CHAPTER 5

The Checklists and Guidelines

The Major Issue of Pricing: You Really Get What You Pay for!

I once read a chatbot blogger commenting in a very precise way about why the better chatbots don’t get to market, or why if they do, they are not more widely known or used. He said the reason is that purchasers expect a Ferrari but want to pay the price of a second hand, very basic car. Then naturally they are disappointed when their basic, cheap NLP chatbot does not become the outstanding “AI miracle of interaction” that the hype has led them to expect.

Figure 5.1 What is real and what is fake? “Hi, AI” shows actual dialogue that was not staged that is conversations between “spontaneous” robots and their “real carers or companions”, not actors. This e-mail exchange between the author and the filmmaker is about Isa Willinger’s 2019 documentary “Hi, AI”. © Tania Peitzker

My 2D chatbot company velmai Ltd experienced this many times. We could not cut through the mass hype and misleading sales talk of hundreds of our competitors, which became a disappointing clamor over the past few years. Every purchaser we encountered had had a very bad experience with a 2D chatbot. They were led to believe by some tech giant competitors that if they paid this well-known brand and provider of human–machine interaction @$100,000 or more for a “complex” bot build over six months or so, then they would have a better, satisfying experience.

Time and again these purchasers from the public and private sectors have been disappointed and left angry at being missold these bot services. Some corporations have outlaid hundreds of thousands of dollars, euros, and pounds over years to see nothing come of their experimentation with customized, 2D NLP chatbots. Nothing at all except a near risk of losing customers rather than winning them. They were not told how to run the integrated marketing campaigns that should have accompanied these botification pilots.

Worst of all, the chatbot brains they were promised did not learn on their own. They were as cognitive as the Japanese Hologram Girlfriend. They were on a loop and did not learn new content without the injection of it by their creators, the bot developers. Several burned public and private sector clients have told me how in addition to the 100K budgets paid to the tech giants, they then had to spend more on paying their own staff additional hours to try to mop up the content mess and manually adding material to the bot brains they had ordered.

Figure 5.2 The sex industry and pornography have always been an easy, lucrative direct route to market for digital innovations and leaps forward in robotics. Sex shops filled with robotic sex dolls can be found in the USA, China, Japan and parts of Asia (see the Australian SBS documentary “Robot Love in Japan” from 2017. In this German film, a romantic domestic companion/lover called “Harmony” is collected by her new owner from this “sex doll laboratory” in the USA, complete with a set of instructions for her maintenance and usage. Taken from the film Hi, AI by Isa Willinger © Kloos & Co Medien, Berlin, 2019

There are endless tales of cheap and nasty chatbots that simply didn’t work, annoyed customers or stakeholders rather than assisting them, or just overall performed poorly. The three phases I outline here should help you avoid such disappointments and unforgiveable cases of misspelling and failure to deliver. It makes me quite annoyed because it damages the market for all the good bot developers out there!

Phase 1: Beginning the Process of Procurement in the Confusing Tech Eco System

• Do a shout out on LinkedIn, Xing, or wherever you have your work profiles for the best conferences on the subject you are looking at. Peer knowledge and recommendations will help with a short list of trade shows and events to go to over a three-month period.
• Ask an intern or junior to scour online for relevant articles for a week and write a short synopsis of each and why it fits with your goals for getting new tech in.
• Inform your managers over an informal chat that you think you should look into this because of three reasons.
• Ask your team and those responsible to you what do they think—be prepared to be surprised if several or more turn out to be tech fans in their private lives. They will be an invaluable source of support and info at this phase and future stages.
• Ask Human Resources if they can recommend other hidden experts in your organization join a local tech group that is relevant, for example, SaaS and innovation. Check out the Meetup groups and Eventbrite, which are rich sources of these events usually free.
• Ask your local Chamber of Commerce what relevant events they are holding planning or had in the past. Get in touch with the chamber’s recommended list of experts, but make it clear you want to source tech directly not engage costly consultants to do this.

