From artificial intelligence to business intelligence
The Kainos AI CON event, to be held next month in Belfast, will explore how artificial intelligence is already having an impact on business and government
To be held on December 1, leading Irish artificial intelligence (AI) event AI CON will have a new élan this year. Organised by software company Kainos and held in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter, the convention is expected to draw a wider audience than ever.
Ruth McGuinness, data and AI practice lead at Kainos, said that one of the goals of the event was to drive understanding of AI beyond a technology audience, particularly out into policy circles.
“If you asked someone in my family, they would probably say my job sounds quite futuristic: I lead the AI department. But it’s not futuristic, AI is happening right now in the Irish and British public sectors,” she said.
AI’s uses, and potential uses, stem from the fact that it is a new way of looking at information. In this regard, it can be seen as an extension of data-centric gains that have already been made in recent years.
“In reality, AI is a pattern-detection system that can help departments and government bodies to make decisions. It reduces repetition in business workflows, so it’s not dissimilar to other automation technologies,” she said.
There were a number of steps organisations needed to take in order to integrate AI into their operations, McGuinness said. Firstly, businesses and public sector organisations needed to develop the right skills, or partner with someone who can provide them.
“Organisations should look at building their capability and understanding of AI in-house: develop your machine meaning or data science capability in-house, or partner with someone who can bring it to you,” said McGuinness.
“Secondly, they should develop an AI governance framework and set out best practices in trust and ethics and bias.”
The next step was to take the necessary digital transformation seriously by ensuring that the data they put to work is ready to be interrogated intelligently.
“Thirdly, organisations should prepare for data transformation. They need to understand their data landscape internally. A lot of work needs to be done about cleansing and preparing data,” she said.
A growing field
Work in and round AI has significantly ramped up for Kainos in the last three years as the benefits the field can bring become clearer, McGuinness said. Noting this, she said her experience has led her to believe that there should be more investment in skills and training around data.
“People think there is potentially an AI skills shortage – but actually, for me, I think the skill shortage we really have is in data engineering. I don’t think we [as a society] are really ready to utilise the AI opportunity fully. Are organisations really savvy with their data? Not really, no,” she said.
Questions that organisations should be asking themselves start with, ‘What are the business objectives we want to achieve?’ and then, ‘How can we get there?’
“After all, if we’re trying to build a machine-learning model, we have to train it on a good example of a clean dataset. There’s a big data translation that needs to happen,” she said.
As a result, this year’s AICON decision to focus on a non-technical audience not only demonstrates the field’s maturity, but it also recognised how AI is touching all of our lives.
“The opportunity in moving away from a purely technical audience is to educate a wider group of people; the areas of focus for the conference are emerging areas,” she said.
McGuinness said Kainos wanted to give the business audience a useful summary of where we now are in areas like policy and regulation.
“AI is not a thing that will happen in the corner, it is something that will touch all areas of your business. What does the national AI strategy mean? What do the latest EU regulations mean for your organisation? This is something that businesses need to be up to speed with,” she said.
