Blogs | RVVR AI

The Future of AI: Between Piaget and Maslow

Most conversations about the future of AI seem to bounce between two poles. Either it’s going to do everything, or it’s going to take everyone’s job. Neither pole is a particularly useful frame to build anything inside, so I’ve been mapping the question against two older ideas that I think have aged considerably better than most things written about AI in the last few years. One is Jean Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. The other is Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. One of them is about how minds grow up over time. The other is about what people are actually for. If AI is going to end up being useful, I think it has to engage seriously with both.

AI for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses

If you run a small or mid-sized company, you've probably watched the AI conversation happen mostly above your weight class. The case studies all involve Fortune 500s, the pricing pages assume you've got an ML team on staff, and most of the demos seem to involve a chatbot answering trivia questions about Wikipedia.

AI in Medical Diagnosis: An Assistant, Not a Replacement

Every few months a study comes out showing some AI model matching or even beating clinicians on a narrow diagnostic task, and the headlines tend to write themselves. Then the model gets deployed in an actual hospital, and the gap between the paper and the ward becomes obvious. The patient population is different, the imaging equipment is different, the documentation habits are different, and there are edge cases that the training set never had a chance to see.

What an AI Retail Assistant Should Actually Do

I test these systems for a living, so let me start with what I look for. A good retail AI assistant doesn't need to feel especially human. It needs to get the customer to the right answer faster than they could find it by scrolling through a help center, and it needs to know when it's out of its depth.

Task-Oriented Dialogue, Without the Hype

The phrase "task-oriented dialogue system" is doing a lot of academic work for what amounts, in plain English, to software that talks to a user in order to get something specific done. Book the flight. File the ticket. Look up the order on its way. The conversation isn't really the point of the exercise. The task is.

What RVVR Actually Does

I sit on RVVR's board, so I should declare the bias up front. But I joined for a reason that's worth writing down. Most of the AI vendors I see pitching to enterprises are selling either a chatbot or a research demo dressed up to look operational. RVVR is selling neither of those things. What they're selling is a finished result: a working AI system that runs on your data, inside your stack, monitored by their team, with somebody you can call when it breaks.