Phase 2: Selecting the Startup, Entrepreneurial Team, and Fixing the Conditions

After identifying the prospects, have a short list of three to four companies to interview. Prior to meeting the entrepreneurs, here is your checklist:

• Have you met the owners of the company?
• Did you prepare for that meeting by reading interviews with them or articles about the technology they are involved in?
• Prior to meeting the founders of the venture, discuss the innovation with some trusted colleagues to crowdsource some ideas about how it could be of direct use and value to your company, department, products, services, and operations.
• Write up a list of questions to ask the technology innovators at your first meeting. It might be an overwhelming discussion so it is best to have notes from your initial research and discussion with you.
• Questions to ask the founders: what are your goals, who are your first customers or which companies are willing to do a pilot or trial of the tech in the near future?
• Due to the nature of emerging tech, it will not always be possible to provide you with testimonials. In fact, if there are a lot of testimonials, then innovation is already established and not emerging.
• Where there are a number of testimonials relevant to your company and its ideas for harnessing the innovation, ask permission from the entrepreneurs to contact these people.
• After at least three or four discussions with your peers, you will soon see if their testimonial is genuine or invented, for example, in the case it was created as a favor for a friend or old colleague or in extreme cases completely made up by the entrepreneurs.
• Obviously if the testimonials have been faked, you no longer want to have any further dealings with that venture or those entrepreneurs. Trust would be impossible to regain but unfortunately there are always some who are prepared to fake it rather than forgo first-mover business.
• Sadly, the business world has lost sight of whistleblowers and enforcing such standards in basic ethical conduct for trading. Celebrity status seems easy on social media and some unethical players think it is won by deceit or embellishing the truth. I wonder where they got those ideas from with the current state of leadership and caliber of politicians.
• On the subject of hype—do your own research on the innovation claims of the entrepreneurs.

Figure 5.3 Unfortunately there have been many false or hyped claims about how intelligent an AI (ro)bot is over the past decade or so. Purchasers are often duped by watching credible videos and convincing demos in a controlled environment. This is the fascination of this authentic documentary by Willinger, because she and her production team capture “real interactions” where the human-machine interaction is recorded spontaneously without being faked. See my e-mail exchange with Willinger about this topic in Figure 5.1. Taken from the film Hi, AI by Isa Willinger © Kloos & Co Medien, Berlin, 2019

Getting Expert Advice Independently If It Becomes Too Much to Research on Your Own

If it is too confusing because the topic of AI attracts all sorts of hyped claims even from the established tech giants as explained at the start of this chapter, then call the following experts who would be happy to give you five minutes of their time to help you support the emerging tech scene:

1. Professors and PhD researchers. They have the depth of knowledge and reading to quickly assist. Due to their professional code of conduct, they must remain independent.
2. However, if the university department is sponsored by a big corporation, or even their Chair or position is funded by a brand in the industry, be cautious. Better still avoid them all together and pick a lesser known academic whose salary is paid for the traditional way, by the government. That ensures neutrality and independence.
3. Technology editors and full-time journalists at an online site or newspaper. They may be hard to reach but if you flick them an e-mail with the name of your company or government department and “seeking advice” in the header, you are certain to get a reply and at least five minutes of their scheduled time. It makes the journalist feel important and more importantly in touch with trends, for example, which major purchaser is backing what. Again, their code of conduct for the profession will guarantee that your chat is kept secret. Unless you call a tech editor from the sensationalist tabloid press, which means you can’t rely on them following the traditional professional standards of confidentiality and conversations that you declare must stay “off the record.”
4. Thinktanks and independent research institutes. If you google AI and the keywords of the software innovation that you are investigating, you may be surprised that there will be an institute somewhere in your country or another that is dedicated to this emerging tech field.
5. The reason for this is academic funding and philanthropic sponsorship. In order to maintain neutrality in research, these outlier researchers outside of your normal universities and business schools are living off their reputations as independent sources of reliable information. They will also have more time to talk with you and provide you with a rounded picture of the field.
6. Again, if their institute is tagged with an industry player’s brand name, approach with caution. With corporate funding of research comes inevitable limitations and influence of their topic parameters and, harder to prove, hard to detect manipulation of research results. Why do you think the tobacco industry and the climate change deniers have lasted so long? Let alone pesticide manufacturers, but that is another problematic altogether.
7. Also check that the thinktank or research institute is not attached to a political party because an increasing number of them are, for example, the Brexit debate in Britain has created a number of politically biased institutes that seek to influence public debate from their point of view. Ditto if the thinktank has been set up secretly by an industry lobby group under the guise of independent research seeking to inform public discourse.
8. To balance out the tech editor and academic outlook on the emerging tech and its use cases, talk to peers in your industry who you believe have tried related technologies or are at least willing to do so. They can provide you with insights about the trials and tribulations they experienced. Again it is a type of crowdsourcing information on use cases that may not yet be in the public domain or mainstream due to confidentiality agreements and NDAs. At the very least you will get ideas and suggestions through a support network of first-mover thinkers and doers!
9. Another source of expertise to vouch for the entrepreneurs or validate the extent of the innovation and its originality or usefulness are venture capitalists, known as VCs or sophisticated investors. Often private equity firms and VCs have resident technology scouts and experts looking for the kind of venture you are dealing with.

