Emerging Technologies

Realizing the value of Digital Entities in the era of AI

Digital entities are a wide class of technology designed to stand in for humans and automate tasks in digital spaces. Image: Shane Casey - Ciara Wade

Thomas Beckley
Fellow, Metaverse Initiative, World Economic Forum
Anna Schilling
Fellow, Metaverse Initiative, World Economic Forum LLC
Isabel Thomas
Human Sciences Studio, Accenture Research, Accenture
  • The convergence of AI and immersive technologies will transform digital entities as we know them today, fundamentally changing how we interact with technology.
  • The increasing autonomy and human-likeness of digital entities draw the importance of responsible design and governance approaches into focus.
  • The expanding use cases for digital entities unlock innovative capabilities for unprecedented economic and social value creation.

The convergence of advanced technologies such as AI, Spatial Computing, Blockchain, and more is culminating in the creation of digital entities, offering a range of new avenues for generating significant economic and social value for people and businesses.

For organizations, they provide personalized, scalable, cost-effective, and innovative options across industries, enabling enhanced customer engagement, operational efficiency, and emotional connectivity. For consumers, they help to deliver hyper-personalized experiences, enhanced UI/UX utility, easier onboarding, and new ways to receive and perceive information.

While the potential upside is significant, the design of digital entities can persuade us to change our opinions, attitudes and behaviours in different ways. While tools such as web search were intended to persuade by increasing our abilities, digital entities largely take the form of social actors, interacting with and persuading us by creating relationships.

What are Digital Entities and how are they used?

Digital entities are a wide class of technology designed to stand in for humans and automate tasks in digital spaces. These increasingly AI-driven representations encompass a broad spectrum, from simple GenAI chatbots to complex, human-like avatars and digital twins.

Digital entities can be broadly categorized into two larger groups, non-embodied and embodied (avatars).

Broad Categories of Digital Entities:

  • Non-Embodied: Non-embodied digital entities do not have a physical or visual form but operate through text, voice, or other non-visual interfaces, such as ChatGPT.
  • Embodied: Embodied (Avatar) digital entities, on the other hand, are represented by visual forms, such as embodied virtual agents, digital replicas, and human-driven characters. These entities can mimic human appearance and behaviour, offering a more immersive and interactive experience, such as UneeQ.
Image: World Economic Forum

Capable of varying degrees of interaction, autonomy, and behaviour, digital entities serve roles such as virtual assistants, social media influencers, and corporate trainers. Several types are already in use by businesses and individuals today.

Types of Digital Entities:

1. Virtual agents assist with customer service, sales support, and corporate training, offering consistent and efficient service.

2. Virtual influencers are used to engage audiences on social media and beyond to promote products, and influence lifestyle trends.

3. Virtual guardians can monitor environments for safety, providing alerts, and offer guidance on potential risks.

4. Virtual companions offer personalized companionship, emotional support, and conversation, particularly in eldercare and mental health.

5. Virtual assistants help users to perform tasks and services, from scheduling appointments to managing smart home devices.

6. Digital twins and doppelgangers simulate real-world objects and individuals for applications in health monitoring, fashion try-ons, teaching, and immersive experiences.

7. Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are used to enhancing gaming and virtual environment experiences with interactive, increasingly AI-driven characters.

Select Examples of Digital Entities:

Virtual Influences: Lil Miquela as seen on Instagram

Image: Lil Miquela

Virtual Companions: Companions as seen on Replika

Image: AI Companions

NPCs: Gen AI Powered Non-Player Characters as seen on Ubisoft

Image: NPCs

Capturing Value from Digital Entities

The evolution of generative chatbots, Agentic AI, which can autonomously achieve goals and even orchestrate teams of agents, occupies a space for productivity-enhancing tools and artificial co-workers.

As digital entities continue to evolve, their applications across various industries continue to expand, offering innovative consumer-facing solutions and enhancing operational efficiency.

  • Retail – Digital entities allow retailers to scale customer touchpoints through 24/7 channel interactions and personalized advice. This could resolve consumer queries more accurately, save handling time, and increase the productivity of call centre agents, allowing retailers to address the more than 3 in 4 customers who expect immediate personalized interactions—that could be provided via embodied digital entities.
  • Healthcare - Digital entities could address the sectors' significant talent shortages amidst a rapidly ageing global population by enabling real-time monitoring and optimizing resource allocation to prioritize urgent patient needs. Particularly, young people facing financial and access barriers to care increasingly turn to digital entities to help themselves. Adherence to appropriate medical standards to avoid therapeutic misconception while augmenting the work of clinicians could significantly improve access to care and reduce clinician burnout, which is estimated to cost the US healthcare system $4.6 bn per year.
  • Financial Services – Digital entities enhance financial services by providing 24/7 support and personalized financial advice, streamlining tasks like balance inquiries, loan applications, and fraud alerts. This meets the growing demand for instant, tailored services, as 72% of consumers expect personalized financial experiences.
Discover

How is the World Economic Forum creating guardrails for Artificial Intelligence?

A look ahead

As digital entities continue to permeate various industries, unlocking their full potential requires addressing several key challenges.

  • Proper identification is necessary: as our world becomes increasingly digital, establishing clear methods to identify and distinguish digital entities is critical to maintaining transparency and trust.
  • Data management is essential: developing robust systems for managing the data supply chain that supports these digital entities is vital, ensuring secure and efficient delivery while safeguarding the data inputs provided by end-users during their interactions.
  • Representation is crucial: we must determine how to appropriately represent both embodied and non-embodied entities in terms of appearance, voice, and behaviour to ensure they are engaging, trustworthy, and respectful of diverse user groups.

By resolving these issues, we can safely enable the value of digital entities and harness their transformative potential across industries.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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