Individual Addressability Comes Full Circle with Mobile AI: From People to Data to Agents

Through the lens of agents, this article situates mobile artificial intelligence (mobile AI) in relation to earlier and ongoing developments with mobile media and communication, including mobile telephony and mobile broadband. With mobile telephony, individuals are directly addressable to one another (“individual addressability”), whereas with mobile broadband, data are addressable to individuals anytime, anywhere (“data addressability”). With mobile AI agents, data are not just addressable to users, but individually addressable to them and the situation at hand (“individual addressability of data”). As social actors that use machine learning to perform tasks requiring humanlike intelligence, mobile AI agents operate at the intersection of addressability among individuals and data, uniquely supporting the “individual addressability of data” and mobile broadband services. As we explain, this development has implications for how individuals connect with people, data, and agents as social actors.