Important to Note in This Due Diligence Process

• Be careful with regard to confidentiality agreements and NDAs. You will need to get express permission to discuss what you are doing or thinking of doing with the tech company especially if you have signed an NDA with them.
• The problem is not that these VCs are aligned with the tech giants necessarily, though many of the investors and advisors in their organizations are in fact ex-Facebook, ex-Google, ex-IBM Microsoft and so on. That is already a warning bell with regard to confidentiality and for that reason alone the entrepreneurs may withhold their permission. Increasingly, the VCs you meet are former entrepreneurs who have told their innovative emerging tech to a larger competitor or established corporation.
• More to the point, their trade secrets if shared with you may be passed on (wrongly) to a competitor venture that is in stealth mode and not yet visible. That means that this hidden venture could be incubating inside the VCs’ pipeline for deal flow or already have received funding and is in R&D about to go to market.
• That could be fatal for the tech venture you want to give a chance to! You could also be sued for breaching the NDA or confidentiality implied if you discuss too freely with competitors or experts funding these potential future or currently hidden competitors. Just because you and your peers may not have heard of this innovation until now, it is quite likely the trend of the innovation had already been spotted years ago by their talent and trend scouts at the private equity firm. That is their job and how they make money, they want to be first movers!
• However the sad fact is, it is frequently very hard for bootstrapped, unheard of ventures to win capital investment from these big investors in an early stage of business development. That is why you will feel like you are entering a world of smokescreens, cloak and daggers.
• It is high stakes. We are talking about “pre money” ventures worth tens of millions of dollars before they have their first paying customer or show profits—for high-profit groundbreaking innovation. And it is often about strategic positioning and strategic communications. Which is why it is so hard for you to make purchasing decision.
• This vicious circle will always present itself with really new, exciting, innovative technologies. You will need to scratch below the surface to get the information and do the due diligence you will need to do to commit to a six-month pilot or longer. Anything less is of less value and not really viable for the tech entrepreneur in terms of marketing, new client acquisition, and using you as a crucial testimonial from a first-mover client.

Approach any competitor to your entrepreneurs or any corporate-sponsored expert with extreme caution. I used to think what has a tech giant got to be afraid of? The reality is, none of the dominant players ever want to lose even a slice of their market share even to a minnow like a completely unknown, unmonetized early stage venture run by unpaid cofounders.

Sadly, too many tech giants and their past and present executives are known to act badly even unethically to stop an innovative tech company in its tracks. They do not want the slightest bit of competition. If the startup survives as a new venture—gets traction on the market as the jargon goes—and becomes a serious threat to the giant’s market share, then they will bid to acquire it more often than not. This is called an M&A, a merger and acquisition whereby the new venture is basically taken over by the old.

