Multihyphenate will.i.am does not sit idle for long.
Seeing the creative challenges faced during pandemic lockdowns, the singer, songwriter, producer and tech entrepreneur embarked on a mission: develop a digital platform to help creatives and creators manage their businesses all in one place.
So was born the platform FYI (For Your Ideas). It went live in May. It’s described as the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI) Web 3.0 messenger utilizing WatsonX technology from a partnership with IBM Cloud.
What is FYI?
FYI aims to help creators collaborate by offering services from storyboarding, messaging and video calls to high-resolution file sharing and appointment booking all in one place while featuring cryptography to secure all of a user’s work and communications.
“In 2020, when we were all stuck in our homes or wherever, working from our devices, I realized that the creative community had to (use) five or six products just to get work done,” he explained at an event in Cannes held by Adweek.
It’s heartbreaking to know that it’s easier to raise money to make machines smarter than it is to raise money to make people smarter.
—will.i.am
From Dropbox to WhatsApp, WeTransfer, GPT and the need for encryption using NFTs and blockchain technology, he asked: “Why can’t it all be your whole entire dataset with all your digital assets kept in one place with generative AI at the core? So that was the idea.”
The application is being to support his i.am/Angel Foundation, funding STEAM education and robotics programs for 12,000 students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The foundation is raising money through The American Dream Fund with a target of $5 million that aims to help at-risk students get access to quality education so they can, in turn, lift up their families and communities. In the two years since fundraising began on a gofundme page, the foundation has currently raised less than half of the target.
“It’s heartbreaking to know that it’s easier to raise money to make machines smarter than it is to raise money to make people smarter,” he said.
“I just want to get out of that having to raise money and just have money to do it my damn self,” he said, adding, “I want to have success with FYI so I can do more work in inner cities and around the world because as AI continues to grow, it’s going to topple a lot of jobs.
Building for tomorrow
Sitting alongside will.i.am during the session was Jonathan Mildenhall, the co-founder of marketing consultancy 21st Century Labs and former chief marketer for Airbnb and Coca-Cola. The two worked together on projects 20 years ago, and re-engaged through College Track, which aims to help disadvantaged students across America go through college.
Mildenhall cited Peloton as one business that would see the content that is “far more authentic” and “far more effective” if it used the FYI platform.
“When the community generates content, and we saw this at Airbnb, you get a deep sense of authenticity, a deep sense of storytelling that is so organic and so compelling that it makes the traditional advertising agency content quite often feel incredibly superficial,” Mildenhall said.
“The big industries that are going to come tomorrow are going to come from communities like the ones that I come from,” will.i.am said. “We have a tool to help solve the problems that humans have ignored our whole entire life.”
And that’s the aim: to make the community the platform’s priority, which means protecting their rights. Will.i.am promised there is no intention to access or sell user data or to compromise their privacy.
“And we grow from there as we build from that principle of the human moral compass on our business practice,” he said.
Adweek reached out to content creator @Cocomocoe for her thoughts on using FYI
Currently, the app is not available on desktop. While I do believe that the future of working is mobile, it would be nice to have the desktop version. I use my desktop to edit videos while using other apps at the same time to grab images, grab links and email with collaborators as the project comes to life. That is harder to do when only on the phone as it forces you to focus on one app at a time.
One bonus of the app is that it is sleek and simple. As a first-time user, I did not struggle to navigate the app.
The biggest push for me to adopt FYI over the other platforms I currently use would be the AI chatbot that is baked in. The public domain AI tools are still relatively new and sometimes difficult to navigate. I have used AI bots on sites before that will crash or give me a limit of questions I can ask in a week. FYI, to my knowledge, has allowed me to use the bot without limit.
The first question I asked was how many apples are there in the world. It replied that there are 7,500 types of apples. I cross-referenced this answer on Google to check the accuracy of a newer chatbot and it was correct!
In summary, the biggest hurdles that I face with FYI before I fully adopt the app would be for there to be a desktop version and if they could loop your calendar into your already established email address or give you a new one to use. Email is such a huge part of people’s identity and daily life now – it would be hard to move away from that.
