IN 1933, then US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said “there is nothing to fear but fear itself” during his inaugural address as the country’s 32nd Chief Executive.
Ninety years later, this statement by the only four-term US president has become relevant with the advent of technologies such as artificial technology, machine learning and the Internet of things, among others.
Societies around the world have received the coming of these technologies with mixed feelings. Cynics equate them with a negative mindset, fearing that they will replace or, if not, dominate the human race in the future.
Meanwhile, supporters of these technologies say mankind will benefit as they could be harnessed to help the world solve complex problems, such as climate change, poverty, population explosion, environmental degradation, among others.
When an organization decides to deploy both AI and generative AI, Ambe Tierro, Accenture’s country managing director for the Philippines, points out that having an open mind will pave the way for the successful deployment of AI and generative AI.
Defining AI
FOR Accenture, AI encompasses multiple technologies that enable computers to perceive the world (computers, vision, audio processing and sensor processing). Moreover, it analyzes and understands information collected (natural language processing or knowledge representation) and makes informed decisions (inference engines and predictions of expert systems). AI also has the ability to learn and self-tune (e.g., machine learning and deep pleasing).
The company also values the development of AI because it can understand, analyze and comprehend character development of the data and information it gets from clients. It also plays great part in Accenture’s daily operations in mining the huge volume of information it receives from their operations.
The entry of generative AI has added more value to Accenture because it has increased the productivity of their agents during a typical working day. “Generative AI’s transition is a net gain for the industry because we’re entering an era of unprecedented productivity,” says Tierro.
Meanwhile, agents can find a reliable ally in generative AI when addressing a client’s problem in the fastest possible time. Generative AI can function as a co-pilot for an agent, transforming the message from voice to text in real time and providing the agent with a prompt response to the client’s problem.
Making the first step
BEFORE embarking on a generative AI roadmap, Tierro advises management to develop a clear business mindset in order to maximize the benefits and make the right investment decisions. “They should also look for potential problems,” she points out.
It is also important for management to engage in conversations with employees and explain the benefits of generative AI to them. “People must have an open mind in accepting generative AI,” says Tierro.
“We are undoubtedly seeing a resurgence of AI as interest continues to grow globally for generative AI or language-based AI and how these game-changing technologies can potentially transform and shape the future of businesses and societies,” she says.
Furthermore, success with generative AI requires that the company give equal attention to people and training as it does on technology. Business organizations must act swiftly to be able to keep pace with the rapid digitalization in the corporate sector.
“The time to move is now. Companies can start by experimenting with low-risk knowledge and creative work use cases, like generating insights from internal company reports or publicly available information, while also exploring where the technology can be differentiating and lead to breakthrough innovation,” Tierro explains.
The rapid adoption of generative AI will introduce a new perspective on why there is a huge reason for every organization to have robust, defined, top-led responsible AI principles to support an effective governance structure for risk management and compliance, both with organizational policies and applicable laws and regulations.
For the corporate world, generative AI should be able to perform context-specific activities at a granular level. To do so, foundation models will need to be customized with domain-specific data, semantics, knowledge and methodologies.
Aside from gathering support from their personnel, Tierro says companies also need to get the right technical infrastructure, architecture, operating model and governance structure to meet the high computed demand of large language models and generative AI.
Companies need to create a foundation model that has the right network system and an ecosystem of partners to guide them to the complex and computer-intensive systems of generative AI.
The Computer Science graduate from De La Salle University allayed the fears of a lot of people once generative AI comes into full swing. As a response to the displacement challenge, Accenture is addressing it by redesigning the work cycle. This means that agents can automate some of its functions or go into full automation.
“Let’s keep a positive attitude on generative AI because technology is evolving. The entry of generative AI led to the creation of prompt engineers. Before generative AI, there were no prompt engineers,” Tierro emphasizes.
A prompt engineer specializes in developing and fine-tuning AI-generated text prompts to ensure they are accurate, engaging and relevant for various applications. Moreover, prompt engineers work with different teams to improve the prompt generation process and overall AI system performance.
She says the emergence of generative AI led to the creation of new jobs and the creation of new skills. If an engineer is immersed in the industry, he or she can take other roles as prompt engineers. “New technologies have created new jobs,” says Tierro.
Generative AI also lowers the cost of entry. An agent can easily be assisted by an auto pilot especially when the agent is new on the job,
Personally, the 30-year industry stalwart admits she also needs to learn new things and knowledge to keep pace with the developments in the industry. “The things I learned in the past 30 years are now obsolete. I have to keep on learning,” Tierro points out.