But until that point, a truly disruptive and innovative tech venture must strategically guard its first-mover client list, its marketing strategies, even the names of its team. Given these life-and-death sensitivities, you must be ethical at all times and check with the entrepreneurs about who they are comfortable with regards to you checking on them. A big competitor’s name attached to an expert’s salary or organization should signal a big red flag for you in this context.

Phase 3: Nurturing and Managing Your Chosen Bot Developers

Remember at the beginning of this textbook I discussed what is happening in the public sector in Britain. Specifically at the UK Department for Workplace and Pensions and their multibillion pound budget to roll out chatbots and AI. I know from firsthand experience that they have been talking with external bot developers about plugging in chatbots from the private sector, adapted to their public service needs. So I was curious to read shortly before Brexit Eve as I name the end of October 2019, that the DWP had decided to establish a high-powered, extensive intrapreneurship department and centers around the country.

The DWP is also rapidly expanding its own private technology company, Benefits and Pensions Digital Technology Services Ltd, which recruited more than 400 staff in the year to April, while DWP Digital recruited 520.

A spokesperson for the DWP insisted it was using artificial intelligence to help people find work, to reduce the burden on claimants to prove their circumstances, and to help vulnerable people access welfare more easily without having to provide evidence of their digital identity.1

This DWP example is a clear case of public sector procurement, not of external entrepreneurs to commission botification services, but recruiting intrapreneurs or new full-time staff to conceptualize, develop, and realize greenfield projects and pilots from within the multitude of governmental organizations that make up the Department or Ministry.

Alternatively you can choose a tech venture from outside your company who you want to bring in and run a greenfield project. Alternatively, some companies are “sourcing entrepreneurs and coders” themselves and giving them short-term contracts to develop an application from within the company.

I think there is an erroneous belief that creating your own startup from inside your organization somehow gives you more control and security. However, there are many pitfalls with this type of intrapreneurship, and I cover these points in the following. For both entrepreneurs outside your company providing the pilot, and the intrapreneurs doing R&D for a project within your organization the following points should be considered:

• Set realistic milestones.
• Be flexible and fair on deadlines.
• Keep communication lines open at all time.
• Be reliable in giving feedback on time, tell them if you don’t understand something—it can be fatal to a project to not admit your failure to comprehend any detail or overall description of the collaboration and it creates an unnecessary working atmosphere of friction and potentially resentment.
• Get your team and managers to give feedback after each milestone where possible.

Dealing With External Entrepreneurs for Projects Created and Run Externally

• Keep the media away until the AB testing has been completed to the venture’s satisfaction and yours.
• Discuss with the entrepreneurs how you want the media coverage and future external comms (communications, media liaison, marketing, PR) to be handled, how they are to be portrayed, and what is their tech story.
• Work out a PR and marketing strategy with your resident marketers and comms directors so they don’t feel cut out of the loop. They will probably need to give you and the project sign off, not just your bosses.
• Communicate clearly to all stakeholders at every point what the expectations are and where there are delays explain why, don’t cover them up, that is, don’t not communicate the issues in a timely, fair way.
• Most people understand pilots will have unexpected problems. Given the tech venture is operating externally to your company or organization, the entrepreneurs will inevitably be working on other prototypes and pitching to other first-mover clients, if not already working on several pilots in parallel. That is inevitable if you are not paying them for this work or paying little.
• If you don’t like the fact they are not focused on your company’s pilot, then you may have to sign an exclusivity contract which negotiates their time and how long it should be devoted to your pilot alone. Entrepreneurs will want to be paid (extra possibly) for this.
• However, don’t expect the external tech venture to give you exclusivity over their technology! That is an anti-competitive ask that should be rewarded or compensated for monetarily, without question or much argument.
• If you want them to not offer the innovative solution to your competitors, you will have to put a higher payment clause in the contract, that is, so the entrepreneurs are not put at a financial disadvantage giving up other clients and contracts to focus only on you.
• Intellectual property lawyers will probably get involved then to calculate the worth of the tech now and in [the period of time for the exclusivity] and arrive at a pricing range that is fair to the entrepreneurs.
• It is not a monopoly situation if this payment system for exclusivity is agreed upon as a fair exchange to give the paying client a first-mover advantage over their competitors who have been too slow to adopt the new tech of the entrepreneurs.

