What could Santa do with Gen AI?

By Ian Amaranayake

It’s that most wonderful time of the year again when we try to watch out, try not to cry, definitely don’t pout, and tell each other why – Santa Claus is coming to town. Well, we all know Santa runs a tight ship (or should that be a sleigh). 364 days may sound like a lot of time to prepare for a one-day ‘go live’ event but the reality is Santa and his elves are up against the clock the moment Christmas Eve rolls into Christmas Day. Whilst we’re tucking into our mince pies, unwrapping our presents and stuffing our turkey in the oven, Santa is already planning for next year’s “deliverables”, and with a growing population every second counts.

Even with Big Data analytics (see our 2023 Xmas blog), the task of delivering presents to 2 billion children worldwide takes planning, coordination and quality control with no margin for error – there can be no project delays, no one wants to entertain moving Christmas, there is simply no appetite for a “change freeze”.

Let us consider the problem:

Santa has a huge workforce analytics challenge – every elf counts, no time to sit on a shelf! Santa needs his workforce to deliver without fail, to quality, and with increasingly complex requirements around presents than ever before. It’s a tough job! Never has there been a need to constantly modernise to survive, and with less demand for physical toys, Santas workshop quite literally has had to undergo digital transformation.

How does Santa know what presents will be needed? With most Christmas lists being prepared less than a month before the big event, Santa has a huge challenge processing both cross-platform and multichannel requests (letters, email, social media, apps and direct outreach to shopping mall and garden centre Santas). How can Santa possibly get ahead of demand?

And then of course there is the naughty and nice list. We all know Santa checks it twice, but is that enough? Even a long-time nice lister can turn naughty, and at what age do we start to see believers churn?

When you consider all the above, it almost seems like an impossible challenge. It would take a winter wonderland to keep up. Fortunately, there is an answer to this challenge, Santa needs to embrace AI!

Let’s consider the potential on Santa’s business operations:

• Using synthetic data to build simulations and predictive models forecasting the most popular gifts, Santa’s workshop can stay one reindeer hoof ahead, focussing on those gifts that will be the most in-demand.
• Could Santa use Gen AI to automate the interpretation of present requests? LLM’s trained on a vector database of popular presents should reduce hallucinations and ensure an accurate coupling of presents with nicely-behaved believers. Different formats of requests? No problem! Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision should enable the workshop to process all formats of requests.
• How many elves does it take to respond to every ‘letter’ sent to the North Pole? Could Santa’s workshop make better use of Chatbots (‘Ho Ho Ho-w can I help you?’) and AI agents to automate and personalise responses back to expectant children the world over? Perhaps the elves could spend less time in the workshop and more time rockin’ around the Christmas tree.
• And as for the naughty and nice list, the problem here is that the data changes all the time. But society is also changing, don’t most children have access to a device? What Santa really needs is analytics at the edge, performing behavioural scoring with streaming updates to the naughty and nice list. Why only check the list twice when, through AI automation, we can cross-check and update it multiple times per minute?! Furthermore, Santa could make his analytics freely available to parents. Collecting 360-degree feedback will help to manage bias and ensure his results are trustworthy and transparent.

By embracing AI, Santa could optimise his business. Elves would be free to take holidays, and critical year-end events would become far more manageable due to the efficient prioritisation of resources. And it doesn’t just stop there, surely Santa’s reindeer can also help. After all, they know all about the cloud and already use a deer-to-deer network for coordinating take-offs and landings!

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at Katalyze Data.