Abba’s co-founder and president of CISAC, Björn Ulvaeus, responded to the report by warning that poorly regulated artificial intelligence has “the power to cause great damage to human creators, to their careers and livelihoods.”

It stated that the market for GenAI music and audiovisual content will rise from $3 billion now to $64bn in 2028, while revenues at risk of loss for creators by 2028 will be cut by almost a quarter in music, and over 20% in audiovisual.

This amounts to a cumulative loss of $22bn over the 5 years, according to the report.

In addition, the report states that GenAI music is expected to account for approximately 20% of traditional music streaming revenues and around 60% of music library revenues.

Further, translators and adaptors for dubbing and subtitling are said to experience the strongest impact, with over half of their revenue at risk. At the same time, screenwriters and directors could see their revenues hit by 15 to 20%.

Ulvaeus said that policymakers must “get these regulations right, protect creators’ rights, and help develop an AI environment that safeguards human creativity and culture” to prevent such damage.

VP of CISAC, film director and screenwriter Ángeles González-Sinde Reig, added: “This study highlights the need for ethical and economically sound policies that put creators’ rights at the very centre of the AI world.

“AI tools can profoundly support our work as storytellers and filmmakers. We must not forget that it is human creators who provide the fuel of the AI world and who must be at the centre of policymaking and regulation.”

The post ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus warns of AI in music industry appeared first on TechInformed.

Before a business plunges headfirst into AI, it is important to identify the use case – the exact problem you are trying to solve. In my experience, it is vital to be as specific as you can. At Mallowstreet, our use case was the meeting.

We all have lots of meetings – too many. So, the Mallowstreet team started by asking ourselves the simple question: how can we help make meetings, and the necessary follow-up, more efficient and effective? As a result, we built our own AI tool SOFI to analyse a meeting.

We used our industry-specific knowledge to train SOFI to fluently summarise financial meetings and discussions, surfacing key actions and takeaways in the process. We also built the capability to analyse a meeting through critical lenses – a dashboard of how the meeting deals with risk, return, liquidity profile, investment time horizon, growth versus matching investment characteristics, and ESG.

The result was amazing. As a meeting attendee, you could now actively listen and truly pay attention – feeling 100% present, knowing that SOFI is in the background ensuring no discussion points are missed, and instantly see if the salient lines of enquiry are being attended to.

Expanding the use case

Then came our second round of development – again leaning on the use case approach. This time, we asked: can we apply SOFI analysis to a whole series of related meetings to highlight key themes, identify discrepancies and surface common questions across sessions? This was the genesis of Multi-Vertical Analysis.

Multi-Vertical Analysis unlocks our trend analysis tools, paving the way for the development of ‘SOFI scores’ which quantify vital meeting dynamics. For example, how much time does each participant speak (soapbox score) or how many ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ do you say (disfluency score)? With this added layer, SOFI has also become a pitch/ presentation practice tool – providing feedback that is objective, consistent, and transparent.

It’s clear that, when implemented in a thoughtful and structured way, AI does deliver on specific use cases. But what I’ve found more interesting is the concept of the ‘impact coefficient’: how an individual can achieve uplift in delivery of their core role.

Very few people go into a job to become, for example, a financial adviser who says: ‘wow, I really cannot wait to write up the reports for my clients, fill in the KYC forms, and update the CRM with all of the required points to satisfy an increasingly more regulated world’.

On the contrary, people become financial advisers because they want to help people on their journey. They want to make a difference, to spend time with their clients and get to know them, so they can provide the best advice to allow each person to achieve their respective goals.

I repeatedly hear the above tension of how people want to spend time vs where time actually gets spent by wealth advisers and financial advisers. And this is where the impact coefficient comes into its own. If an adviser is freed from the responsibility of capturing and analysing all the information from a conversation, they can spend their time focusing on asking the right questions and really getting to the heart of what a client needs. They can pay far more attention to body language and tone, helping to understand the ultimate driver of a client’s concerns or decision making.

Allowing the adviser to be truly present in a conversation with their clients allows them to help provide better advice, allowing the client to make better decisions, and ultimately having a fundamental positive impact on their long-term trajectory.

Imagine a world where all the advice being offered was elevated in this way. The long-term impact on the UK wouldn’t just be significant – it could be transformational.

A tool, not a replacement

People often ask me if AI is going to ultimately make a huge amount of the work force redundant. The honest answer is I don’t think anyone knows. But what I am sure of is this: the people integrating AI into their daily workflow are not only becoming more efficient, but also more effective. Those who are leveraging the impact coefficient are gaining ground on all of us.

