Intro into AI and How to Embrace it: Lucy Hall
Lucy’s session provided a thorough introduction into what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, why understanding the use of AI is important to all of us, and how we can embrace the skills of the future.
AI is the simulation of human intelligence and can be defined as technology that is able to learn, reason, plan, perceive or process natural language. It is a rapidly advancing technology and is already having a significant effect on our everyday lives and the world of business, impacting the future of virtually every industry and becoming the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics, and more. Large tech companies are also giving priority to AI and are already heavily investing in research and development, demonstrating the importance of AI for businesses in general.
Despite people’s presuppositions about Artificial Intelligence only taking over jobs, AI is actually creating new work opportunities; there is a huge demand for technical professionals in AI and data analysis right now. Plus, technological advances are changing the landscape of the job market constantly and by 2030, 85% of the jobs that will exist don’t currently exist today. Being ahead of the game by understanding AI and using it within our own businesses to improve efficiency and educate others is therefore crucial to our future success.
The very nature of AI means that someone has to be behind this technology and so ethics do come into this field in a very big way. It’s not all about science, technology, and programming; ethicists will be integral to the success of emerging technologies like AI.
AI already exists in our everyday lives. Some examples include Face ID, which utilises machine learning algorithms, social media, where AI is working behind the scenes to personalise what we see on your feeds and filter out fake news, and emails, where spam-blocking and natural language tools like Grammarly are playing an evermore important role.
Emerging technology will actually free up more time in our businesses to allow us to be more creative, as AI will take care of processing menial, data-heavy tasks in an error-free way. This data will also provide us greater insights into our customers and our business itself, helping us to improve performance and understand our customers better. So naturally, empathy and the human touch are going to become evermore important, and organisations that ignore AI will rapidly become redundant. The time to upskill is now!
And one final note from Lucy: Be brave, be curious, and never stop learning!
All of this and more will be available on-demand via heysummit after the event.