“Just be open, be aware and seek new learning.”
AI could not be ignored
AILEEN Judan-Jiao, IBM Philippines president and technology leader, agrees that there is a growing concern that AI can be disruptive to businesses. There is, however, no turning back and she expects AI to remain as more businesses adopt and explore its true potential.
“There’s no doubt that AI is here, and we can no longer ignore it. It will continue to evolve and become more pervasive; hence, everybody should seize the moment—prepare for it, learn to embrace it, and learn how to capitalize on it, rather than steer clear of it and hamper growth in the long run,” Jiao explains.
According to Jiao, the three key barriers hindering organizations from adopting AI are skills, technology and trust. She says the skills challenge is not a new development to the tech sector and remains to be a broader challenge.
Nonetheless, she remains optimistic and adds that AI for business development has significantly accelerated and evolved to address key AI principles such as explainability, fairness, robustness, transparency, and privacy. On the trust issue, she says many people believe that it should, in fact, be at the core of the strategy for AI for business.
“As an example, our AI platform, watsonx, addresses this concern by making AI trustworthy through enabling technology features that can govern against bias, model drift, among others,” Jiao says.
It is also important to realize that AI may not be for everyone or for all industries. What is critical is to find the right use case that will make it helpful and impactful on your industry or organization. She points out that AI must augment human intelligence and not replace humans. “The person doing the work augmented by AI may be the same, but the role may evolve and change over time,” Jiao says.
In a new IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study titled, “The Augmented Workforce for an AI-Driven World” released just this August 2023, the executives surveyed, including those from the Philippines, estimate that 38 percent of their workforce will need to reskill as a result of implementing AI and automation over the next three years.
“The need for AI may vary across various roles, but the bottom line is that it will impact everyone regardless of their role. So, the responsibility lies in our HR and senior business leaders to navigate these changes, redesign work to have AI augment human skills, and empower all employees to build new skills,” Jiao says.
First, awareness is key. The business community fares quite well on this but more can be done. We need to be a lot more inclusive and ensure not only Manila or within the National Capital Region but nationwide. IBM’s ability to explore and be aware of its potential knows no borders. “In IBM, we are doing this through our ecosystem of partners working across industries and across locations,” Jiao says.
Second, IBM collectively determines with the broader business community which industries or use cases may potentially be impacted the most and will need to be prioritized for skilling and upskilling. The best ideas for such possibilities may come from anyone in the organization. As leaders of organizations, they must enable a culture that doesn’t stifle such innovative yet potentially disruptive ideas.
“I am very pleased to share that we at IBM are what we call ‘Client zero,’ which means we used this ourselves as part of our internal transformation across the enterprise. This helped us expand AI adoption from real experiences,” she said.
Finally, all hands must be on deck. Although the skills gap is huge, each one must contribute but it must start somewhere. IBM has been sharing its SkillsBuild platform with the underserved and underprivileged schools and partners, including the government.
“This learning platform includes content on AI and related use cases augmented by our global ecosystem of partners. There are ways to explore it for students, teachers and jobseekers who wish to do reskilling and upskilling, leading to digital badges,” she explains.
“As we all do our part, we will find new use cases, new roles we can play, and new possibilities that will create a new role for the Philippines in the global context using our talent but augmented by AI,” she said.
PHL as a major hub
COLLABERA, a leading global digital talent solutions firm, sees a huge potential for the Philippines to become an AI global hub.
Manan Mehta, senior vice president and country head of Collabera Digital Philippines, says the company now has three sites in the country, Cebu, Manila and Davao, which comprise 50 percent of the global workforce.
After opening its first laboratory in Sydney, Australia, Collabera opened its second laboratory in Manila. It handles data engineering, data analytics and data science. “We have always believed in the huge potential of the Philippines,” says Mehta.
“Collabera already has a strong niche in the local market as the top banks in the country are its clients. Furthermore, four out of five digital banks in the Philippines utilize Collabera services,” adds Mehta.
The country, Mehta observes, provides good business opportunities for the company because it has major clients such as the local conglomerates and Fortune 500 companies.
Moreover, Collabera provides the generative AI requirements of the country’s largest retail, insurance and airlines companies.
In the future, there are plans to expand in the Tier 2 cities such as Bacolod and Iloilo because it anticipates a huge demand for its services. “One of the reasons why Collabera is investing in the provinces is because it wants to support the rural development in the Philippines,” Mehta explans.
