Ethan Mollik, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies entrepreneurship, innovation and AI, recently wrote an eye-opening article illustrating the phenomenal progress being made by AI. Entitled: ‘The recent history of AI in 32 otters’, the article showcased how rapidly AI had evolved its ability to produce an illustration of an otter on an aeroplane, using WiFi.

For Barry Neethling, Chief Technology Officer at First Technology Group, the article encapsulates everything organisations should understand about AI progress. “It showcases how revolutionary and unstoppable AI is, and the progress made in just four years,” he says.

“Soon, we’re not only going to get immensely powerful AI processing systems running in gigantic data centres in the cloud, but we’re also going to have immensely powerful and intelligent AIs running on our local computers. These sovereign AIs are going to get really interesting, and at First Technology, we’re paying a lot of attention to working with sovereign AI models,” he says.

“Now, researchers are also testing AI for the glimmerings of human intelligence, and slowly but surely, you can see true intelligence is starting to develop. Potentially, five years from now, we might end up with sentience.”

He says: “AI is a superpower and it’s evolving rapidly. If you do not become part of it and embrace it, somebody else will.”

Neethling says while there is widespread interest in AI, many organisations are hesitant to embark on an AI journey, or don’t know where to start.

“But AI is starting to permeate our lives in every way and anyone who isn’t part of AI or using AI to enhance their lives will be excluded from the future where we are using AI to empower ourselves. If you persist in ignoring AI and leaving it to others, or convincing yourself that AI can do nothing for you in your life, I would suggest that you’re making a grave mistake,” he says.

Neethling notes that First Technology teams are mastering AI to help revolutionise their customers’ environments: “The different teams in First Technology are working to do amazing and impressive things with companies’ data, empowering people to access and gain insights from their data in ways that they never dreamed possible.” Take a look at First Technology’s AI that you can use to interrogate the company’s database of stories (you need to ask your admin to give you access).

He adds: “AI has a better memory than humans do, and it is able to connect the dots. So when you combine human ability with the ability of an AI, you can achieve something better or greater than what you would have been able to do by yourself. All organisations need to be focusing on ways to use it in their businesses.”

He notes, however, that data issues must be addressed before embarking on an AI journey. “Before you can start using AI, you need to actually have an idea of what control you have over your data. Is your data stored just on a company server as a Z drive shared to everybody? Have you categorised your data? Do you even know what data is confidential or data that is generally available? What do you know about your own data? And how do you know how effective you are in protecting your data? Before you can put an AI into your environment or an AI onto your data, you have to start figuring out what is going on with your data and how you will protect it.”

Neethling outlines how First Technology assists customers in harnessing AI: “First, we work with customers to categorise and protect their data using tools and licences that they probably have already paid for. And secondly, we help empower them in their environment by accessing that data with an AI to enable their users to be more productive and to be more effective.”