AI for Good: Transforming Industries

At the Snowflake Summit, I had the honor of moderating the session “AI for Good: Transforming Industries” with Jennifer Daniell Belissent, PhD , Murali Gandhirajan , and Marco Diciolla . We discussed how AI is profoundly impacting different industries around the globe.

Story 1: Preventing Miscarriages of Justice

The first story was about the CoCounsel chatbot developed by the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) . This generative AI tool helps prevent miscarriages of justice by analyzing complex legal documents and identifying patterns that can lead to the exoneration of wrongfully convicted individuals. This AI application is a prime example of how technology can ensure justice and fairness in the legal system.

Story 2: AI in Precision Forestry and Sustainable Agriculture

The second story focused on AI’s role in precision forestry and sustainable agriculture. AI technologies are helping farmers improve yields, manage resources more efficiently, and adopt sustainable practices. This is crucial for achieving long-term agricultural sustainability and food security, aligning with global efforts to promote responsible consumption and production.

Story 3: Tackling World Hunger with Technology

The third story highlighted the innovative approach of The Akshaya Patra Foundation Foundation in combating world hunger. Using a modified chocolate pump, this NGO prepares nutritious meals for over 1.3 million children daily across India. Their efforts have significantly boosted school attendance and broken the cycle of poverty. This example illustrates how technical innovation can be a powerful tool in the fight against hunger and educational inequality.

Panel Discussion Highlights

Following these stories, the panel dived deeper into the potential of AI across various sectors.

Reshaping Healthcare:

Murali Gandhirajan spoke about how AI is revolutionizing healthcare. He highlighted AI’s ability to speed up transformation, reduce patient wait times, and decrease anxiety through rapid digital pathology reports. This demonstrates AI’s potential to enhance patient care and operational efficiency in healthcare systems.

Social Determinants of Health:

Murali then discussed how AI can significantly help with Social Determinants of Health by analyzing vast datasets to identify patterns and predict outcomes, enabling targeted interventions for high-risk populations. It can optimize resource allocation to ensure healthcare services reach underserved areas and help address environmental factors like air quality, enhancing overall community well-being.

AI in Food Tech:

Jennifer Daniell Belissent, PhD discussed AI’s role in food technology, emphasizing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of Zero Hunger. She explained how AI can help farmers adopt sustainable practices, manage resources efficiently, and promote food security. AI can also help with optimal consumption and production, aligning with UN SDG 12.

Creating Sustainable Cities:

Jennifer also highlighted AI’s role in creating sustainable cities and communities. AI enhances urban living through intelligent city infrastructure, better waste management, improved public transportation, and optimized energy use.

Small Actions, Big Results:

Marco Diciolla took a unique approach, emphasizing the impact of small, individual actions in combating climate change. He provided examples from the food and fashion industries, showing how AI can offer visibility into our carbon footprint and encourage sustainable choices. He stressed integrating AI across all processes and balancing small initiatives with large-scale projects.

He talked about the unique Move 37 by AlphaGo in the match vs Lee Sedol. Move 37 of AlphaGo was surprising because it was an unexpected and unconventional move that defied traditional human strategies in the game of Go. This move demonstrated AlphaGo's ability to think creatively and strategically beyond human expertise. It was a turning point that highlighted the advanced capabilities of AI, showing that AI could not only compete with but also surpass human intuition and strategy in complex tasks. Marco discussed that we must work on creating environments so that AI can create more "Move 37" for us.

Global Challenges and Risks:

Marco also discussed leveraging AI to address global challenges like climate change, public health crises, and social inequality. He reflected on AI’s crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling rapid vaccine development and distribution. However, he also cautioned about the inherent risks of new technologies and the need for appropriate regulation.

Audience Engagement

An audience member asked about the biggest challenge in implementing AI. The panelists provided insightful responses, emphasizing the need for guardrails, the trifecta of people, processes, and technology, and the importance of educating decision-makers.

In conclusion, I reflected on how my teachers once discouraged using calculators, emphasizing mental math. They feared that using calculators would make the exams too simple to solve. What should have been done in the class was to change the examination to test creativity rather than rote learning. Humans should focus on creative tasks with higher value when AI takes over mundane tasks.

This analogy underlined that AI + Human is an AND story, not an OR story. Combining human creativity and ethical judgment with AI’s capabilities can achieve far greater outcomes than either could alone.

Conclusion

In the book "Human + Machine," Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson state, “The more that machines advance, the more we realize the critical need for people to step up.”

By leveraging our creativity, empathy, and ethical judgment alongside AI’s capabilities, we can achieve breakthroughs that neither could accomplish alone, driving innovation and addressing complex societal challenges in unprecedented ways.

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