Embrace hope, overcome AI fears, guests at breakfast event told
Guests at a breakfast event hosted by law firm Fieldfisher were told to embrace the hope that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a force for good.
In a fireside chat, Astra Zeneca’s head of IT Kabir Patel gave a series of spellbinding insights into how one major corporation is embracing the challenge of AI and sustainability.
A quick show of hands at the start showed a high awareness of AZ’s reach, not least with a firm majority raising jabbed arms that had been in receipt of vaccinations for Covid.
Far fewer were willing however to expose themselves to any scrutiny – even amongst friends – for their adventures in ChatGPT – an entry level AI tool we’ve all had a dabble with.
My early dystopian antennae was twitching at the power being in the hands of Big Tech and Big Data. Remember how the internet turned out, how algorithims designed to make us angry ran rampant?
A bright engaging and nonetheless challenging provocateur, Kabir ran us through what Big Pharma are doing – computer aided drug discovery, aggregation of an insanely large amount of data to tackle medical diagnostics, deploying machine learning that can mimic human cognition.
It can set us free, he suggested, unleash human creativity to perform tasks that require empathy, judgement and thus spark serendipity and productivity.
It wasn’t Kabir’s place to discuss regulation of all of this with so many lawyers present, but for good measure he offered up the thought that the push for collaborative working, for sustainable development, comes from the bottom up. It keeps corporations honest.
AZ, he said, are insisting on ESG improvements throughout their supply chain. They are embracing the circular economy and expect to be carbon negative by 2030.
This was the first of a new series of fireside chats with interesting and thought provoking people, brought to you by Fieldfisher and TheBusinessDesk.com.
