Lifeboat Foundation

The 120-year-old company shows the importance of knowing your limits | Business.

There’s no shortage of emerging applications and projects that promise increased productivity, new levels of automation, and cutting-edge innovation. But all too often, AI initiatives within the enterprise fail to get off the ground, and there can be vast and costly unintended consequences when this technology is applied to the wrong use cases or falls into the wrong hands.

In the case of cyber defense, widespread accessibility to generative AI tools, as well as the increasing sophistication of nation-state actors, means that threats are more personalized and convincing than ever. In an era of algorithms fighting algorithms, human defenders must effectively team up with AI to build cyber resiliency and prevent business disruption.

Presented by expert stakeholders from industry, academia, and government, this event is designed to offer practical guidance for security teams to cut through the noise and unleash the power of AI responsibly and effectively.

Researchers from the Gothelf lab at Aarhus University.

Established in Aarhus, Denmark in 1928, Aarhus University (AU) is the largest and second oldest research university in Denmark. It comprises four faculties in Arts, Science and Technology, Health, and Business and Social Sciences and has a total of 27 departments. (Danish: Aarhus Universitet.)

A large proportion of CEOs from a diverse cross-section of Fortune 500 companies believe artificial intelligence might destroy humanity — even as business leaders lean into the gold rush around the tech.

In survey results shared with CNN, 42 percent of CEOs from 119 companies surveyed by Yale University think that AI could, within the next five to ten years, quite literally destroy our species.

While the names of specific CEOs who share that belief were not made public, CNN notes that the consortium surveyed during Yale’s CEO Summit event this week contained a wide array of leaders from companies including Zoom, Coca-Cola and Walmart.

Those well-established conventional IT systems, however, can no longer be taken for granted. Companies are accelerating their digital transformation efforts, automating, optimizing, and reinventing their business processes. The pace of change continues to accelerate: Deloitte reports, for example, that 58% of organizations have stepped up their modernization plans due to the covid-19 pandemic.

Many ERP apps are now being moved to public cloud services, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, while others are being replaced with SaaS-based alternatives, including Salesforce and Workday. The previously monolithic ERP platform is being deconstructed.

Enterprises now find themselves with a mixed-bag, hybrid cloud environment: some legacy core applications remain on premises, while new applications are cloud native and run in containers or as microservices.

There is tremendous apprehension about the potential of generative AI—technologies that can create new content such as text, images, and video—to replace people in many jobs. But one of the biggest opportunities generative AI offers is to augment human creativity and overcome the challenges of democratizing innovation.

In the past two decades, companies have used crowdsourcing and idea competitions to involve outsiders in the innovation process. But many businesses have struggled to capitalize on these contributions. They’ve lacked an efficient way to evaluate the ideas, for instance, or to synthesize different ideas.

Generative AI can help over­come those challenges, the authors say. It can supplement the creativity of employees and customers and help them produce and identify novel ideas—and improve the quality of raw ideas. Specifically, companies can use generative AI to promote divergent thinking, challenge expertise bias, assist in idea evaluation, support idea refinement, and facilitate collaboration among users.

In large organizations, complexity can lead to less efficient processes and projects that aren’t aligned with business strategy. A modern business management tool can help enterprise architects, leaders and relevant stakeholders gain control and ensure efforts are prioritized and anchored correctly. Cutting projects that aren’t business critical or growth enablers might be the right thing to do, even if the ideas they’re based upon are great. As a result, freeing up time and saving costs can empower the organization to onboard new projects faster and leverage AI and its possibilities before its competitors do.

How can technology leaders best leverage AI to benefit their companies and their customers? Here at Ardoq, we’ve focused on a few key areas that all technology leaders could benefit from.

1. Allow for and encourage continuous innovation. This includes always evaluating the type of technology your business is based on. If your organization is already based on modern technology and has a data-driven approach, you can be more agile when it comes to adopting and leveraging AI. AI will create disruptions as well as open up new opportunities. This is an opportunity for leaders to create momentum and embrace an iterative approach that will help their people feel that they’re staying ahead of the curve.

In short, data-driven solutions themselves are only part of the overall approach. It is the effective integration of this fast-evolving technology into existing workflows and processes that leads to successful business outcomes.

The first step to integrating AI is identifying places and processes where it can help increase efficiency or accuracy. Businesses should step back and identify their pain points, creating a list of processes that are slow, tedious, cumbersome or suffering from a lack of staff. They should also analyze where additional data or information could help make better decisions.

In the pharma industry, data-driven AI solutions have been widely adopted in sales and marketing processes. For example, by analyzing patient and physician data, electronic medical records and demographic information, AI algorithms can identify trends, patterns and insights that help sales representatives tailor their messaging and presentations to specific HCPs.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the weekend called for enhanced collaboration between the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence development. Without mentioning the fact that his company’s products like ChatGPT are not available in China, he argued that China should be a major player in ensuring the safety of global AI development and rollout.

“With the emergence of the increasingly powerful AI systems, the stakes for global cooperation have never been higher,” he said in the keynote address for a conference hosted by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, sounding more like someone leading an advocacy group on responsible tech than what he is: the CEO of a company responsible for shepherding that emergence.

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