Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Main idea
At a trade show, the usual sequence puts the assistant after the fact: you talk to exhibitors, you take notes, you go home, and it is that evening or the following week that you ask for a synthesis. By then, all the assistant can do is work with what was brought back. The questions you did not ask cannot be recovered.
A context reachable from the phone moves that moment. Between two stands, you dictate what you have just learned, you persist it, and after a few conversations you run the ingestion. You can then ask, on site: what am I missing to understand this topic, which contradictions should I check with the next exhibitor, which questions have I not yet asked anyone. The answers arrive while the people are still there.
What changes is not the quality of the analysis, it is where it applies: it bears on a collection that is still open, and therefore still correctable.
Why it matters
This gives a value criterion for an assistance setup that does not show up in its advertised features: its access latency. A more complete system that is only reachable once you are back arrives after the window in which its answers could have been useful; a poorer system available while walking acts on the material before it is frozen.
And it redefines what you expect from an AI in field work. You usually ask it to produce from what has been collected; you can ask it to say what is missing from what has been collected, which is a different job.
Nuances and limits
Ingesting on site works on a partial stock: the blind spots it points out are those of a half-finished collection, and some would have filled themselves in at the next conversation. So part of the follow-up questioning is work rendered pointless later on.
And the exercise assumes the operator accepts being interrupted in their own thinking by what the system sends back — which is not neutral in the middle of a dense day.
Open questions
- At what quantity of material does mid-collection ingestion become reliable enough that you actually go back and ask the questions it points to?