October 12, 2023

Bridging the AI-Human Divide: AI as Your Operations Teammate

When viewed through the lens of collaboration rather than competition, AI should free people to do what they are uniquely good at — creative problem-solving, collaborating and using judgment to solve complex challenges. This “human-in-the-loop” approach to AI can alleviate people from daily-grind tasks that are time-consuming, repetitive, and often lead to burnout.?Envision a scenario where your AI teammate seamlessly integrates into your operational workflows, becoming a trusted assistant who handles time-consuming tasks. This teammate has a comprehensive understanding of your operations, understands the contextual importance of data and can deliver that data exactly when needed in the forms of metrics, graphs and recommended actions. Imagine an AI teammate that collects and sorts a massive amount of data, producing concise summaries for human analysis. Or AI that provides you with information that detects and contextualizes incidents.?As potent as AI is in dissecting vast data sets, spotting patterns, and rendering contextual analysis, it’s still in its infancy.?

Chatbots in the future of customer service

Customers often feel like they must jump over hurdles, trying different phrase combinations to explain what they need to get a rules-based chatbot — which is typically defined with existing mapped-out responses — to understand their request. Generative AI addresses this pain point, by continuously training and optimising chatbots to deliver a far more sophisticated, personalised level of customer support. Through conversational interactions, the technology can provide intelligent support for faster issue resolution while increasing self-solve rates to better streamline processes for the human agents. Generative AI’s ability to formulate responses based on historical insights, such as past behaviour and user profile problems, is a key differentiator for business leaders looking to win customer loyalty. Considering the majority of customers?say it’s important organisations understand them, with 65 per cent wanting agents to resolve problems easily, it’s an impossible demand to meet without integrating intelligent solutions.?

Treat generative AI like a burning platform and secure it now

“As generative AI proliferates over the next six to 12 months, experts expect new intrusion attacks to exploit scale, speed, sophistication, and precision, with constant new threats on the horizon,” wrote Chris McCurdy, worldwide vice president & general manager with IBM Security in a blog about the study. For network and security teams, challenges could include having to battle the large volumes of spam and phishing emails generative AI can create; watching for denial-of-service attacks by those large traffic volumes; and having to look for new malware that is more difficult to detect and remove than traditional malware. “When considering both likelihood and potential impact, autonomous attacks launched in mass volume stand out as the greatest risk. However, executives expect hackers faking or impersonating trusted users to have the greatest impact on the business, followed closely by the creation of malicious code,” McCurdy stated. There’s a disconnect between organizations’ understanding of generative AI cybersecurity needs and their implementation of cybersecurity measures, IBM found.

Technical debt has hindered UK innovation

With technical debt reaching an extreme tipping point, it is important to learn from how we got here. As businesses are driven to provide better and more customized solutions for their customers, they are competing for a limited pool of developers who can help them navigate complex IT infrastructure and operations. The research found that the two leading factors behind technical debt were the high number of development languages, which makes it difficult to maintain and upgrade systems, as well as steep turnover in development teams. This results in new hires becoming responsible for platforms they did not create and may not fully understand. Other significant factors include companies accepting known defects in order to meet deadlines, and the presence of outdated development languages and frameworks. As a result, businesses struggle to maintain and rework critical systems. Over time, technical debt builds up and compounds through thousands of seemingly small decisions, before becoming a major problem preventing companies from investing in new innovations or services.

How ChatGPT and other AI tools could disrupt scientific publishing

Many editors are concerned that generative AI could be used to more easily produce fake but convincing articles. Companies that create and sell manuscripts or authorship positions to researchers who want to boost their publishing output, known as paper mills, could stand to profit. A spokesperson for Science told Nature that LLMs such as ChatGPT could exacerbate the paper-mill problem. One response to these concerns might be for some journals to bolster their approaches to verify that authors are genuine and have done the research they are submitting. “It’s going to be important for journals to understand whether or not somebody actually did the thing they are claiming,” says Wachter. At the publisher EMBO Press in Heidelberg, Germany, authors must use only verifiable institutional e-mail addresses for submissions, and editorial staff meet with authors and referees in video calls, says Bernd Pulverer, head of scientific publications there. But he adds that research institutions and funders also need to monitor the output of their staff and grant recipients more closely.

Israel-Hamas conflict extends to cyberspace

There have also been cyberattacks targeting Palestine by an India-based hacktivist group called Indian Cyber Force. The group has shown solidarity with Israel in the current conflict and has taken responsibility for bringing down the websites of Hamas, Palestine National Bank, Palestine Web Mail Government Services, and Palestine Telecommunication Company. "Indian Cyber Force has previously initiated several cyber campaigns in support of India. Their previous targets include Bangladesh and Canada. It appears that Bangladesh was targeted regarding their relationship with Pakistan," Flashpoint said in a report. ... India's open support for Israel in the ongoing conflict has also dragged the country into this cyber warfare. Several hacktivist groups objected to India's support for Israel in the current conflict and its departure from a traditional neutral stance in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Hacktivist group Ghosts of Palestine posted a message on the Telegram channel claiming to target India. The message clearly highlighted that the cause of the attacks was India's support for Israel.

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