AI has taken over the news and much of the business world over the last two years. There’s a lot of speculation about what AI will and won’t do, as well as where it could take us. Someone who has been working at the forefront of this change is Fergal Murphy, whose AI career spans three decades and includes start-ups, IBM Watson and most recently Accenture.
I want to share a recent conversation we had that provides a little bit of background about Fergal and some insights into what’s happening in Australia, as well as where we could find ourselves in the next 12 months.
There’s a lot to say about AI and Fergal is an expert in the area so this will be the first of several conversations I share. If there’s a topic related to AI that you’d like covered, get in touch and I’ll try weave it into our discussions.
What drew you to the world of AI originally?
It was the possibility of what we could do with technology, essentially how we turn the physical world into a digital representation and then use technology to do some of the tasks we do today. I think curiosity has been one of my main drivers in my career, having looked at the exponential power of technology and what it can do through computing.
In my university days I worked with some doctors in a medical centre, I wanted to build an AI application that could replicate what they do. This was met with a healthy dose of scepticism, but my persistence paid off when they agreed to support my thesis to find the minimum number of questions that could be asked to provide an accurate diagnosis. When I trained my AI the results that came out were accurate and very close to the actual practitioners. This opened their eyes as well as mine – the ability to ask a very small number of questions and get automated, accurate results is transformative.
Who is currently using AI well in Australia?
Most of the organisations that I would regard as high performers have been building data foundations over many years, which is now allowing them to use AI at scale.
AI is like the piece of the iceberg that’s sticking out of the water, that’s got light shining on it, but the iceberg is really 7/8 under the waterline. That large part of the iceberg is the data foundations that leading organisations have been working on for years.
If you look at the banking industry’s use of data and AI, it has been leading. CommBank are the Harvard MBA case study in the use of AI to improve customer experience, using up to 150 billion data points to mould customer interactions. I would say CommBank are not just a leader in Australia, but a world leader in this area.
Another organisation doing this well is the Australian Tax Office. They’ve applied insights and intelligence to help people through their tax return digitally, as well as make sure they’re asking the right questions in order to give them the ability to interrogate tax returns to make sure everybody pays their fair share.
What can business leaders do to best equip their companies?
In terms of business leaders and what they’re looking to do, data integrity and data maturity are the most important areas to be focusing on. If you’re not already a data driven business or if you’re not on the pathway to becoming a data driven business, you’re going to struggle to keep up.
If you look at the mining industry for example, they’ve recognised that the thing that speeds them up is automation and what slows them down is when they have safety concerns. So AI is bringing this to life by automating the drilling and the blasting of rock, automating truck driving and train driving. I think more and more AI is not just for the digital world, it’s for the physical world too.
Another example is the Australian Institute of Marine Science who work to maintain the health of the of our coral reefs. They’ve created an AI-driven platform called ReefCloud that allows marine scientists and marine biologists to automatically feed in underwater images so they can track the health of the reefs in real time using AI. This means they can spend a lot more time acting on the science rather than collecting the data, which gives them a much more powerful voice and the greatest chance of success.
Do you have any predictions in terms of what we may see in the next 12 months?
If you look at the current wave of AI, we’re seeing a range of estimates about how much of the workforce is going to be impacted. I’ve seen reports that range from 25% to 40% and whatever it ends up being we can be fairly confident that this is going to have an impact across the workforce.
But something to keep in mind with Generative AI is it is reconstituting the past, it’s trained on large bodies of text and imagery that already exist. It analyses this information to summarise or act on it. It’s not so much about creating or recreating the future as reconstituting the past. So AI won’t really work well in truly creative roles, but where it’s very effective is in areas of repetitive knowledge and administration work.
AI is probably not going to be the next fashion designer, but it can help speed up repetitive processes of work that slow you down. At the moment, a lot of the impact is at the simple end and that will likely remain the case for the next 12 months.
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Our next articles will look at how AI will change the way we work and the structure of organisations, as well as how to navigate career decisions (for yourself and loved ones) given the shifting landscape.
If you have a question or something you’d like thoughts on when it comes to AI, contact Phil Davis, Managing Director, Q Consulting Group on 0404 803 609 or at phil.davis@qconsultinggroup.com.au.