By Sudipta Mohanty, Aerospace MBA India – TBS & IIMB
We had the Opportunity of attending a seminar on “Artificial Intelligence – Opportunities and Challenges” at the IIMB Auditorium on 18th Feb,2017.
The evening bought together a panel comprising of some of leading technocrats representing some of the leading technical companies in the world. With AI the question that always come to our mind is “Will AI lead to job loss for maximum IT professional in the next 10 years”.
The discussion was highly thought provoking which brought academia, technical and functional experts on the same plaform.
The esteemed Panel Included :
- 1)Prof Rahul De -Chairperson, Centre for Software & Information Technology Management,IIM,Bangalore
- 2)Mr Anirban Roy –28 years of experience in the industry working for Kore Inc
- 3)Amreeta Mazumdar – 13 years of experience.Currently working in the HR Department,Google
- 4)Joy Mustafi – 13 years of AI experience working for Microsoft as a scientist
- 5)Krishna Singla – 16 years of AI experience working for IBM Watson Group
Prof Rahul De gave the inaugural address which started with a quote from Hebert Simon. He shared his experience of working in AI for the last 25 years.He got introduced to the artificial intelligence in1987 while working as Research Assistant, Artificial Intelligence in Management Laboratory, Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA. He gave us an insight into the phenomenal success of AI in practical applications Like Tenserflow from Google.
Anirban gave us a introduction to chatbots and the use of AI in Chabots applications. He discussed about the Bots Platform 2.0 introduced by his company which enables the creation of chatbots that have the ability to contextualize, remember, and use data from conversations to execute helpful actions and make relevant suggestions for users on demand, or over time.He also gave us a brief overview where chatbots are performing well in the banking application and also said that is not same as a application/website but everything is done via messaging.He showed us the architecture of an AI system which includes the following components:
The next speaker of the evening was respresenting Google and she was Amreeta Mazumdar. She was of the opinion that AI is niche skill where demand in the industry is high but supply is comparatively low.A audeience question followed asking what are the qualities they look in candidates at google while hiring for AI positions. Her Response was they primarily look of 3 skills : Programming, real time problem solving techniques and is the person ready to take up the challenge of working in different technologies.She was of the opinion is that lot of work to be done in AI so that it can replace some of the monotonous work done in the HR department like guiding resources on where to apply leaves, check their payslips and HR chatbots to help answer queries of employees asap.
This HR prospective of AI was followed by a technical prospective from Joy Mustafi who works for Microsoft as a Data scientist. He shared his journey of how he managed to enter into the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning. He was of the opinion that there has been a transition in the focus on the different attributes of AI in the last decade. The focus has shifted from making application to strengthening the logic to handle terabytes of data. The future growth trends in AI will be in the following areas of Image Processing/Pattern Recognition, Handling of Unstructured data, Speech-to-Speech Translation, IT security of Payment gateways and Fraud Detection.
The final Person to speak in the evening was Krushna Singla who was representing the IBM Watson Group. She shared her experiences of how AI is saving money for her clients across the business spectrum from energy and utilities,Fintech companies as well as Product Companies. She also explained that in AI team should have a right mix of technical people as well as functional people for it to succeed and implement a solution.
The conclusion I would draw from the seminar is AI and machine learning algorithms will replace some of the monotonous jobs like the Nightly file maintenance, data entry and repetitive work. With AI taking over these jobs this will open up new avenues for the incapacitated people to reskill themselves into newer platforms.
This is mmy AeMBA Individual Project. What a co-incidence, I was presenting the same to Christophe!