Do you get sick at the mention of artificial intelligence in business?

A lot of hands went up at the question last Thursday during the keynote for Birmingham’s Sloss Tech 2024. Host Roy Wood Jr said standup comedy doesn’t need the help from tech. “It’s perfect the way it is,” he said, drawing laughs.

But Dona Sarkar, whose job involves finding AI solutions for business, said there’s been a lot of “nonsense” around the topic for more than a year.

Sarkar, whose job title with Microsoft is Chief Troublemaker of its AI Extensibility Program, said AI is being used by McDonalds and Walmart, and while many people seem to think it’s going to eradicate their business models, it’s not quite clear why the tech application is going to “take over all our lives.”

“This is the quickest adaption of tech in my life,” Sarkar said.

Because of this, AI presents a host of problems, she said.

Take last month’s unsuccessful scam involving the head of the world’s largest advertising agency. Fraudsters reportedly created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of WPP CEO Mark Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting, employing a voice clone and YouTube footage of him.

If someone can do that to a billion dollar company, she said, it can happen anywhere.

Artificial intelligence - which relies on human data to make decisions - isn’t getting enough diverse information. Currently, it relies on data sets from the west coast of the US - hardly indicative of most of the people on the planet, Sarkar said.

“It needs a human in the loop, and not just one,” she said.

Companies are hiring positions for AI, meaning expertise is needed. The federal government is looking for chief AI officers in virtually every sphere.

What’s more, companies are already finding that employees who use AI are advancing faster than ones who do not.

So they’re going to need people who can train AI models, who can problem solve, expertly wield data, provide prototypes and serve as “validators” - determining whether AI solutions will be good for, you know, humans.

“This is our life now,” she said. “We didn’t choose it, it chose us.”

 - TNS