Progress in AI technology has moved faster than our ability to leverage it for the many ways in which it can create value. In this episode, Yadin looks back on the past CIO Exchange episodes focused on AI, and shares a special announcement.
Progress in AI technology has moved faster than our ability to leverage it for the many ways in which it can create value. In this episode, Yadin looks back on the past CIO Exchange episodes focused on AI, and shares a special announcement.
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Timestamps:
(01:04) Paul Roetzer
(01:50) Trevor Schulze
(03:03) Tim Crawford
(03:51) Peter Shen
(04:30) Jeff Boudier
(05:17) Suhail Nimji
(06:07) Missy Young
(07:19) Srini Koushik
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0:00:01.0 Yadin Porter De León: Progress in AI technology in many ways has moved faster than our ability to leverage it for the many ways in which it can create value. For that and many other reasons, it has been a prominent topic on this podcast over the past years. In this special episode, we'll be revisiting some of those conversations, sharing clips from the experts we've heard from, specifically about AI and its impact on our futures. I also have a special announcement regarding my future work on AI and the future of the show. I'll be taking a pause from the CIO Exchange Podcast. I'll be creating a new show focused heavily on AI. Several of my colleagues and I were early in adopting the technology and scaling it across a large organization. We'll be sharing our experiences, strategies, tools, and techniques so that you can do the same within your organization or your teams. So head over to the AI Edge Enterprise Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. With that, here's a special show reviewing some of the top insights from my conversations about AI so far. One of our first episodes about AI was with Paul Roetzer, CEO of Marketing AI Institute, who talked about generative AI and what CIOs need to know.
0:01:13.4 Paul Roetzer: The blessing of ChatGPT in my world is it woke people up to the power of AI in good ways and in bad, that people can now envision the downsides as well. So now we can actually get to the important conversations around ethics and responsible application of AI and impact on workforces and things like that. I feel like we need more conversation around AI as a leverage point to create better working environments, better jobs, and more fulfilling lives for people, because otherwise I think it's just for nothing. It's just another productivity gain and a missed opportunity to improve people's lives.
0:01:53.4 Yadin Porter De León: Shortly after that, I talked to Trevor Schulze, CIO of Alteryx about data democratization and as he called it, the current intelligence era.
0:02:02.3 Trevor Schulze: For CIOs to think about is really what can they do to take advantage of those capabilities? And if you just pull back all the hype, data really is the lifeblood of these intelligent systems. And this is where AI is going to matter because you hear about if the data isn't good or it's not trained well, you have hallucinations, it gives you bad answers, and you can't just trust it blindly. So you have to have this literate group of people, and we go back to data literacy. You need a literate group of people in your company who are going to have the ability to take advantage of these new AI enabled systems in this era of intelligence. So IT leaders really are paying more attention to data. We've always paid attention to data. That's our job. But really we have to refresh and rethink and reimagine what we have to do in order to enable these intelligent systems to really take advantage of advanced capabilities.
0:03:05.0 Yadin Porter De León: We then discussed emerging trends and how CIOs should think about implementing generative AI with Tim Crawford, CIO, strategy advisor at AVOA.
0:03:13.4 Tim Crawford: And that's part of what is scaring IT executives today, is that they got burned on cloud, and now we're talking about generative AI, and now unfortunately, we're talking more about data and the risks just went up. And so you have to be really careful about how you go down this. I realize the pressure is there. I realize there's a lot of demand to try and adopt it and get ahead of your competition. But at the same time, if you don't think about the risks that go with it and have a healthy balance between benefit and risk, you're just playing with fire.
0:03:52.5 Yadin Porter De León: Then Peter Shen, Head of Digital Health, North America at Siemens Healthineers, talked about the opportunities for AI to improve the healthcare industry.
