Don’t miss Brandweek, Adweek’s ultimate experience for marketers, September 11-14 in Miami. Connect with peers and gain insights and inspiration from top brand marketers and industry icons at Glossier, Coca-Cola, Taco Bell and more. Register.
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 built through 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.