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Leadership Reflections – Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

What immediately jumps in your mind when you read or hear that phrase?

Excitement: The future is now! …

Fear: The machines will rule the world!  …

Overwhelm: Where / How do I start?

I admit that all three emotions are part of my response to AI. So, I recently sat down with Tim Hoch, our APM IT & Innovations Director, to discuss how I can gain more confidence with AI. He shared some thoughts with me, and we thought it would be good for him to share it with us all. A few considerations from him:

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not just a trend but a transformative force that will impact our lives and our business significantly over the coming years.  Harnessing the power of AI will enhance safety, efficiency and creativity while optimizing resource allocation and strategy development.  As more AI systems come online and existing systems gain capability, it is becoming increasingly important that we learn how to use AI in our daily lives.  People are naturally resistant to change and often fear the unknown, so getting comfortable with AI may be challenging at first.

Please note that you don’t need to be a data scientist or a programmer to use AI.  One great analogy about using AI is the comparison to driving a car – you don’t need an in-depth understanding of how the drivetrain in a car operates to safely drive it, you simply need some driver education and a little experience.  Understanding how the car works is a bonus especially if you run into issues, but it is not necessary to safely operate the vehicle. 

The same is true of AI.  There are plenty of online resources available to guide initial use of AI tools, but the best way to learn is with some practice.  Choose any AI platform (Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT are popular choices to start with) and experiment with non-work-related requests to get a feel for how the systems work.  Please see the attached Acceptable Use of AI Tools document that GE released in 2023 for guidelines on protecting company data while using AI.  Here is a link to a video beginners guide to ChatGPT that many will find helpful:  How to Use ChatGPT - Beginner's Guide - YouTube

Once you have experimented a little with Copilot or ChatGPT, you may want to investigate other tools that are designed to assist with specific tasks.  Here is a link to one of many videos that dive into the usefulness of AI tools:  5 AI Tools That Will Change Your Life in 2024! - YouTube 

The technologies we employ today including our smart phones, wearable devices and computers will gain new capabilities in the coming months and years.  Smart phones will be replaced by “intelligent phones”, wearable devices will leverage AI to drive health and safety, and computers will gain new capabilities that will assist in maximizing efficiency.  All these enhancements will eventually become seamlessly integrated into daily life.

AI will have a significant impact on our daily lives and our business, and in some ways it already has.  Learning to work with AI is just the first step.  Once we become comfortable with simply using AI we will quickly find new opportunities to leverage its capabilities – making day-to-day operations more efficient, getting advice on an expanding range of topics, developing short- and long-term business strategies and testing them against large data models, applying predictive analytics to ideas and models to gauge potential for success or risk – just to name a few.  The growth of AI will be exponential, not linear. 

My recommendation is simple:  get to know AI, experiment with the tools, investigate new applications and capabilities, and share your successes with others to encourage them to discover AI as well.

Thank you Tim for your good thoughts on AI.

For all of us, AI will impact our future. In addition to what Tim shares, there is also the AI impact on future energy demand. For example, this week the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that USA energy demand will rise 3% this year driven in part by “the surge in data centre expansions.”

-Jake