predicting players’ intentions and engaging in persuasive dialogue. While currently limited to gaming, this technology demonstrates the potential for AI systems to understand and influence human intentions through natural conversation.

The Future Landscape

Major tech companies are positioning themselves for this potential future. Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI in what researchers describe as ‘the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen,’ investing over $50 billion annually from 2024 onward. The researchers suggest future AI assistants could have unprecedented access to psychological and behavioral data, often collected through casual conversation.

Unless regulated, researchers warn that this developing intention economy ‘will treat your motivations as the new currency’ in what amounts to ‘a gold rush for those who target, steer, and sell human intentions.’ This isn’t just about selling products — it could affect everything from consumer choices to voting behavior.

As we navigate this new landscape, a pressing question looms: In a world where our intentions are commodities, how many of our choices will truly be our own?

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• AI Assistants
• Consumer Privacy
• University of Cambridge