Handle AI with care: chief AI officer WPP
“Humans are rubbish at making decision”. Yet the role and best use of artificial intelligence (AI) is not always obvious, and the industry should adopt it carefully and with a very nuanced approach.
That was one of the conclusions of a presentation by Daniel Hulme, CEO at Satalia, Chief AI Officer at WPP, called ‘Our Strange New World.’ He was speaking on the first day of Airmic’s annual conference, being held in Edinburgh this week.
He stressed that even the definition of AI is not clear – there are many different definitions. Many would measure this on the basis of getting computers to do things that humans can do. But using humans as the definition of intelligence is also problematic, he said.
But he went onto detail six applications of AI, one of which is capable of removing almost any friction in a supply chain in any industry.
The first is task automation, which can be used to do mundane, repetitive tasks. The second is content generation, used to create images and text. But he warned: “The battle ground is not around creating generic content, it is to create specific, unique content. It can be hard to do that with AI.”
The third is what he called human representation, which can create things like deepfakes, and mimic personas. The fourth is insight extraction, which would include machine learning, data science and analytics. But he noted: “The real power of machine learning is explaining predictions rather than making better decisions.”
The fifth use was better decision making while the sixth was human augmentation, the creation of things like exoskeletons and avatars.
But he also warned that companies should think carefully before implementing AI into their organisation in any sense. He advised carefully consider the intent when implementing AI. Once that has been established as being safe and responsible, he also suggested ensuring you can explain it to staff. And also consider the implications, not of it going wrong, but of working very well. “These technologies have the potential to massively over-deliver,” he said.
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