0:04:02.6 Peter Shen: We determine it as AI being a companion for the clinician. So the clinician is still gonna make that ultimate diagnostic or therapeutic decision here, but can we have a technology like AI be that companion for him or her so that they have actually a more informed or more confident diagnosis or a more confident treatment plan for that particular patient? So that's where we see, again, the technology working hand in hand with the clinician rather than replacing that clinician there.
0:04:29.5 Yadin Porter De León: I also had the chance to sit down with Jeff Boudier, Head of Product and Growth at Hugging Face. We talked about the current state of AI in the enterprise and open source AI.
0:04:42.2 Jeff Boudier: Open models, open data sets, and open source AI are really the only way forward for enterprises if they want to be future proof in terms of auditability, in terms of regulation, in terms of compliance. And then it's about being in control of your own destiny. Because AI is so key to everything you are going to be offering to customers, new features, new products, new services, there's going to be AI features if AI itself is not the feature. So you want to be able to control that and build up your skillset.
0:05:20.6 Yadin Porter De León: Also, what's important to note that AI partnerships will play an increasingly important role for most companies. Suhail Nimji, VP/Head of Business Development, Corporate Development, and Partnerships at Jasper AI gave us insight into how CIOs should be choosing their AI partners.
0:05:35.6 Suhail Nimji: Is that vendor and partner that you're choosing to partner with, do they understand the landscape well enough to adapt with the changes? That's the conversation. And the thing is like there's no magic to these discussions. It's just the simple things of like, do they know what they're doing? Have they implemented this before? Do they have a good pulse on what the market looks like today and have a really good vision for what the market looks like tomorrow and adapt with the changes that come with it?
0:06:08.7 Yadin Porter De León: Obviously data management and data storage considerations are even more complex with the rise of AI. Missy Young, CIO of Switch, warned us of the coming AI gold rush as it pertains to data centers and the future of the data center industry and what CIOs should do about it.
0:06:24.3 Missy Young: There's a huge rush to do these massive deployments of AI all over the place. AI companies are consuming all of the available high density data center space in the country as fast as they can. There's not really anything left right now. There are certainly data centers that have, like you might hear, oh, hey, this one data center over here has 30 megawatts. Well, that's great, but it only has CRAC units for cooling inside. It's not going to be able to cool this. So we have to retrofit that facility in order to do liquid cooling. With the current supply chain issues, that's at least a year and a half out if you start yesterday. So we are under construction in all of these markets specifically to handle this massive rush of data center consumption by the AI companies. And so my big warning right now, what I am preaching to the heavens right now is if you are not currently planning for what you need from a data center perspective over the next two years, if you're not planning today for what you need two years from now, you will not get it.
0:07:20.9 Yadin Porter De León: Srini Koushik, President Technology, Sustainability, and AI at Rackspace talked about sustainable use of AI.
0:07:28.9 Srini Koushik: I am the parent of two amazing daughters that grew up like one half and half in the internet age and the other one solely in the internet age. And I tell them, they're very responsible, but I tell them, look, it's great that you're looking at older guys like me and saying, you should have been more responsible with this, and I take that criticism to heart, but as we were having this conversation over lunch, I just saw you take 10 pictures of that food that you were using. Where do you think that goes? There's a network consumption, there's a storage consumption, it never gets deleted. So like, no, look, we all have to be very, very conscious about what we choose to use technology for and how do we drive that. That's a very integral part of sustainable and responsible AI. The other parts that are equally important is, you mentioned it, it has to be safe, but I extend it even further saying if we build AI to replace human beings, then I don't think it's responsible. Now, if you actually build AI that augments a human's capability, that's very responsible, because it allows me to move away from the day-to-day toil to work on higher levels.
0:08:42.1 Yadin Porter De León: It's been a fascinating year in tech, and I've loved having all these conversations. While I miss Hosting CIO Exchange podcast for now, I'm super excited to focus heavily on AI and my next show, AI Edge. Keep an eye out on my LinkedIn for updates there, and if you wanna dive deeper into any of the episodes mentioned today, links will be in the show notes. Thanks for listening to the CIO Exchange Podcast.