Chapter 1
Our tech leaders spent 20 minutes discussing the role that AI currently holds and will hold in our departments in the future. We’ve distilled some of the conversation and pointed you in the direction of some fascinating user cases and studies.
Greg Telford
Global Head of Infrastructure and Operations
Hogan Lovells
Sector matters contextually. It's one thing using AI to generate code. But when you're doing it in law, I mean, who here would feel comfortable with an AI generated mortgage document? Or legal decision being made by AI?
You can create your own large language model referencing specific legislation but ultimately a human has still got to clarify that the legislation is real and exists. I have heard many cases of when AI has made up legislation.
Jas Bassi
Head of Solutions Delivery
Gateley
Mark Simpson
Engineering Director
Griffiths Waite
Now, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to mix prediction with facts, especially the data. It's just that commercially, in the whole everyone's interested by just the prediction side of it. So that's where so much investment has gone and so much marketing. But, it should be catching up, you should be able to plug and play in your legal precedents, right? I think this one's relevant. Well, let's get another module that's more based on facts rather than prediction to assess and review.
The CX space is all about using AI around data sets. For example, one of the things you would do is look across all your reviews, your feedback, your surveys, take that data and ask: What the hell is going on here? Where are the issues? Where are the problems? As a human being it takes ages to go through all of that or you end up getting tables of data that doesn't mean anything, but you can turn this into Insight using AI very quickly.
With language models, you get contextualisation sentiment analysis rapidly and surfaces it, so that you can take action. That's one kind of a trend that's appearing.
The other one is around more to do with productivity, and taking away some of the mundane stuff that operatives have to do in the contact centres and on the frontline, and presenting them with the data so that they can get there quicker and build more effective conversations with customers.
Improving productivity, visualising data and ultimately improving decision making is where I see the game changing.
Vinay Parmar
Non-Exec Director & CX Keynote Speaker
Curo
Mark Simpson
Engineering Director
Griffiths Waite
What's key for me is data, it’s still the major currency here. We've been trying to educate clients on the importance of people, data and technology, get the right data and people onboard and apply the right technology and you can do great things.
This is the concern for me, the data. Public versus private. When we use this business sensitive information and throw it into Chat GBT its no longer our data. Where are the guardrails?
Peter Wainwright
Director of IT
ERIKS UK & Ireland
Matthew Evans
Director of Markets
TechUK
Did you hear about the company in Thailand who gave away their source code. It was an absolute disaster.
It's a creative nightmare. Who ultimately owns IP if a song has been adapted by AI. Where is the copyright now?
Vinay Parmar
Non-Exec Director & CX Keynote Speaker
Curo
Reuben Boughton
Board Member
Birmingham Tech Leaders
So most of us run IT teams, what does this mean for people? Less workers? The same numbers but increased efficiency?
Well, tasks such as LLM Prompting are going to be prerequisites on CV’s very quickly, that’s for sure.
Matthew Evans
Director of Markets
TechUK
Mark Simpson
Engineering Director
Griffiths Waite
I’m hoping that more time can be spent with the business users, the recipients of the applications to say, where have we designed it wrong, or prompted it randomly, if you like. And interestingly, when we started rolling out code pilot here, a while ago, I was really interested by the results. 50% of the team were like "this has saved me time, I'm going to go and demo this earlier". The other half of the team didn't like it, but two years later, that's now changed.
It’s like Centaurs and Cyborgs – The study that some scientists did with Boston Consulting. AI, specifically ChatGPT-4, significantly enhanced work performance across various tasks.
James Walsh
Business Director of Cyber Security
Hays
Conclusion
Uniformly we all agreed that every business was a technology business and the lens that we should see AI through is, its in our toolbox. It’s a creative efficiency tool that when utilised with the right guardrails, big data, tech and people will enhance every offering.
What we are all searching for is those guardrails for our businesses and business cases to develop even further how we can increase efficiencies and effectiveness.
Some questions to think about...
How is your IT department incorporating AI?
What are your biggest opportunities?
What are your concerns?
We’d love to hear your feedback.
#Birminghtechleaders
