AI expert Greg Levenhagen provides insights into the kinds of opportunities and challenges the exploding technology can provide your business
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues transforming the business landscape, leaving many wondering where it will go next.
This is exactly the question that Greg Levenhagen tackles in The State of AI in Business in 2024 webinar, which you can see in its entirety here. Greg is uniquely positioned to address the topic as a Technical Fellow, AI and Software Engineer at CoreBTS, as well as Microsoft Regional Director and AI MVP.
“Pretty much across the board, we’re finding that a lot of people have different definitions [of AI], different understandings, and what I will highlight as most important is different expectations,” says Levenhagen. “And so when we’re working or deploying or strategizing in AI, it is of utmost importance to communicate expectations so that people understand what’s coming, how to interact with an AI mechanism, and how it may impact things.”
People’s expectations range from the doomsday scenario with The Terminator Skynet to “I’ll just be able to sit back, and it’ll do my job for me, and it’ll be awesome.”
While the future shouldn’t be exactly like these two things, it could be awesome in many ways.
AI Integration into Business
AI, and particularly generative AI, is making major inroads into the business world. It is transforming operations and IT systems, automating tasks, and enhancing efficiency.
Levenhagen points out that AI’s current and growing usefulness depends on three factors. These include the 1960s research that yielded the base algorithms for AI processes, helping to build neural networks. There was a rise in computing power led by both cloud computing and the gaming industry. Finally, there has been a mass accumulation of low-cost data over the last decade or more.
“So we’re kind of hitting this trifecta of things that we can pull together and process the data . . .” explains Levenhagen. “And then it actually starts becoming useful for the average business.”
But it’s also important to realize that while AI can present new solutions for business problems, it’s not always the only or best solution. Other methods might work better and cheaper in certain functions. So, business leaders need to understand their company’s industry pain points or do a gap analysis to determine if AI is the best solution. Core BTS’s CoreConversations solutions can help businesses navigate these decisions by providing tailored insights and expert advice on the best technologies for their unique challenges.
“There are sometimes other technologies that can be better suited to solving that. And so it’s right to think about your full toolbox potential ways to handle things,” says the CoreBTS Technical Adviser.”
Transparency Efforts
One of the roadblocks to using AI in business effectively is that the technology can seem too complex and mysterious for most of us to truly comprehend. So, a lot of effort is being made to render AI systems more transparent and understandable to humans.
Levenhagen agrees that “explainability” has become an important issue regarding AI integration into business. It could be “laziness” on the part of some computer scientists to accept that AI is not explainable to most people, so they don’t make the effort.
“Now, I’m not saying it’s an easy problem to solve, but we could certainly capture the information and characteristics as things traverse through neural networks and then do some amount of work to analyze that data, and . . . figure out some explainability observability stuff,” he says.
Security and Ethical Impacts
AI usage has concerns about security, ethics, bias, and privacy, prompting discussions on mitigating these issues.
AI itself is providing some answers to these concerns. Working with massive amounts of data, AI can be used for predictive analysis and optimization techniques. The effectiveness is seen in AI-based credit card fraud detection, so credit card bureaus have practically eliminated the need for verification signatures.
Levenhagen points out that AI is ramping up the effectiveness of cybersecurity measures, finding stronger ways to detect and analyze patterns, and “recognizing attack vectors being utilized by hackers.”
When it comes to privacy concerns, “the important thing is the call to action for us as technologists to realize that we need to shoulder some of that responsibility and make sure that we’re doing ethical and moral things with data, especially if it contains any personalized data, or critical data for clients, or our employees and our own companies.”
Sometimes, biases in AI data are caused by problematic demographic data. This situation must be addressed, but many applications don’t require such information. CoreBTS, for example, has worked on projects requiring no personal information, such as ones for healthcare and manufacturing, which may involve data about equipment and processing times.
According to Levenhagen, Microsoft is making great strides in creating a dataset that tries to help users running it through their models to be evenhanded and avoid minority biases.
Industry-Specific Applications
AI influences industry-specific applications in healthcare, retail, finance, transportation, and others, automating tasks like diagnosis, risk assessment, and autonomous driving.
Healthcare, for example, has been using AI for a while for medical diagnosis and treatment planning. However, Levenhagen insists that while a doctor may use AI to examine symptoms and provide possible diagnoses, it is essential to keep the human medical expert at the center of the process. AI shouldn’t make a fully automated decision when human lives and health are at risk. It’s a tool, not a replacement.
In retail, AI might be used for inventory management, making pricing decisions, enhancing the consumer shopping experience, optimizing product placement, and much more. Besides cybersecurity and fraud detection, the financial sector is already using AI to personalize services and products, enable transparency and compliance, automate operations, and reduce costs.
When it comes to transportation, AI is helping with route optimization, giving drivers real-time updates about traffic conditions and potential hazards, and even helping to improve fuel efficiency by suggesting when to brake and accelerate. Of course, AI is (literally) the driving force in autonomous cars, which seek to partially or fully replace human drivers in navigating their vehicles. Of course, a truly safe, self-navigating car isn’t here with us yet.
AI Will Continue to Grow
AI continues to reshape businesses. It has profound impacts, ranging from enhanced integration into operations to addressing security and ethical concerns. According to Levenhagen, there are legitimate worries that it might cause disruptions to industries, just as the cotton gin did to the cotton industry or Henry Ford and the assembly line did to the automotive industry.
However, against this, we’ve seen many examples of AI helping people with their work duties and, in some cases, creating jobs rather than putting people out of them. Levenhagen points out that CoreBTS is walking its talk and going through an AI transformation itself.
“Every company is now having to concern themselves with AI and what impact it may have,” he says, “or they’re probably gonna be going out of business.”
Contact us at CoreBTS for an AI readiness assessment and learn how you can start to drive innovation and efficiency in your operations.
