TrendLife targets AI challenges with family-focused Kaleida

TrendLife is looking to put cybersecurity protections around the rapidly expanding use of artificial intelligence, arguing that families need greater visibility into how AI is being used rather than simply relying on the technology to produce answers.

Speaking at the Families in the Age of AI event in Sydney, TrendLife Chief Customer Experience Officer, Peter Chiang, said the rapid development of AI is creating a new set of challenges for a range of stakeholders, including parents, children and educators.

Chiang explained how his own experience as a parent has influenced his thinking about how AI should be developed and deployed.

"I feel grateful that at TrendLife, we're contributing to something as meaningful as the next generation's future," he said.

Instead of trying to restrict the possibilities created by AI, Chiang said the technology requires pragmatic scaffolding to allow children to explore its potential, while reducing the risks associated with increasingly powerful systems.

He described AI as a double-edged sword, capable of addressing complex problems while also introducing new risks that are not yet fully understood.

Technology influencer Georgie Healy spoke about her recent experience at Dreamforce in San Francisco, where AI leaders Sam Altman and Dario Amodei reinforced the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

That tension is also influencing how TrendLife thinks about AI and creativity.

On the topic of young people perceiving creative pursuits as futile when the technology is exponentially more capable, Chiang argued that the value of creative work cannot always be judged by the final product.

The process behind creating something - including the context, struggle, purpose and personal experience involved - will remain important.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," Chiang said, arguing that AI-generated content could not necessarily replicate the individual context and story behind human creative work.

"If we're talking about protecting something, then I would take the stance that the process and the pride, the purpose, and the provenance that accompanies it is something very much worth protecting in the AI era," Chiang said.

Learning Buddy encourages pragmatic use of AI for education

One of the central concepts behind Kaleida, its family-focused AI product, is giving parents and educators greater visibility into how children interact with AI.

TrendLife has introduced Learning Buddy as part of the platform, with the feature designed to encourage learning rather than simply allowing students to obtain answers from an AI system.

A student who arrives at the correct answer without demonstrating their reasoning may still be marked down because the process used to reach that answer is important.

TrendLife wants to apply a similar concept to AI.

Learning Buddy is intended to provide parents and teachers with greater visibility into how children are using AI without turning the technology into a surveillance tool.

The approach is also intended to build AI literacy by encouraging users to question and refine AI-generated responses.

Lynette Owens, VP Consumer Education & Marketing Communications at TrendLife, said children can use the system to practice asking an AI tool questions in different ways and examining how responses change.

The company sees this as particularly important as AI becomes embedded in education and everyday life.

Owens said the risks associated with AI could be harder for consumers to understand than earlier cybersecurity threats because some of the consequences remain hard to predict.

She compared the current growth of AI with the early development of social media, when the long-term implications of widespread adoption were not immediately clear.

"The issue now with AI is some of the risk feels a little abstract," Owens said.

Focus on consumer protection

Kaleida is part of a broader range of consumer-focused products in the TrendLife suite following its spin-off from Trend Micro back in April.

Chief Revenue Officer at TrendLife, Tim Falinski, said the decision to separate its consumer and business departments was made to allow each side to develop more specialised expertise while retaining common underlying technology.

The move comes as AI changes the nature of cybersecurity for both consumers and businesses.

TrendLife had previously seen a similar shift with scams, where the company moved towards more proactive consumer protection, Falinski explained.

AI needs to be addressed as a matter of priority, rather than waiting for risks to become widespread.

"AI iterates so fast we can't leave it for another two years, like we did with social media, like we did with scams," Falinski said.

He cited differing approaches to AI in schools as evidence of the challenge facing governments and educators.

New York City public schools recently announced a ban on students using AI in the classroom from kindergarten until eighth grade.

But instead of applying such blanket restrictive policies for AI use in schools, Falinski said education systems must find ways to prepare students for a world in which the use of technology and automation is on the rise.

The company's position is that protection needs to become part of the AI infrastructure, not treated as a separate consideration.

Falinski described this as applying a harness around the model, with TrendLife sitting between users and the underlying AI services, as the company is not developing its own foundational model.

Instead, Kaleida is designed to work with existing LLMs and generative AI models.

That distinction allows TrendLife to focus on security and consumer protection rather than competing directly with AI model developers.

Privacy and local processing remain important

Privacy is another area TrendLife expects to become increasingly important to consumers as AI assistants become more capable.

Chiang acknowledged that the current product requires data to pass through the company's cloud infrastructure.

The long-term goal, he said, is to push more context towards local processing.

TrendLife is examining how future consumer hardware could allow more information to remain local, private and under the control of individual customers and families.

Executives expect significant evolution of family AI tool 

Despite the company's ambitions for Kaleida, Chiang said that it represents an early iteration in its current guise.

He explained that TrendLife deliberately wanted to get the product into consumers' hands and begin collecting feedback because the AI safety market is still relatively immature.

Unlike established cybersecurity products, such as antivirus, internet security and VPNs, consumers do not yet have a widely understood concept of what AI security should look like, creating an inherent and significant challenge for product designers.

One of Chiang's priorities was to develop an interface that allows consumers with varying tech savviness to understand what an AI system is doing.

He argued that AI interfaces still lacked the equivalent of the intuitive breakthrough created by touchscreen interfaces on smartphones.

While natural language has become the dominant way of interacting with AI, Chiang said multimodal systems could present information through graphs, quizzes, games and videos.

The challenge is making those capabilities easy to understand, while providing users with sufficient visibility into the AI's behaviour.

"Auditability and interpretability are first-class priorities in terms of the Kaleida user experience," he said.

TrendLife expects feedback from early users to influence the product roadmap as Kaleida evolves.

Chiang said the company's broader objective is understanding the specific security needs of consumers as AI becomes embedded in their daily lives.

For TrendLife, the next evolution of its B2C operations will be moving beyond protecting devices and networks to protecting how people interact with AI itself.