Generative AI’s impact in business world highlighted

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This article was published 23/01/2024 (641 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tim Siemens has been working in the digital world since before the Internet.

As the 30-year veteran chief technology officer of Online Business Systems, the company founded by Chuck Loewen in 1986, he’s helped countless clients across Canada and the U.S. to become more productive using digital tools and solutions.

So it’s not surprising he would have a pragmatic take on the impact generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will have when it comes to business usage.

In a virtual presentation to members of Tech Manitoba on Tuesday, Siemens spoke about unleashing the power of AI in the business world.

A self-confessed optimist, Siemens said he discovered very early on the incredible power the tool holds.

“Generative AI can be useful in an extremely wide variety of situations from general to specific,” he said.

For instance, in his capacity as the leader of Online’s Innovation Lab, he can use AI to summarize information from large documents with lots of complex content and extract just what he needs and create new information from it.

“It is fantastic at creating agendas and project planning,” he said. “It’s great at conversational response. If you ask in the right way it can do a really good job compiling and extracting key topics from large documents.”

He made reference to the importance of semantics in using AI. Asking the right questions in the right way can make a big difference in the results that are generated.

In a casual poll of the 50-or-so people who attended Siemens’ online presentation on Tuesday, close to 90 per cent said they’d tried ChatGPT, the publicly available free-to-use AI system.

AI is already proving to be a popular cultural trend.

About 170 million people used ChatGPT within the first two months of its release.

Its global adoption is already faster than the take-up of the smartphone and, like smartphones, its usage will certainly increase as the systems get smarter and the smart people who can deploy the technology get better at doing so.

Siemens said Online has used it in enhancing the quality of chatbots and conversational tools for use in sectors such as the call centre context.

(Laivly, the Winnipeg AI company spun out from the massive Winnipeg-based contact centre company, Intouch CX (formerly 24-7 Intouch), was recently ranked as the second-best startup employer in Canada in Forbes magazine’s first-ever ranking of Canada’s best startup employers.)

Siemens said, “Generative AI is going to have a significant impact on conversational applications like chatbots and virtual assistants. It is going to heavily penetrate those markets. It is going to change the nature of those kinds of interactions.”

As an optimist, Siemens is hopeful regulators and creators will be able to figure out a way to manage malicious applications as more and more of then start surfacing.

“It’s something left to bigger brains than mine to determine a solution,” he said. “I am hopeful that when it comes to deepfakes and deliberate generation of wrong information that it is going to be wrestled down. But right now that remains an issue.”

He believes that in these early days of AI those fakes can be spotted relatively easily, but in a note of caution he said it will become increasingly difficult as they get better and become more numerous.

As for the human resource impact of AI, Siemens’ perspective is also fairly optimistic.

Siemens is focused on the productivity enhancement features of AI and he is sufficiently impressed.

With a staff of about 400 in six locations, AI is not going to replace Online’s skilled workforce. Instead, he believes it is more likely to make them all more productive.

“That means we’ll have the ability to produce more and more quickly,” he said. “Maybe there’s an idea that a customer may have which they have decided not to pursue because it would take too much effort to do. Now, all of a sudden it becomes within reach.”

Instead of needing fewer people, it’s not inconceivable that it will mean an even greater demand for workers for a company like Online Business Systems.

“Taking advantage of the capabilities of AI to help do a job in a more productive way means it will be opening up all sorts of avenues of use,” he said.

“I am a bit more of an optimist.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca