By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is now the big challenge for businesses everywhere. In the last three years, businesses have moved from experimenting with AI to actively deploying it at scale, especially generative AI like Chat GPT.

Adoption has surged, but many companies still struggle to capture full value because they’re still learning.

Matthew Forzan, the founder of Yoghurt Digital, said one of the key problems was that AI can make mistakes. At the same time, however, the problem is compounded because it’s getting smarter all the time. 

Mr Forzan has nearly two decades of industry experience. He is a seasoned digital marketing professional with deep expertise in search engine optimisation (SEO), paid search and social marketing, and user experience.

“It’s good for quick form information – if you want to know what the capital of Australia is or the best place to travel in Melbourne for a coffee,” Mr Forzan told Talking Business. “All those types of things are really good but we’ve seen it have critical errors like how to make cornflakes or boil an egg. Things like that it’s still getting wrong.

“But this is the worst that it’s ever going to be,” he said.

“The problem is that it’s always outpacing things like legislation.”

Identify who is in the driver’s seat of AI companies

Mr Forzan said this meant it was important to look at who was in the “driver’s seat” of the companies behind AI.

“They obviously have a commercial interest there. We’re talking huge valuations, huge salaries of the people they’re recruiting in Silicon Valley,” he said.

“I dare say their interests are potentially not for the human race than for themselves, which opens up some problems too.”

Mr Forzan said different AI platforms were used for different purposes.

“If you look at AI Mode, in the context it’s being used, it’s typically more about finding access to information like websites and things,” he said

“Whereas (with) something like Chat GPT, a lot of people are using it as a therapist or a companion.

“I think that’s where it can start to go off the rails because there’s no layer or lens of protection or validation. I think a lot of children might be picking that up, acting on it, taking it as concrete advice.”

AI has been involved in self-harm cases

Children using ChapGPT and other AI large language models, has unfortunately led to instances around the world of self-harm.

“With children having access to these things, there is a risk they can be influenced in unforeseen ways,” Mr Forzan said.

“And because something is unregulated, left to their own devices, they can be getting incorrect advice and I think there’s an inherent risk there when it’s left unmonitored.”

He said the social media bans for under-16s was a good step forward.

However, he said education in schools had an important role to play as well. There was also scope to better educate parents on teaching their kids how to use AI.

“It’s a fantastic tool when used correctly. It’s a potentially dangerous tool when not used correctly,” Mr Forzan said.

“I don’t think the answer is to not use it at all. It think it should be used at a point of maturity of the individual, and also with the support of their parents and the schooling.” 

www.yoghurtdigital.com.au

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-42-interview-with-matthew-forzan-from-yoghu

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is taking over businesses all over the world.

This has shown up in the latest Udemy Global Learning and Skills Trends report.

There are now 14 new Gen AI enrolments on the Udemy platform every minute. This is in addition to a 98% increase in demand for AI ethics courses year on year.

More extraordinarily, companies learning on Microsoft CoPilot surged 3400%.

Peter Kokkinos, the vice-president and managing director Asia Pacific for Udemy said there has been a tremendous growth across all AI technologies. It’s continuing to grow and have an impact on business in a significant way. 

“It’s not surprising. I’m lucky enough to meet hundreds of organisations around the world and what you’re seeing is different levels of maturity in AI,” Mr Kokkinos told Talking Business.

“Some organisations are full steam ahead. I think what we saw in the past was that some companies are trialling AI in pockets of their business.

“What we are seeing now is large scale and full-scale implementations of AI across all parts of their businesses, whether it be through performance improvement tools, or embedding it into their technologies or how they interact with their customers,” Mr Kokkinos said.

“Organisations that aren’t upskilling in those technologies risk falling behind their competitors.

“The impact of AI is going to change the way we go to market, it’s going to change the way we approach our work every day.

“If we don’t get it right, and we don’t educate our users around responsible use of AI, that’s where the risk is. Using it inappropriately could have a significant risk on a business.”

That said, Mr Kokkinos believes that while a lot of the assessments of humans is done by machines, taking humans out of the equation is a “dangerous proposition”.

However, it can play a significant role in all sorts of human interaction in the workplace, including staff appraisals using role play tools.

Mr Kokkinos said people learning how to develop critical thinking skills when combined with AI allowed them to differentiate.

“I don’t think it’s around learning how to use the tool but learning how to use the tool in a way that makes you more effective,” he said.

“And when you think about it, critical thinking is really where you’re going to differentiate yourself from the next individual.

“If AI tools can perform the menial tasks for you in your job, they can do it for everybody. So how do you differentiate yourself? It’s realty going to be around your leadership skills,” Mr Kokkinos said.

“AI is not going to replace leadership skills. People still want to be led by leaders who are empathetic and caring and thoughtful.

“And being able to make decisions on how and when to use those tools in the appropriate way through critical thinking is going to be the differentiator.”

Mr Kokkinos said learning how to use AI was now critical for everyone at work.

“AI is no longer considered just a tech skill,” he said.

“It’s now embedded across all functions of organisations, be it in marketing, sales, finance, and HR operations. 

“It’s now considered a workplace necessity.

“Like knowing how to use a computer 30 years ago.”

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-39-interview-with-peter-kokkinos-from-udemy

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

BUSINESSES all over the world need to transform their operations with digital technologies.

