“Golden Age of #AI”

Yesterday at the beautiful Calyx in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens, more than 50 brave guests joined us despite the rainy weather for our “Golden Age of #AI” event. Our SnapShot lunch series is designed to provide a series of short, sharp, relevant and practical insights on a broad topic, with a chance to ask questions and interact, and be back to work by 2pm. And that’s what we delivered!

Our topic was Artificial Intelligence and the golden age it promises to offer us.

Gartner tells us global business value derived from AI will total US$1.2 trillion in 2018, an increase of 70 per cent from 2017. They say AI-derived business value globally will reach $3.9 trillion in 2022, and that AI will be the most disruptive class of technologies we will witness over the coming decade.

So AI is big, and important for us all.

But AI is a veritable child right now. We humans have an obligation to see AI grows up as a highly responsible, ethical and productive adult over the coming decades. As it learns to walk, we have already seen celebrated evidence of its early stumbles, just like we’d expect of any young kid.

Many people - Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Stuart Russell of Berkeley and others - foresee that as a mature, self-motivated adult, AI’s might “take off” on their own, modifying themselves and independently designing and building ever more capable systems. The risk being "that us humans, bound by the slow pace of biological evolution, would be tragically outwitted."

Just Google ‘Slaughterbots’ or visit https://autonomousweapons.org or follow hashtag #bankillerrobots and you will see more.

In the meantime, our colleague Ben Pring says “AI will enhance human ability in every field, not replace it. Everything from roads to bridges to medical machinery will be instrumented, with sensors talking to computers, enabling faster, data-driven decision-making and allowing people to act on the most urgent things first. When decision-making capability is objective and data-driven, there are enormous benefits for people to thrive, making them of greater value to their organisation.”

Yesterday we were joined by three expert practitioners to talk about the coming of age of this big, somewhat scary, highly intelligent kid, who we believe has great potential.

• Lisa Borden, Partner and Head of ANZ at ISG implored us all to just get started, because to some extent, who learns fastest will win here.
• Adrian Letchford, Senior Data Scientist at Airtasker regaled the audience with a fantastic story of personalizing his task classification algorithm – as Carl – and going even further to define the cast of characters within any business in terms of how they are likely to respond to the arrival of AI among them. 
• Jeff Olson, Head of Applied AI & Analytics at Cognizant shared his practical insights on the potential risks and conditions for successful AI deployment, and example use cases already creating great value for our clients and their customers.

In our Q&A we covered a number of key questions including:

• Do you do this yourself or do you need a partner? Which parts do you retain, which parts do you look to partners for?
• Is the hype around AI justified in terms of value creation? As a banker I asked “Show me the money” - what kind of use cases are delivering real returns already?
• Is the “automation anxiety” we hear about warranted? Do you buy the argument AI will be about augmentation of workers vs the elimination of jobs?
• Is the ability to attract talent in AI and emerging tech going to hold us back in Australia?
• How can we be confident about the ethics and fairness of algorithms when we don’t always understand how they really work (ML based on data it is trained on; bias)?

Thanks go once again to all our speakers, guests and event organising staff for creating a great experience. If you would like to continue the conversation with us, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with me or Jeff Olson.