ChatGPT

76% of consumers in EMEA think AI will significantly impact the next five years, yet 47% question the value that AI will bring and 41% are worried about its applications. This is according to research from enterprise analytics AI firm Alteryx. Since the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022, there has been significant buzz about the transformative potential of generative AI, with many considering it one of the most revolutionary technologies of our time. With a significant 79% of organisations reporting that generative AI contributes positively to business, it is evident that a gap needs to be addressed to demonstrate AI’s value to consumers both in their personal and professional lives. According to the ‘Market Research: Attitudes and Adoption of Generative AI’ report, which surveyed 690 IT business leaders and 1,100 members of the general public in EMEA, key issues of trust, ethics and skills are prevalent, potentially impeding the successful deployment and broader acceptance of generative AI. The impact of misinformation, inaccuracies, and AI hallucinations These hallucinations – where AI generates incorrect or illogical outputs – are a significant concern. Trusting what generative AI produces is a substantial issue for both business leaders and consumers. Over a third of the public are anxious about AI’s potential to generate fake news (36%) and its misuse by hackers (42%), while half of the business leaders report grappling with misinformation produced by generative AI. Simultaneously, half of the business leaders have observed their organisations grappling with misinformation produced by generative AI. Moreover, the reliability of information provided by generative AI has been questioned. Feedback from the general public indicates that half of the data received from AI was inaccurate, and 38% perceived it as outdated. On the business front, concerns include generative AI infringing on copyright or intellectual property rights (40%), and producing unexpected or unintended outputs (36%). A critical trust issue for businesses (62%) and the public (74%) revolves around AI hallucinations. For businesses, the challenge involves applying generative AI to appropriate use cases, supported by the right technology and safety measures, to mitigate these concerns. Close to half of the consumers (45%) are advocating for regulatory measures on AI usage. Ethical concerns and risks persist in the use of generative AI In addition to these challenges, there are strong and similar sentiments on ethical concerns and the risks associated with generative AI among both business leaders and consumers. More than half of the general public (53%) oppose the use of generative AI in making ethical decisions. Meanwhile, 41% of business respondents are concerned about its application in critical decision-making areas. There are distinctions in the specific areas where its use is discouraged; consumers notably oppose its use in politics (46%), and businesses are cautious about its deployment in healthcare (40%). These concerns find some validation in the research findings, which highlight worrying gaps in organisational practices. Only a third of leaders confirmed that their businesses ensure the data used to train generative AI is diverse and unbiased. Furthermore, only 36% have set ethical guidelines, and 52% have established data privacy and security policies for generative AI applications. This lack of emphasis on data integrity and ethical considerations puts firms at risk. 63% of business leaders cite ethics as their major concern with generative AI, closely followed by data-related issues (62%). This scenario emphasises the importance of better governance to create confidence and mitigate risks related to how employees use generative AI in the workplace. The rise of generative AI skills and the need for enhanced data literacy As generative AI evolves, establishing relevant skill sets and enhancing data literacy will be key to realising its full potential. Consumers are increasingly using generative AI technologies in various scenarios, including information retrieval, email communication, and skill acquisition. Business leaders claim they use generative AI for data analysis, cybersecurity, and customer support, and despite the success of pilot projects, challenges remain. Despite the reported success of experimental projects, several challenges remain, including security problems, data privacy issues, and output quality and reliability. Trevor Schulze, Alteryx’s CIO, emphasised the necessity for both enterprises and the general public to fully understand the value of AI and address common concerns as they navigate the early stages of generative AI adoption. He noted that addressing trust issues, ethical concerns, skills shortages, fears of privacy invasion, and algorithmic bias are critical tasks. Schulze underlined the necessity for enterprises to expedite their data journey, adopt robust governance, and allow non-technical individuals to access and analyse data safely and reliably, addressing privacy and bias concerns in order to genuinely profit from this ‘game-changing’ technology. Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. The post Ethical, trust and skill barriers hold back generative AI progress in EMEA appeared first on AI News. View the full article