Stepping back, when you are approaching AI, it is incredibly important to nurture curiosity – ask the challenging questions, and push for how things can be done differently and, even, better?

You aren’t looking for a quantum leap. Think about the Tour de France. Better handwashing to avoid germs, improved pillows for better sleep, tiny aerodynamic redesigns for faster results. Alone these tweaks are helpful – together they are transformational.

And make sure you have a growth mindset – the belief that abilities, intelligence, and talents can be developed over time through dedication, hard work, and learning. This contrasts with a fixed mindset, where someone believes their abilities and intelligence are static and cannot change.

What excites me is the fact that we now have a new set of tools which can transform the way we work together and leverage the impact coefficient. Be specific in the issues you’re trying to solve – find your use case – and automate the tasks that can be.

Because the more time we can save, the more intellectual firepower that can be deployed to help ensure we all achieve our respective goals. By putting financial advisers and the financial services at the forefront of innovation and driving adoption of AI to benefit from its advantages, we can achieve great things.

Read more: How to launch a dating app in 8 days

The post Art of the meeting: Transforming client relationships in finance appeared first on TechInformed.

Although the pandemic didn’t kill half the world’s population like the Black Death in the 1300s, it did kill 3 million people worldwide, despite all the advances in medical science that have taken place in the last 100 years.

And according to many public health experts, the problem of global pandemics isn’t going away any time soon. In fact, it’s about to get a lot worse.

That’s the view of the UK Health Security Agency boss Jenny Harries, who spends a lot of time worrying about where the next pandemic is coming from on our behalf.

“The bad news is that we know the risks for pandemics and new diseases globally are increasing for a number of reasons,’ says Harries, who points to climate change as an accelerating factor.

“Climate change is hastening habitat alteration and movement of animal species. Urbanisation is encouraging encroachment and overlaps between animal and human interfaces and transport changes.”

Dr Jong-Yoon Chun, a Korean expert in medical molecular diagnostics, argues that climate change and extreme weather, from unusually hot conditions to unusually wet conditions, stresses pathogens in the same way that it stresses humans. “The result is that they mutate faster, to create new diseases in humans, or animals.”

“What concerns me most is waves of pandemics – or Multi-pandemics – which will be much more serious,” he warns.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that Dr Chun and his molecular diagnostics company Seegene is working hard on a solution in the shape of the company’s syndromic, real-time PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) technology, which can detect a wide range of pathogens.

Microsoft Azure Open AI partnership 

The company teamed up with Microsoft’s Azure Open AI at the beginning of the year to supercharge its PCR technology and has now managed to come up with a way to dramatically reduce the time it takes to analyse tests and predict pandemic outbreaks.

Seegene and Microsoft showcased their developments at an event in London last month, hosted by science publisher Springer Nature, detailing how the  integration of Microsoft’s Azure Open AI into the research and planning module of Seegene’s automated product development system was able to dramatically reduce the time needed to process and analyse relevant information from published scientific literature and to analyse samples.

“Manually we need three expert scientists who take days to analyse samples. But with AI we can get the results in just minutes,’ declares Dr Chun.

“Until now, scientists and experts have been confined to limited local data, usually generated by themselves. However, access to diagnostic information shared across the world powered with Microsoft’s AI technology will enable swift response to any emerging diseases,” says Chun, who adds that the  results can be applied to any disease.

“Human papilloma virus which ultimately causes cervical cancer is another disease which can be easily detected with a low-cost PCR test, and largely eliminated. If women only knew they had the virus they could take the steps to avoid the cancer, which can take 10-15 years to develop, right at the beginning, which is the best place to handle it.”

Seegene and Microsoft are in the process of forming a series of partnerships with local scientists and experts to develop diagnostic tests tailored to the needs of their communities and fields, spanning a wide range of human and non-human diseases.

Disease-free world 

The aim is to create  ‘a world free from diseases’ ­– a future where people no longer suffer from infectious diseases and cancers, and where animals and plants can thrive without illness.”

Microsoft’s director of population health Geraint Lewis observes that the rate of development of AI in medical diagnostics is mind-blowingly rapid, doubling every six months.

“So, it’s quite a sobering thought for me to think how things might have been different if the Covid pandemic had occurred in the post Generative AI era. How many lives would have been saved?”

The challenge now is to look forward to the next pandemic and to ask ourselves, what will we do differently? How are we going to make the most of the fact that tasks that experts previously took many weeks to complete, can now be done in minutes.”

Read more: AI predicts 1000s of diseases early

The post GenAI is supercharging the fight against future pandemics appeared first on TechInformed.

Microsoft is introducing autonomous AI agents, or ‘virtual employees’, that can handle client queries and identify sales leads.

