About 100 people gathered at the Edgar Centre to learn about the potential implications of artificial intelligence for the future of business, at Business South’s AI Summit yesterday.
Among the guests speakers was Emeritus Prof James Maclaurin, co-director of the Centre for AI and Public Policy at the University of Otago.
Prof Maclaurin said, when speaking to the Otago Daily Times before the event, it was important to have these conversations now that AI had “well and truly left the lab”, and was starting to get rolled-out into the office.
“The genie is absolutely out of the bottle,” he said.
“For businesses there are lots of questions to ask themselves about what they might use it for and what effects it would have.”
Prof Maclaurin said AI had been around for ages but generative AI, the technology used in ChatGPT, was suddenly appearing.
A recent report by Microsoft and Linkedin had shown nearly 80% of people were using AI at work, and were often introducing it themselves, he said.
While that data showed people found AI useful and helped them to get drudgery tasks out of the way, people were nervous about its reliability.
Prof Maclaurin said AI could be used in the workplace for composing reports and emails, designing logos, customer service, product development and personalising output — and in the future could include “AI agents” which worked and solved tasks as if they were a human co-worker.
AI had suddenly become important because it now had much more general capabilities, which posed the question to businesses of which office tasks would be worthwhile for it to tackle.
Prof Maclaurin said integrating AI into the workplace would see “a lot of change” and businesses could not start thinking about how to use it soon enough, he said.
While the contours of the job were going to change, he did not fear that huge numbers of jobs would disappear in the short term.
Business South chief executive Mike Collins said he believed AI would be a “game changer” for business.
The more you understood it the more you used it, and there were real gains to be made — which Dunedin was well-positioned to be a part of, he said.
“The internet came along and made a pretty radical difference in the way we worked and communicated and I think AI is definitely a wave that is going to create a memorable difference in how businesses actually function.
“We do need to embrace it.”