Intelligent automation (IA) technologies are graduating from being operational to highly strategic. In terms of the bottom line, it’s even more impressive. A study from SS&C Blue Prism, conducted by Forrester Consulting and published in April, put together a composite organisation representative of five customers interviewed. The conclusion was that, over three years, there were key gains in IA from greater productivity to compliance cost avoidance, to improved employee experience and retention. This represented an overall net present value of $53.4 million (£42.5m) per customer. Yet this may just be the tip of the iceberg. Dan Segura, enterprise sales manager at SS&C Blue Prism, notes one healthcare client who, in what is described as a ************* estimate, delivered savings of more than $140m overall on cost avoidance and recoup. Another healthcare client delivered a use case with a claimed $43m benefit on its own; a **** which recouped overtime pay for nurses and staff during the pandemic. “They built it in an afternoon,” Segura explains. “It’s a perfect example of being in the right place at the right time; and having the right skills and technology being ready.” Many of the technologies which comprise intelligent automation have been around for a long time, such as classic RPA (robotic process automation) or OCR (optical character recognition). SS&C Blue Prism’s document automation, which forms part of the latter, is described as a ‘game-changer’ by Segura. “There’s a lot of these processes, whether it’s going to be ********* by a ****** or a human,” he says. “First things first, we’ve got to get data off documents. “Automation is not just doing simple tasks anymore thanks to the introduction of AI and generative AI” he adds. “There’s now more understanding, whether it’s assessing information from documents, information from a message, structuring things that are semi-structured or unstructured, to drive the process or complete the process.” Segura describes wider business process management (BPM) and process orchestration tool Chorus, meanwhile, as ‘one of the world’s best kept secrets.’ Or, at least, it was; in November analyst Everest Group named the tool as a leader and star performer in its Process Orchestration Products PEAK Matrix. The tool is now getting leverage outside the traditional finance and insurance fields. “It is how millions and millions of transactions and pieces of work are getting done every day,” says Segura. “We’re now seeing adoption [elsewhere] alongside automation to orchestrate their work and give them that end-to-end work orchestration, visibility, and efficiency gains with whatever they have going on.” So how does a use case come to life? It is often a mixture of inspiration and perspiration. Where SS&C Blue Prism comes in is to ‘help customers catch lightning’, as Segura puts it. “We’ve all been in that situation where it’s like ‘oh if I were running this place, here’s what I would do’,” he says. “Intelligent automation gives you the opportunity to reimagine your processes and transform how you get work done. Once that light switch turns on, and the initial use case is built, that’s really the secret sauce of SS&C Blue Prism; it’s that realisation and awareness of what intelligent automation can deliver. “We’re always learning from our customers,” adds Segura. “It’s at their direction because they know their business and processes better than anybody. Combine their business expertise with the transformational power of intelligent automation and its digital workforce, then that’s where the magic happens.” Any organisation, argues Segura, regardless of the industry, has change agents and citizen builders in waiting. Don’t think that’s a misnomer; the term is definitely ‘builder’. “I hear about these citizen developer programmes, and they’ll say, ‘here we have 500, 1000 citizen developers.’ What I don’t hear is, ‘and with this army of citizen developers we’ve achieved this’,” says Segura. “Whereas I have customers where two people have basically become citizen builders with more of a robust type of approach.” The $43m healthcare single use case is a case in point. “It is the whole mantra of SS&C Blue Prism,” adds Segura. “We’re designed to go after those higher value chain automations that can have a tangible impact on some of the company’s key objectives.” So, you have the idea, the value proposition, and the capability to build it out. How do you make it stick? Every organisation is different; though if your company has a continuous process improvement department then that can be a good place to start. Segura likens it to offshoring processes. “You don’t just wave it goodbye and never think about it again,” he explains. “At the end of the day, it still has to function. “You’re not just ‘digital-shoring’ [automation] and it will essentially be taken care of by digital. Someone has to continuously improve the process; someone has to mind when something changes with the business rules or regulatory compliance; somebody has to be responsible for making sure that those changes are kept up in an agile way.” SS&C Blue Prism has a longstanding, large US retail customer that combines that lightning capture with the right internal culture around automation. This is a company that has 72,000 employees, as well as 60 ‘digital workers’ executing more than 150 automations. One such automation, through using OCR technology, lets the company automate the processing of inbound customer orders received by digital fax. The overall result is 6.2 million transactions processed to date, and 250,000 hours of work returned to the business. But there is one extra ingredient required, particularly for a big company: discipline. “It took them a while to get to that point in maturity,” explains Segura. “They do have a very central function when it comes to the intelligent automation team, [but] keep in mind one of those processes is in supply chain. That process is regularly reviewing 4.2 million purchase orders; it’s minding 50 million inventory case volume; it’s going through two