Making AI Work: Recent Episodes
Michael Cowen
Welcome to Making AI work where we explore how businesses can adapt and scale AI, what are the challenges and where do the opportunities exist
“Airlines, like banks, are still very much dependent on on-prem. While legacy vendors really like to promote that they are on the cloud, or that they have partnerships with cloud vendors, in reality, they're just moving computational workloads to a bunch of VMs and not actually using the underpinning technologies the way they should be.”With airlines, travel and transport in desperate need of direction, CEO and Founder of FLYR Labs, Alex Mans turns AI and contemporary tech into a beacon of resilience. One that aims to transform airlines and underserved industries for the better. We had the absolute pleasure of picking his brain and you’ll be amazed at what we pulled out!
“The ability for the airlines to adopt is a little bit more conservative… You can optimise. But you have to be careful how you do it, because it's got to be what I would call ‘environmental friendly’ with the labour force, the management force and the passenger.”
A superb episode with Christopher Rospenda, the global aviation leader for AI and AR applications at IBM. As an SME in aviation and transportation, he uses AI to solve some of the biggest airline operations challenges across the globe.
"We know that the devil is in the details. So we spent months and months choosing the right industry and sub industry where we can solve a big problem with reinforcement learning."To predict the future with AI and deep learning, Roy Cohen and Uri Yerushalmi helped create Fetcherr, an AI-powered price intelligence engine that can predict a price on anything. We had the opportunity to pick their minds and take away some great insights.
“... Data will have taken quite a hard hit in some respects, because of the situation with COVID. We rely so heavily on household surveys, and we rely on people being able to move around countries and populations, and to ask questions face-to-face. And so we've now got this period of time where we're going to be missing key information”.
As Director of the Data for Children collaborative with UNICEF, Alex Hutchison turns data into merit by improving children’s lives all across the globe. We had the honour of chatting with her and took away some very interesting insights.
“It's just encouraging them to think about it in a different way. And in a way, I think that the pandemic has accelerated this, because we have people all over the world working together. And if you do have that structure sorted out, it makes your life a lot easier.”
Leader in biomedical and epi-informatic data science, Paul Agapow turns big data into tremendous medical value to help mankind. We had the opportunity to chat with him and discover the impact that AI is having on pharmaceuticals.
“And we have managed to contribute over half a billion to UK economy… for every pound that the taxpayer has paid, we have returned 14x. So they’ve received 14 pounds in return for every pound.”An eye-opening and engaging episode with Applied AI Lead at Tech Nation, Sam Beni. With experience in deep tech, from autonomous vehicles, to renewable energy and VR, Beni shares his thoughts on AI’s emergence and exponential growth.
“Often with data science ideas, it's about how they're presented. So the machine learning algorithm is only part of the larger solution. Which is, in itself, running as part of an IT architecture… And you need to understand that data scientists can't be expected to understand all of that architecture.”We had an engaging sit-down with the Head of AI and Machine Learning in Customer Solution Engineering at Dow Jones, James Bell. He shares personal and valuable insights about the importance of building communities for data scientists, taking a broader approach to change and the secret to finding sweet-spots for AI solutions.
"The key problem that we're facing now is that our dataset is evolving. And by that, I mean the schema is evolving all the time."
We had a great chat with Adriano Soares Koshiyama, CEO of Holistic AI, about AI in risk management and how technology is changing the way that we monitor, map and verify risk in order to provide mitigation strategies during AI development.
“...Also the main thing is integration of chatbots. For instance, integrating it with business applications using APIs. That is where the magic lies in general."
We sat with Chatbot/AI expert at Uniper, Debanjan Chaudhuri, to unpack the use of AI in document understanding and processing, automation in procurement and chatbot integration. Chaudhuri has a deeply embedded passion for neural networks and deep learning architectures to solve different problems relating to natural language processing (NLP).
"The easiest way to get your A.I. and ML strategy off the ground is to follow a well-defined pattern. It's important to first and foremost, identify the problem that you are solving for. Because many people, again, simply follow the hype and the buzz."An exciting episode, as we sit with Avsharn Bachoo, CIO of Comair Ltd and discuss the impact (as well as the secrets) of digital transformation in airlines. Avsharn is a technology strategist with specialist knowledge in areas such as digital transformation, big data analytics, DevOps, and enterprise architecture.
"...If you know who your customer is and you have a good enough relationship with them, you're then going to be able to learn from them anyway, because you're not relying on this third party data, you know, you've got that first party insight."Brett went solo on this informative episode and had a great chat with Tim Bond, Director of Content Strategy and Insight at Data & Marketing Association. This episode is packed with insights on customer ethics, where AI fits into organisations and AI maturity in marketing.
“I think we are often guilty as tech people that we fall in love with our solutions. And we forget to still check if they are still relevant, versatile, fit-for-purpose. Where it fits in the bigger picture in our organization.”
Getting real value out of Machine Learning can be difficult. Especially when obstacles like poor data literacy, organisational readiness and lack of investment slow adoption. JVR’s Head of Software Engineering, Louise de Beer gives us insight on psychometrics, data-readiness and reveals what businesses need to make ML work.
“I think the idea of data being the new oil is still quite skiddy, because it’s so darn messy at the moment”.
The road to AI is built on trust, accountability and clean data. Globant’s Sr. Client Partner, Anil Awasthi shares his views on the journey to digital transformation, while unpacking customer relationships and ethics in AI.
Thanks to AI, healthcare is undergoing rapid change. To keep up with these advances, we sat with Clinical Fellow in AI and Robotics, Hatim Adulhussein to look at Healthtech, data regulation, ethics around health and AI, and some of the big challenges in infrastructure.
"So you need to be part of the wave now. Otherwise you're going to slack behind everybody else. And you’re going to have a disadvantage with your competitors, who have been there from the beginning."
Carbon & Finch CEO and Founder, Jimmi Jakobsen talked to us about market maturity within the field of AI and digital transformation, the challenges around building JeffreyAI and the way in which negotiations going back to basics (between AI agents).