For this episode of The Bridge, we’re bringing you part one of our live panel discussion from the 2023 Bridgepointe Tech Summit.

For this practical discussion on the hype and realities of the artificial intelligence debate, I was joined by:

❖    Dan O'Connell, Chief AI and Strategy Officer, Dialpad

❖    Karen Bowman, Vice President, Channel/Alliance, Level AI

❖    Tushar N Shah, Chief Product Officer, Uniphore

❖    Raghu Ravinutala, CEO, Yellow AI

During part one of our discussion we get into the artificial intelligence debate by defining what artificial intelligence is and isn’t and an go through an overview of the various technologies that make up what we believe modern AI to be.

We also talked about considerations and concerns about its use, which unsurprisingly spiraled into bias, the digital divide, autonomous weapons, and the potential of AI singularity. 

Topics covered in this episode: 

●      The definition of AI.

●      The broad categorization of AI technologies.

●      AI training and the emphasis on the importance of data, the context of the problem being solved, and referenceability.

●      Concerns and considerations related to AI, including the potential for job displacement, societal bias, misinformation, and ethics.

●      The concept of AI learning and training, where AI models improve over time by incorporating new data and user interactions into their datasets.

●      The analogy of large language models as libraries and the challenges of building and utilizing large foundational models versus smaller, more specific models.

●      The importance of building models that are faster, more accurate, and cost-effective for businesses and user experiences.

●      The demand for high-performance GPUs in AI and the challenges of scaling AI models.

●      The concerns about job displacement due to rapid automation with AI, particularly for low-skill workers.

●      The potential for a widening digital gap between executives and technical workers compared to frontline employees due to the pace of AI adoption.

●      The democratization of AI, making it more accessible to the general public, leading to greater understanding and acceptance of AI technologies.

●      A shift in perspective towards AI as a wealth creation opportunity and a redefinition of jobs rather than job loss.

●      The belief that those who can leverage AI effectively are less likely to be replaced by automation.

●      The importance of businesses helping employees understand and use AI technologies to their advantage rather than resisting them.

●      Discussion about changing measurements of productivity and rethinking the "butts in seats" model for evaluating worker busyness.

●      Concerns about AI systems amplifying biases from developers and data sources, leading to discriminatory outcomes.

ABOUT DAN O’CONNELL

Chief AI and Strategy Officer, Dialpad

Dan is the Chief Strategy Officer at Dialpad. Previously, he was the CEO of TalkIQ, a real-time speech recognition and natural language processing start-up that Dialpad acquired in May of 2018. Prior to TalkIQ, he held various sales leadership positions at AdRoll and Google.

LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/droconnell/

Web. https://www.dialpad.com/

ABOUT KAREN BOWMAN

VP of Channel and Alliances at Level AI

LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-bowman-5a52073/

Web. https://thelevel.ai/

ABOUT TUSHAR SHAH

Chief Product Officer, Uniphore

Tushar Shah has held numerous leadership roles throughout his career. He joins Uniphore from NationBenefits, where he served as president and CEO of Fintech, driving approximately $1B worth of spend. Prior to that he was the senior vice president at PayPal where he led product and engineering, and managed credit, identity, risk, compliance, customer service, machine learning and AI platforms.  Shah also played a role in the critical aspects of the separation between PayPal and eBay in 2015 and in the rapid growth of PayPal’s market cap since then. Among his other leadership roles is spending a decade at Bank of America as a technology senior executive for consumer banking, e-commerce, sales and services and software engineering. Earlier in his career, Tushar worked in IT for Teleglobe (Bell Canada) and customer care for Broadslate Networks and WorldCom (Verizon).

LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tushar-n-shah/

Web. https://www.uniphore.com/

ABOUT RAGHU RAVINUTALA

CEO, Yellow AI

LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/raghuravinutala/

Web. https://yellow.ai/