When members of the Zachary Chamber of Commerce meet, usually pre-event conversations are general greetings and inquiries about business, friends and family.
At the group’s Jan. 10 Lunch and Learn, people were already excitedly talking about the day’s topic: artificial intelligence. Some members expressed concerns, while others excitedly explained how they decided to use it to help for a project and that it produced great results.
The speaker was Revonda Kirby, of Zachary, who is senior AI adviser at Next Level Solutions.
She has a varied background that includes a juris doctorate, disaster recovery and trauma care.
Kirby’s first task was to define AI. She said, “A very, very simple definition for that: The ability of a machine to perform tasks that are commonly associated with intelligent beings.”
She said when she asks people about artificial intelligence, many of them come back with Terminator scenarios. People tend to fear the worst.
She offered assurances that AI “is an advancement; it’s a tool. It’s no different from when the horse and buggy was replaced by the automobile.”
She called AI a disruptive technology, which is “any innovation that significantly alters the way that consumers industries or businesses … operate. The disruptive technology would sweep away the systems or habits it replaces because it has attributes that are recognizably superior.”
She called e-commerce, online news sites, ride-hailing apps, GPS and others disruptive technology.
Kirby said all of these brought changes, growing pains, and had learning curves. “AI is the same,” she said. “And we’re going to have to figure out how it’s going to impact in the same way these other technologies did, because it’s not going to go away.”
She said that AI is growing exponentially.
For those who say they aren’t tech savvy, Kirby said, “AI is easy. … But what’s not easy is how we’re going to integrate it within our society and making sure that we do so ethically, making sure that we don’t have biases, discrimination, all of the things that already exist, making sure it doesn’t exacerbate those types of issues.”
Kirby said she hears from people that companies are not offering “any training or any guidance about what to do with AI.”
She said part of the issue is that getting people to use AI is not like rolling out traditional software; you don’t train everyone first, then roll out the new system. Also, she said, in business often one person is using AI or some people are using it but just as a search engine.
She said the biggest thing is AI increases productivity and efficiency. “You can remove days from your work by utilizing generative AI … especially in areas that involve text and language-based businesses or tasks, like marketing, legal, anything that involves generating a lot of text.
Kirby encouraged attendees to think of tasks they want an assistant for and get AI to help with those. “I challenge you to take your job descriptions, and then one day maybe even write down every single thing that you do in a day. Look at the most mundane tasks, and then figure out how generative AI can help you with it. Because it can.”
She told the audience to go beyond using AI as a fancy search engine and to do so because otherwise their companies would fall behind others who have embraced the technology.
She mentioned that health care and financial institutions are already using AI a lot and that education and industry would benefit from AI.
Kirby offered several tips for bring AI into businesses.
First, educate yourself and understand the tools. Second, identify tasks that tend to take too much of your time, and third, apply the tools to those tasks.
Next, executives in a company must provide training for employees. “I’m not talking about hours and hours and hours of training,” Kirby said. She suggests a three- or four-hour training with experts on how to design the best path to get the information needed and to discuss specific tools. She said that training can teach people how to create prompts specific to their needs.