Microsoft has recently filed a patent for an AI chatbot that can learn from an individual’s social media posts, emails, letters, voice samples and other communication material and then replicate the person’s style of communication. This machine learning algorithm will scan through all your social media activity, e-mails, letters you wrote in your teens, essays you wrote in school, speeches you gave, family moments that captured you, recordings of conversations stored in your devices and using all that information, it can in the near future, behave just like you, online. It can send out e-mails, post to your social media handles, chat with your friends and family, respond to enquiries, send out reminders, write your speech, represent you in webinars and virtual industry gatherings and perhaps deliver your podcast! Now let’s extend this conceptual thought forward to include more possibilities. The longer it lives with you, the better it will learn and the closer the likeness it will develop of you and soon, it will be indistinguishable from you. In short, it would have become your consciousness online. With one caveat—unlike you it won’t be restrained by a physical body made up of cells that will age and die. Which means this artificial consciousness that has formed an identical likeness of you, will continue to live on endlessly and then eventually, will become you. -Chapter Extract from “Multiply your Business Value Through Brand and AI” by Rajan Narayan. Launching August 2021