Francis Prince Thangasamy, the Singapore-based managing director for Asia-Pac of Lumen Technologies said there were many challenges, not least of which is cyber security.

But business leaders need to ‘go digital’ for all sorts of operations. Even during tough economic times.

“Regardless of market conditions, organisations will transform,” Mr Thangasamy told Talking Business.

“Regardless of market conditions, organisations need to enable business and drive efficiency.” 

This could be across many areas, he said.

“Transformation has many purposes. Some of it is to drive efficiency. It could be cost savings or it could enable new features focusing on the business,” Mr Thangasamy said.

“It really depends on how much dependency a business has on digital infrastructure.”

Digital impact is global

Being responsible for Asia-Pacific, Mr Thangasamy’s business works with mainly global businesses specialising in all sorts of areas. We’re talking here about verticals like finance, agriculture, retail, e-commerce, logistics and supply chain management.

He said the biggest challenge for companies transforming through digital technology was prioritisation. What comes first?

“You see companies that depend on IT for different aspects,” he said.

“There are companies depending on IT to enable the business to drive efficiency but also you have organisations which are heavily e-commerce driven and IT is driving the business.

“Those are the challenges of prioritisation of budget, of resources,” Mr Thangasamy said.

“How do you serve your business and at the same time modernise your infrastructure and how you get the skill sets?

“Skill sets [can be] quite a common problem globally.”

He said what a lot of companies do to deal with this is they complement what they have internally while training staff. And they leverage expertise from partners and providers.

At the same time, he said, there needs to be strong internal expertise to work with those third parties. So staff have to be trained.

“You need to have strong management program capabilities, people who can reach external partners and internal business units to solve common business problems,” he said.

Cyber security issues loom

One of the big challenges now, for businesses everywhere, including their boards, he said, is cyber security.

Mr Thangasamy said cyber security will be the major issue and focus for Lumen over the next five years.

“We focus quite a bit on cyber security because of the insights that we have on our networks,” he said.

“With that and our managed security services capabilities, we do help organisation modernise.”

But here’s the problem: so many companies now, he said, have invested in different security tools. It creates ‘blind spots’.

“This becomes an issue for companies where they have invested so much money but they still have blind spots, so how do you bring all of that together,” Mr Thangasamy said.

The other issue, he said, was finding security talent. And that is a global problem. How do businesses deal with that?

“What some companies do is get involved in campus recruiting and training people from internal training programs and competing in the market to identify top talents,” he said.

“But definitely that’s a big priority for companies – finding talent.” 

www.lumentechnologies.com

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-31-interview-with-francis-prince-thangasamy

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

ALL OVER THE WORLD, businesses are reeling from cyberattacks. The most common of these is in the form of ransomware.

What is ransomware? It uses malicious software, otherwise known as malware, which restricts a business computer’s access to files by encrypting them and then the criminal demands a ransom payment.

In other words, crypto criminals using ransomware hold that business hostage until the payment is made.

Bob Huber, chief security officer and head of research at Tenable, said these ransomware attacks were continuing to grow.

“It’s become a business,” Mr Huber told Talking Business. “The effort to start a business, generally considered a learning curve for any enterprise, takes years of effort and expertise. But ransomware, over the course of the last few years, has been an ecosystem that allows you not to have to be an expert to put out ransomware. 

“There are initial access brokers out there and providers and contract services,” he said.

“So I don’t have to be an expert myself to get into the ransomware game. I can actually contract those services out where I don’t have expertise. So, as much as I hate to say it, it’s lowered the barriers for entry to the market for most entities and organisations. It’s just not as difficult as it used to be years ago,” Mr Huber said.

“You can pick and choose the pieces that are already built. So you don’t have to develop the initial access or some novel attack to gain access or foothold to an organisation. They already exist. You can just click and build these things.”

Ransomware drives 38% of attacks

Ransomware has grown so much that Tenable research has found that it’s behind 38% of all cyber attacks.

Mr Huber said the growth of ransomware would continue as there were not that many businesses that are prepared to make the “commensurate investment in defending against ransomware attacks”.

This, he said, often came down to “foundational cyber hygiene”.

“If you think about organisations, whether they be non-profits, charities that don’t have mandates to make the investment … I’m sure they would like to but they compete against other businesses and risks, you know, economic down turn and pandemic, those are risks as well,” he said.

“They have to balance all those risks and determine where cyber fits into their risks and what they’re willing to accept or transfer. And especially for smaller organisations, they can’t make the investment to measure against those types of attacks.”

Remote work facilitates cyber attacks

Mr Huber said much of the growth of ransomware has come with more people working remotely.

“Given the proliferation of remote work… with people working from home and coffee shops and libraries, we found now that people do tend to travel, they still do their work but some of the controls you would traditionally have in an enterprise that [is] tied to certain types of access, through the facility or through a virtual private network, you don’t have that when you move to the coffee shops,” he said.

“There are other technical controls that were developed for a time when we expected folks to be in a facility,” Mr Huber said.

“And as we migrated to a remote workforce, in many cases we’ve had to loosen those controls to afford people to work from wherever to continue operations for the business.” 

www.tenable.com

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-27-interview-with-bob-huber-from-tenable

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