For Intrapreneurs

• Encourage positivity and optimism for all involved.
• If people at your company are unduly negative and skeptical, call them out on this attitude. Get them to do the quiz at the start of Chapter 4, ask them if they are an advocate of new technologies or an opponent.
• Nipping it in the bud can prevent a mobbing type of effect at the launch date where if something goes wrong, the company doesn’t hit the panic button and kill off the innovative project without proper consideration and reasoned planning, for example, agreeing on a postponed second release with new milestones and budgets.
• Where hired coders are working nine-to-five on your internal pilot and R&D in an intrapreneurship situation (like the DWP’s new business and staff), those time constraints in themselves turn it into an office job rather than a startup. Don’t be surprised if progress becomes slower than with tech entrepreneurs driven and motivated by ownership of their intellectual property, the reward of profits and dividends and building a business (scaling up) on their own outside the company.
• For this reason, it might be useful to have as an early milestone to spin out the pilot as a standalone venture, that is, register it independently of your company so that the coders and business development managers have a sense of ownership and autonomous control. Many universities operate in this way have full-time salaried commercialization or knowledge transfer manager to shepherd this process. Even to IPO stage for a university spin out company that gets seed funding from its university. Note that means the entrepreneurs/academics often lose the full ownership of their intellectual property, which is then shared with the university as its business angel providing the incubator environment for them.
• This might sound scary for large corporations and some SMEs, however this has become common practice for R&D projects with proven traction and promise of relatively fast commercialization to become their own companies as spin-outs (UK) and spinoff (U.S.) from the parent company.
• It is a term most frequently used for university and business school lab experiments and long-term research that gathers momentum.
• The academic structure usually provides a unit of specialists to supervise spinning out these ventures mostly created by their own students, graduates, and academic staff.
• Like the university version, as corporate investors in your own spin out ventures, you ought to look carefully at the intellectual property arrangements—who owns the IP if the innovation began “inhouse”? If the coder team says it was their invention, who else can claim that it wasn’t?
• In the last century, this problem was mostly solved with employment contracts stipulating that all of the R&D belonged to the “corporation as investor” who hired them to be intrapreneurs.
• However, today with the rapidity of inventions and convergence, it may be very hard to find the most talented people who will agree to these conditions that they forgo the innovation they may be responsible for in a small coding team.
• For the sake of motivation, it may be useful to offer them part ownership and shareholder stakes in the company, especially if they succeed in spinning out the invention into a separate company from the “mother corporation” that you all work for as salaried employees and/or as contractors.

Government Procurement Checklist

• Have you checked with the relevant departments if they have anything in the pipeline for trialing this technology?
• Don’t assume there is nothing happening it may not have been communicated yet—the good old silo divisions often prevent knowledge being shared.
• Ask the HR head if they know of any initiatives.
• Where possible circulate a call or e-newsletter for ideas and feedback at the planning stage; ask to meet in the canteen individually or if there is a strong response, suggest an “AI lunch” or whatever topic once a month after work or lunchtime to generate staff “buy in” and crowdsource their ideas ongoing.
• If you work for a large corporation, government, or an international NGO, check with the company’s librarians and archivists for literature and records of past pilots and current policy papers for implementing the emerging tech fields you want to trial.
• Ask your managers what they think regarding the current policies and planning.
• Ask your junior staff and colleagues from other departments about their plans for new tech to see if there is overlap and potential for interdepartmental collaboration that you haven’t thought of yet.
• Publicize the proposed implementation date on the staff e-newsletter.
• Ask colleagues if they have heard of the ventures and/or entrepreneurs on your shortlist.
• Check with the government funding agencies if they know of them or can recommend any new tech startups as suppliers.
• Compare your goals and plans with other countries and their ministries or departments; you will be surprised by the similarities and learn from the differences.
• Where there is a similar project done or underway in another country, contact your counterpart ask for a video conference call to share experiences.
• Check with university researchers, business schools, and institutes.
• As a government official or civil servant, you are best to avoid going to the tech giants or established companies for peer reviews—see the previous discussion. This will by nature not be neutral as their goal is to demolish any incumbents as legacy systems—they don’t want their market share disrupted.
• Similarly, you must be careful about talking with VCs and consultants who will inevitably have vested interests in companies they already own or have invested in. They are obviously going to present their proteges as your best bet and cannot be relied upon to declare this conflict of interest. Sad but true in today’s world of shaky business ethics!