million SKUs for 8000 suppliers. “This is highly iterative, but it’s that process of having that lightning rod to capture the requirements and give people who are not necessarily technical a platform and a methodology to iterate very closely with the intelligent automation team,” adds Segura. Think of what SS&C Blue Prism does therefore as providing a superhero cape for those who don’t otherwise get the chance to step into the limelight. It is a message the company will look to broadcast at the Intelligent Automation event in Santa Clara on 5-6 June. “SS&C Blue Prism opens up that door to enable your citizen builders really make an impact and deliver strategic benefits to the company,” says Segura. “You’re not just playing with a pilot, not just fooling around with something; you’re really getting into the strategic objectives of the company.” Photo by Tara Winstead Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. The post The rise of intelligent automation as a strategic differentiator appeared first on AI News. View the full article

Tech Mahindra, a global provider of technology consulting and digital solutions, has collaborated with IBM to help organisations sustainably accelerate generative AI use worldwide. This collaboration combines Tech Mahindra’s range of AI offerings, TechM amplifAI0->∞, and IBM’s watsonx AI and data platform with AI Assistants. Customers can now combine IBM watsonx’s capabilities with Tech Mahindra’s AI consulting and engineering skills to access a variety of new generative AI services, frameworks, and solution architectures. This enables the development of AI apps in which organisations can use their trusted data to automate processes. It also provides a basis for businesses to create trustworthy AI models, promotes explainability to help manage risk and bias, and enables scalable AI adoption across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. According to Kunal Purohit, Tech Mahindra’s chief digital services officer, organisations focus on responsible AI practices, and incorporating generative AI technologies to revitalise enterprises. “Our work with IBM can help advance digital transformation for organisations, adoption of GenAI, modernisation, and ultimately foster business growth for our global customers,” Purohit added. To further enhance business capabilities in AI, Tech Mahindra has established a virtual watsonx Centre of Excellence (CoE), which is already operational. This CoE functions as a co-innovation centre, with a dedicated team tasked with maximising synergies between the two companies and producing unique offerings and solutions based on their combined capabilities. The collaborative offerings and solutions developed through this partnership could help enterprises achieve their goals of constructing machine learning models using open-source frameworks while also enabling them to scale and accelerate the impact of generative AI. These AI-driven solutions have the potential to aid organisations enhance efficiency and productivity responsibly. Kate Woolley, GM of IBM Ecosystem, emphasised the collaboration’s potential, adding that generative AI may serve as a catalyst for innovation, unlocking new market opportunities when built on a foundation of explainability, transparency, and trust. Woolley said: “Our work with Tech Mahindra is expected to expand the reach of watsonx, allowing even more customers to build trustworthy AI as we seek to combine our technology and expertise to support enterprise use cases such as code modernisation, digital labour, and customer service.” This collaboration aligns with Tech Mahindra’s continuous endeavour to transform enterprises with advanced AI-led offerings and solutions, including their recent additions like Vision amplifAIer, Ops amplifAIer, Email amplifAIer, Enterprise Knowledge Search offering, Evangelize Pair Programming, and Generative AI Studio. It is worth mentioning that the two companies have previously collaborated. Earlier this year, Tech Mahindra announced the opening of a Synergy Lounge in conjunction with IBM on the company’s Singapore campus. This Lounge seeks to accelerate digital adoption for APAC organisations. It aids in operationalising and leveraging next-generation technologies such as AI, intelligent automation, hybrid cloud, 5G, edge computing, and cybersecurity. Beyond Tech Mahindra, IBM watsonx has been used in other collaborations to speed up the deployment of generative AI. Also happened early this year, the GSMA and IBM announced a new partnership to support the use and capabilities of generative AI in the telecom industry by launching GSMA Advance’s AI Training program and the GSMA Foundry Generative AI program. In addition, there is a digital version of the program that covers both the commercial strategy and technology fundamentals of generative AI. This initiative uses IBM watsonx to provide hands-on training for architects and developers seeking in-depth practical generative AI knowledge. Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here. The post IBM and Tech Mahindra unveil new era of trustworthy AI with watsonx appeared first on AI News. View the full article