If Collabera can expand into areas such as Cebu and Davao, Mehta says this will lead to the development of these areas and give people the option not to go to Metro Manila to find employment. “This is part of nation building and Collabera wants to be actively involved in it,” says Mehta.
Right now, Collabera has a 3,500-strong workforce in the Philippines with 3,100 or 90 percent based in the National Capital Region.
Ramasubramaniam Srinivasan, senior vice president and practice leader for data and AI of Collabera Digital, points out that companies need to develop a window of opportunity to move towards the path to generative AI value. Change must start from the top and business leaders must take charge in job redesign, task redesign and reskilling people.
According to its recent research, Collabera says 40 percent of working hours across industries can be impacted by large language model (LLM) tasks which account for 62 percent of total working time in the United States. Of the overall share of language tasks, 65 percent have high potential to be automated or augmented by LLMs.
An LLM is a specialized type of artificial intelligence that has been trained on vast amounts of text to understand existing content and generate original content.
Prem Naraindas, founder and CEO of Katonic AI, says LLMs can convert unstructured content into structured data. This will enable an enterprise to develop original content that could be used for marketing, planning and analyses. “LLMs can also analyze the context of text to obtain information that is not explicitly stated,” he said.
Mehta says LLMs can also deliver a win-win situation both for the company and client as the former can address the solutions needed by the latter to improve their customer service and market performance.
He says Collabera believes in giving opportunities regardless of working experience. In fact, the company even hires fresh graduates out of college. For Collabera, an impressive resumé is not a big deal. “We don’t go for that stuff because we believe they have the potential to be good workers,” he said.
“We retool and reskill them to be great technical workers who can deliver relevant services to our customers,” Mehta says.
In a breakfast forum held in Quezon City, Jose Enrique Africa, managing director of economic think tank Ibon Foundation, says AI and generative AI will definitely benefit the business process outsourcing industry as these tools will boost the BPO firms’ efficiency and capability. Nevertheless, Africa says the impact of AI and generative AI in other industries remains to be seen.
“What is more important is whether AI and generative AI would really benefit the people belonging to the lowest group in the socio-economic pyramid,” he said.
On his part, IBON Foundation administrative officer Jopar Cruz says people were really mesmerized by the capabilities of the two wonder tools of the 21st century.
On the flipside, people also expressed concern about its other amazing capabilities such as the ability to reason and perform several tasks to attain its objectives.
But here’s the rub, according to Cruz. Whenever new tools or technologies emerge, the most compelling question is will these new technologies bring progress and development to the majority. This is the start of the big debate.
“There is no doubt that AI and generative AI are game changers in many sectors of society. Nevertheless, world history has shown that industrial and technological revolutions have benefitted the sector that controls the capital and not the wealth generators,” says Cruz.
In manufacturing, a robot or a machine would be more productive compared to a worker or workers in terms of the quality of work. Cruz says this is especially true if the tasks require heavy physical work.
AI will help students a lot because it will help them gather data in a more structured manner. For the teachers, AI will help them create quality visual aids to make their teaching more effective and entertaining. Furthemore, AI will help the overworked teachers present more interesting lessons in their face-to-face classes.
Cruz says AI played a big role in fighting Covid through the gathering of data regarding the disease, and in the research and development of vaccines.
“However, the nagging question is how AI can boost economic democratization. How can AI and generative AI boost the economy to uplift the majority of the toiling masses from the shackles of poverty,” he says.
Cruz says Filipinos are not really benefiting from the digital economy as the majority of the tech giants operating in the country belong to the huge multinational corporations.
This setup will never allow the country to develop its own technology and the mechanization process that could have been instrumental in developing the country’s industrial and agricultural sectors.
He says the new technologies have been instrumental in amassing the wealth and profits of the huge corporations at the expense of the Filipino labor. In the long run, unemployment will worsen and will also lead to the suppression of wages.
Cruz says it’s a tragedy for Juan dela Cruz because the government does not give importance to uplifting the Filipinos’ economic standing through modern science and technology. “The country’s potential in industrialization is huge because we have rich mineral resources,” he says.
“However, the government only wants to export our raw materials that are only benefiting the First World countries. Our leaders are staunch supporters of neoliberal economics that is pro-capital and pro-multinational. Meanwhile, the majority of the people are enamored with AI and new technologies which give false hopes of achieving good governance,” says Cruz.
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