Figure 5.4 © Realfiction, Copenhagen, 2019. This is a perfect example of Augmented Reality imaging in Real Time being used to promote a product or brand. With the addition of Cognitive Interfaces in future, such as AI botifaction with voice, the AR experience of just seeing a car like this in commercial setting will become a more interactive branding experience. Voice tech will let shoppers chat with the car itself or its human hologram ambassador or sales rep

Special Considerations for Government Decision Makers

• Follow the same due diligence steps as the aforementioned corporate checklists and be aware of the pitfalls in sourcing reliable information about unknown tech.
• When asking for information from other related government agencies it may not be forthcoming. Even other departments at your level of government, for example, Council, Local, County, State, Federal, or national may also be defensive if they have missed a trend or not been agile enough to spot it. Or else they are plain old opponents of new tech, as per the quiz in this book!
• Often semigovernment experts have become too comfortable and reluctant to make any fundamental changes like adopting new tech, especially (ironically) if they are in funding agencies like grants and government financing schemes.
• They have so many eager entrepreneurs wanting to pitch to them desperate for funds, that some government officials and civil servants may rest on their laurels and are quick to cover up their deficiencies, lack of knowledge of current trends, and overstate their past achievements.
• Coverups and nondisclosure of similar tests and trials of the same technology or related innovations may occur because they were flops. It is human nature to want to downplay failures you may be personally or indirectly responsible for. In government, this unwillingness can reach epic proportions as they have different dynamics for disclosing departmental incidents and somewhat secretive protocols for not sharing information, even with colleagues.
• In the private sector, the financial necessity of profits and economies of scale is the determining factor. People are reluctant to withhold information because it will soon come to light that they caused a failure due to a lack of information sharing.
• Tech ventures in the early stages are usually lean and mean operations of five people, sometimes a team of ten. There is nowhere to hide and so accountability in disclosing to your colleagues failed attempts or “accounts lost” is almost guaranteed. Or you will find your contract terminated abruptly. A lean and mean startup has no time to lose, and no money to waste due to staff’s personal feelings of discomfort about failure.
• Check with industry experts you respect but do not tell them who are you are checking on due to the anti-competitive clauses in your nondisclosure agreement with the external entrepreneurs. It is just general good practice in the highly competitive world of launching innovation.
• See the aforementioned checklist for corporate purchasers which goes in depth into this aspect. I have not applied it to the same extent to the public sector because in my experience, there is more awareness of—and openly strict rules for—public servants for discretion and following the departmental guidelines on purchasing.
• Civil servants are employed on the basis of neutrality, which is enforced by strict codes of conduct and also internal guidelines for procurement and tenders for suppliers, that is, most governments have separate units dedicated to sourcing providers and suppliers according to strict, public procurement guidelines to avoid corruption, bribery and favoritism in public and/or political office.

For Both the Public and Private Sectors

Key Advice

This e-mail between our Head of Asia Pacific Sales in Melbourne, Jon Field, and myself sitting on a farm in Kent, chasing deals globally online, sums it all up really.2 Be fair to entrepreneurs, they are usually working nearly 20 hours a day on average.

When you don’t become their internal advocate after you are convinced they have an innovation your company should adopt, you are wearing them out with needless pitches and meetings. Startup owners make these sessions comfortable and easy for you, that is their job. Behind the scenes, it takes enormous energy and resources to make just these corporate pitches happen, often on a shoestring or nonexistent budget.