Google has unveiled a series of updates to its AI offerings, including the introduction of Gemini 1.5 Flash, enhancements to Gemini 1.5 Pro, and progress on Project Astra, its vision for the future of AI assistants. Gemini 1.5 Flash is a new addition to Google’s family of models, designed to be faster and more efficient to serve at scale. While lighter-weight than the 1.5 Pro, it retains the ability for multimodal reasoning across vast amounts of information and features the breakthrough long context window of one million tokens. “1.5 Flash excels at summarisation, chat applications, image and video captioning, data extraction from long documents and tables, and more,” explained Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind. “This is because it’s been trained by 1.5 Pro through a process called ‘distillation,’ where the most essential knowledge and skills from a larger model are transferred to a smaller, more efficient model.” Meanwhile, Google has significantly improved the capabilities of its Gemini 1.5 Pro model, extending its context window to a groundbreaking two million tokens. Enhancements have been made to its code generation, logical reasoning, multi-turn conversation, and audio and image understanding capabilities. The company has also integrated Gemini 1.5 Pro into Google products, including the Gemini Advanced and Workspace apps. Additionally, Gemini Nano now understands multimodal inputs, expanding beyond text-only to include images. Google announced its next generation of open models, Gemma 2, designed for breakthrough performance and efficiency. The Gemma family is also expanding with PaliGemma, the company’s first vision-language model inspired by PaLI-3. Finally, Google shared progress on Project Astra (advanced seeing and talking responsive agent), its vision for the future of AI assistants. The company has developed prototype agents that can process information faster, understand context better, and respond quickly in conversation. “We’ve always wanted to build a universal agent that will be useful in everyday life. Project Astra, shows multimodal understanding and real-time conversational capabilities,” explained Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “With technology like this, it’s easy to envision a future where people could have an expert AI assistant by their side, through a phone or glasses.” Google says that some of these capabilities will be coming to its products later this year. Developers can find all of the Gemini-related announcements they need here. See also: GPT-4o delivers human-like AI interaction with text, audio, and vision integration Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here. The post Google ushers in the “Gemini era” with AI advancements appeared first on AI News. View the full article

The UAE is making big waves by launching a new open-source generative AI model. This step, taken by a government-backed research institute, is turning heads and marking the UAE as a formidable player in the global AI race. In Abu Dhabi, the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) unveiled the Falcon 2 series. As reported by Reuters, this series includes Falcon 2 11B, a text-based model, and Falcon 2 11B VLM, a vision-to-language model capable of generating text descriptions from images. TII is run by Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council. As a major oil exporter and a key player in the Middle East, the UAE is investing heavily in AI. This strategy has caught the eye of U.S. officials, leading to tensions over whether to use ********* or ******** technology. In a move coordinated with Washington, Emirati AI firm G42 withdrew from ******** investments and replaced ******** hardware, securing a US$1.5 billion investment from Microsoft. Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council and an adviser on strategic research and advanced technology, proudly states that the UAE is proving itself as a major player in AI. The release of the Falcon 2 series is part of a broader race among nations and companies to develop proprietary large language models. While some opt to keep their AI code private, the UAE, like Meta’s Llama, is making its groundbreaking work accessible to all. Al Bannai is also excited about the upcoming Falcon 3 generation and expresses confidence in the UAE’s ability to compete globally: “We’re very proud that we can still punch way above our weight, really compete with the best players globally.” Reflecting on his earlier statements this year, Al Bannai emphasised that the UAE’s decisive advantage ***** in its ability to make swift strategic decisions. It’s worth noting that Abu Dhabi’s ruling family controls some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, worth about US$1.5 trillion. These funds, formerly used to diversify the UAE’s oil wealth, are now critical for accelerating growth in AI and other cutting-edge technologies. In fact, the UAE is emerging as a key player in producing advanced computer chips essential for training powerful AI systems. According to Wall Street Journal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with investors, including Sheik Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who runs Abu Dhabi’s major sovereign wealth fund, to discuss a potential US$7 trillion investment to develop an AI chipmaker to compete with Nvidia. Furthermore, the UAE’s commitment to generative AI is evident in its recent launch of a ‘Generative AI’ guide. This guide aims to unlock AI’s potential in various fields, including education, healthcare, and media. It provides a detailed overview of generative AI, addressing digital technologies’ challenges and opportunities while emphasising data privacy. The guide is designed to assist government agencies and the community leverage AI technologies by demonstrating 100 practical AI use cases for entrepreneurs, students, job seekers, and tech enthusiasts. This proactive stance showcases the UAE’s commitment to participating in and leading the global AI race, positioning it as a nation to watch in the rapidly evolving tech scene. Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here. The post UAE unveils new AI model to rival big tech giants appeared first on AI News. View the full article