As of next month, customers will be able to build their own AI agents, and Microsoft will release ten off-the-shelf bots that can carry out supply chain management and customer service tasks.

Early adopters of the product from Copilot Studio, which launches next month, include consulting firm McKinsey, which is building an agent to process new client enquiries.

Other early users include law firm Clifford Chance and pet retailer Pets at Home. Microsoft is flagging AI agents, which carry out tasks without human intervention, as an example of the technology’s ability to increase productivity.

Read more…

IBM launches “most advanced” open source enterprise AI, Granite 3.0

IBM is rolling out its Granite 3.0 AI Large Language models, which it claims are the most advanced to date and will outperform other popular large language models from Meta, Anthropic, and Mistral AI.

Designed as ‘workhorse’ models for enterprise AI, use cases cover customer service, IT automation, business process outsourcing, application development and cybersecurity.

IBM claimed the LLM family “is the closest to open source that anybody has released”.

Read more…

Instagram announces new features to protect teens

Instagram has announced new safety features to target sextortion scammers as a way of giving teenagers protection against abuse and exploitation on the platform.

The Meta-owned social media giant said it is using technology to detect and restrict accounts that engage in scam behaviour, and its new safety tools will prevent scammers from being able to directly screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent in messages — often the way scammers get hold of intimate images.

The platform added that scammers often use “Following” and “Follower” lists to try to blackmail teenagers, but accounts suspected to be scammers will be barred from accessing those lists.

Read more…

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software faces US safety probe

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the agency regulating road safety, has revealed it is investigating Tesla’s self-driving software systems.

The evaluation covers 2.4 million Tesla vehicles across multiple models manufactured between 2016 and 2024 and follows four separate crash reports involving Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software.

The agency said the crashes involved reduced roadway visibility, with fog or glares from the sun. The investigation aims to determine if Tesla’s software can adequately detect and appropriately respond in reduced visibility.

One of the incidents involved a Telsa vehicle fatally striking a pedestrian, and another involved someone being injured, the NHTSA said.

Read more…

TikTok owner fires intern for sabotaging AI model

TikTok owner ByteDance says it sacked an intern back in August for “maliciously interfering” with training one of its artificial intelligence models.

ByteDance rejected claims about the damage caused, saying that the intern worked in the company’s advertising technology team and had no experience with the AI Lab, including its large language models, which were unaffected.

The Chinese technology giant’s Doubao ChatGPT-like generative AI model is the country’s most popular AI chatbot. Like other big players in the tech sector, ByteDance has raced to embrace generative AI.

Read more…

NHS to provide full medical records access through mobile app

Patients are to get full access to their medical records through the NHS app under legislative proposals to change how the system handles data.

The legal change would require doctors and hospitals to use a single administrative system.

The app, currently used to book appointments and order medication, will house all of an individual’s medical information and allow all medical staff to access it easily.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting said it would save around 1.5m working hours yearly.

Read more…

The post Microsoft to launch AI agents while Tesla hit with self-driving safety probe appeared first on TechInformed.

Whether using skilled in-house workers or bringing on board extra developers, coding can pose significant challenges for branching out — but generative AI (GenAI) could be set to change all of that.

AI platforms such as ChatGPT enable developers to launch new platforms and apps with record speed while easing budget concerns.

Take David Minns, for example, who runs a dating platform with over 600,000 global users. Minns, who has worked as a programmer in the dating industry since 2007, claims that the premium version of ChatGPT has enabled him to launch an Android version of his Greed Dating platform in just eight days.

Read more: Harnessing the power of Generative AI: a paradigm shift in modern business

Not only has the OpenAI LLM saved him from hiring the equivalent of “two software developers,” he tells TechInformed, but it has also provided him with business and marketing support.

According to Minns, the launch of Greed Dating’s Android app is a proof-of-concept for the industry.“ AI can now assist in nearly every aspect of the development process, from creating basic app functionality to debugging and optimising code,” he enthused.

End of handwritten code

Greed Dating combines several dating niches under a single app — with the LLM allowing Minns to easily roll out new segments.

Some of the niche dating sites include Butterfly, a dating site for transgender people; Lisa50, a site for women over fifty; Bad Boys, described as “for the Alpha male”; and Dinky1, a site created for gentlemen with a below-average penis size, which Minns claims has now amassed 180,000 members.

Its foundations were built over many years through the manual development of the web platform, with the backend powered by PHP and MySQL.

Later, Greed expanded into mobile with a hand-coded iOS app written in Swift, which was developed entirely in-house using traditional methods.