Here are some more tips on how you can make your entrepreneurial journey more pleasurable and better prepared for all those involved, even down to your company’s inhouse maintenance staff who may have the mundane task of installing the electrical and Internet connections for the device or mixed reality experience:

• Watch videos on YouTube and TED conference talks relevant to what you want to implement.
• If time allows, go to as many conferences and tech trade shows as possible, ask to be introduced to leading speakers who have been paid to be there, not the other way around. Sadly the business model of most trade shows and tech conferences is that the companies with the biggest marketing budgets pay the organizers to put them on stage. And then everyone pretends they are not listening to veiled advertisement.
• Be clear on what you want to achieve and how you are going to publicize it in relation to your brand, your department, your company, or organization, so that the entrepreneurs understand their role in the media plan and what confidentiality levels are required.
• If journalists and tech editors get wind of your pilot somehow and start contacting you, for example, is the government going to replace civil servants with robots? Is corporation X going to use artificial intelligence instead of business analysts, chatbots instead of call centers, digitization and remote working instead of offices and a headquarters, then you may need to prepare a response. No comment may be taken as assent in some media.
• Work this out with your organization media team and the wishes of the entrepreneurs if they are external, and intrapreneurs if they have been recruited to work for you inhouse on an R&D greenfield project.

Guidelines for AI Apps: Understanding What You Want and Measuring It

Dos and Don’ts

• Cybersecurity—make sure all the parties involved have covered the anti-hacking measures adequately to prevent hackers or malware entering or spreading from your pilot.
• Data protection—getting an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) signed that has clauses stating who is liable for data breaches under GDPR is essentially all you need to do here. But best to check this!
• Respecting the creative work and IP of the tech venture at all times, as much as possible either by actions, word or written praise of milestones achieved together.
• Acknowledge the commercial value of this emerging tech with payment if possible. If this is an unpaid pilot on the basis of an exchange of marketing campaigns in return for the trial of technology, then make sure you keep your end of the bargain and promote the startup’s innovation clearly and reliably to their satisfaction.
• Be a reliable partner—communicate what is going on and don’t leave the team hanging in radio silence. They are working in underfunded, pressurized environments!
• Give fair testimonials—you can put an early stage venture out of business within a week if you give unfair criticism to a prospective new client.
• Scaling up for a startup is a slow and painful process so you are in a privileged position of power over their future and past investment. Be mindful and don’t abuse your power to put a rapid end to their innovation.
• Don’t lose patience, remember the extreme conditions these entrepreneurs are working under—no pay, or inadequately paid for years to do R&D, and bootstrapping their venture under pressure of cash flow issues and trying to fund new client acquisitions.
• Don’t reveal secrets to competitors, even if these competitors are “famous” established brands who approach you directly or indirectly to gather business intelligence or even to try to steal the contract away from the startup you are nurturing. Stay committed and keep your integrity intact by not divulging any details to the Goliaths of industry.
• Encourage them in entrepreneurship and acknowledge the many sacrifices they have made to get their tech to market, both in their personal life and their professional life, for example, they have forgone a highly paid, full-time salary like yours!

General Guidelines When Botifying Websites, Databases, and Public Spaces

When commissioning a 2D chatbot for online deployment (usually on an Instant Messaging platform), or if you want to be a pioneer in the 3D Mixed Reality avatar space, AI bot holograms or Virtual Reality/AR experiences, then you should make sure you consider all of these points:

• Privacy
• Data protection
• Contextual practices and cultural expectations
• Demographic expectations
• User habits
• Defined consumers
• Random exchanges
• Unpredictable interactions
• Website are less used than apps
• Most people, anywhere in the world, only use a maximum of five apps on their phone on a regular basis
• Therefore Instant Messaging is and will be the preferred medium of communication between people and brands
• Social media and installations, for example, immersive reality.

Figure 5.5 © Realfiction, Copenhagen, 2019. To date, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have not botified the experience. The interaction has been created through gesture as you see here. The man is waving at the AR image to select a color button. Once the gesture is understood by the AR software, it will change the color of the car for the shopper. Voice commands is the next interactive step, as is the “implanting” of a bot brain which my company AI BaaS is currently doing in our HQ in Munich and Mixed Reality lab in Devon, UK

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