Scaling The $530 Billion Digital Human Market
5 factors that would help scale
As late as January 2023, I have typed in “Are you a bot or a human” in the first minute of an online customer support chat.
Based on the answer, I would judge if I would instead exit the chat and make a telephone call, be on the call queue, request a callback, and rather speak to an actual human.
The approach made sense till the release of GPT4. Not anymore.
In a faceless world, the lines between a human and a non-human being (Ooo… spooky) have blurred since March 2023.
The Digital Humans Industry is approximately a $ 530 billion dollar industry; with a growth rate that exceeds 40%.
I ask myself, what are the stars that need to align, for this market to scale?
In my view there are possibly five building blocks:
1. The Virtual Character ecosystem
The Avatar industry has been alive for a while. Gamers have always represented themselves digitally with the best graphic representations available.
Generative AI tools have made the process of creating hyper-realistic 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional avatars easier. This ecosystem would continue to evolve and get better
2. Virtual Character/Avatar Intelligence
Computer Vision, Transformer, and Robotic Models now enable speech, vision, text, movement, and their combinations as underlying intelligence inputs to the Virtual Characters.
These Models have been evolving separately from, and in parallel to, the Virtual Characters.
3. Integration of Intelligence into Virtual Characters
Ease of integration of Avatar Intelligence to the potentially disparate Virtual Character ecosystems is an important enabler.
This is where the NVIDIA Avatar Engine (NVIDIA Omniverse ACE) would help. The platform claims to provide seamless integration of the various Avatar Intelligence components to the Avatar ecosystem.
I like the micro-services-based open approach.
4. Real-time rendering
Real-time rendering of the Avatars to life opens up important market segments.
A lot of the incremental value created by a Digital Human happens to be in live scenarios.
5. Ease of deployment
Two variables that helped the Cloud industry scale are 1) ease of deployment and 2) cost efficiency.
I would extrapolate the same variables for scaling the Digital Human industry as well.
I would explore the following questions:
- is there an active ecosystem of System Integrators, Equipment Manufacturers and Software Vendors?
- Is there portability across the big cloud infrastructure providers?
- Do I see any proprietary silos anywhere?
- Am I able to bring my own ecosystem into the fold?
Note: I do not own any stocks at NVIDIA AI. I am keen to hear your thoughts :)