This manual process, while effective, came with challenges, Minns notes. The programmer-turned-entrepreneur added that learning and mastering new programming languages, such as Swift, slowed the iOS development cycle.

As the project grew, Minns realised that continuing along the same path for the Android app would take additional time and increase costs.

“As a solo entrepreneur, to have any additional developers is costly, and knowledge transfer is difficult because all my code is written in my head — explaining a quarter of a million lines of code to someone else is challenging,” he explained.

Android: AI-assisted development

Minns decided to take the plunge and embrace AI for its Android app development. By using ChatGPT, Minns claimed that he could bypass the traditional, time-consuming methods of coding from scratch.

Instead of learning a new programming language or outsourcing the task, Minns used AI to write the code in the cross-platform development framework Flutter, using Microsoft’s integrated development environment, Visual Studio.

He explains: “With ChatGPT, I asked the AI to develop each section of the Android app step by step.

“Not only did it generate working code, but it also helped fix bugs and improve the app on the fly. It was like having an expert developer on hand, 24/7.”

Minns adds: “I’ve been using AI for 12 months, and it offers groundbreaking functions for developers. Even if you are vague on the first and last line of code, it will fill all the gaps in between — you can cut and paste that into the development environment, and it becomes easy.”

According to Minns, he was able to ask the AI to hunt out security failures and software–bugs, “which it does brilliantly”.

Legal, marketing and sales tasks

In addition, Minns adds that he was also able to use ChatGPT to generate name ideas for new sites and to help with trademark applications.

“We applied for trademarks for the name in all the main territories. We received rejections in some EU territories and used ChatGPT to find EU laws to argue our case. ChatGPT is strong in areas such as law, as well as software development,” he explains.

To avoid hallucinations, Minns suggested that users prompt GPT to find out whether it has any sources to corroborate the information that it initially offers.

To enhance sales, Minns also uploaded a picture of the site’s payment page and asked for ‘10 ways to improve sales conversation rates. “It will show you what’s working or not for your business,” he says.

Minns said that the decision to use AI resulted in a dramatically shortened development cycle, taking him just eight days to build the Android app, which would previously have taken around three months.

Meta accrues $2.8 billion in GDPR fines

Minns believes that AI tools will undoubtedly reshape how apps are built in the future and that Greed Dating’s experience with AI-assisted development is an exciting indicator of this.

Minns concludes: “For $20 a month, I’m not doing the work equivalent to hiring a couple of software developers and/or a marketer. In the future, I think we will see fewer traditional coders and more ‘conductors’ or ‘directors’ who guide AI in building out complex systems.”

The post How to launch a dating app in 8 days appeared first on TechInformed.

The study tracked deepfake video requests using a popular text-to-video AI tool. It found that 64% of the deepfaked videos of the top ten most deepfaked figures were of politicians and business leaders.

Donald Trump, the former president and current Republican candidate, topped the list with 12,384 deepfake videos. He was followed closely by CEO of Tesla and X (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk, with over 9500 deepfakes.

Current US President Joe Biden and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also made the top ten.

The threat of deepfakes to democracy

The prominence of Musk and Trump as deepfake targets underscores the growing risk this technology poses to business leaders and politicians alike, particularly with the 2024 US election just around the corner.

Eric Lu, co-founder of Kapwing, who conducted the study, says: “Our goal with this study is to bring hard data to the conversation about the potential dangers surrounding deepfake technology.”

According to Lu, deepfakes could be weaponised to spread misinformation, influence public opinion, or even deceive voters.

The post Trump and Musk rank as most deepfaked figures ahead of 2024 US election appeared first on TechInformed.

A CrowdStrike executive has told US lawmakers the company was “deeply sorry” for the global outage that grounded flights and left millions unable to work.

SVP of counter adversary Adam Meyers appeared before a US congressional committee to answer questions on the faulty software update that left millions of PCs disabled on July 19.

Lawmakers on the House of Representatives cybersecurity subcommittee pressed Meyers on how it occurred in the first place.

“A global IT outage that impacts every sector of the economy is a catastrophe that we would expect to see in a movie,” said Mark Green, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in his opening remarks.

Meyers described the outage as a result of a “perfect storm” that was “due to a mistake”, adding that the cybersecurity firm is “determined to prevent it from happening again”.

Mr Meyers said the company would continue to act on and share “lessons learned” from the incident to ensure it would not happen again.

Read more…

LinkedIn ditches UK data for AI training over regulator concerns

LinkedIn will cease using UK data to train its artificial intelligence models after the Information Commissioners Office raised concerns.

The Microsoft-owned platform admitted it had trained its AI using UK user data without seeking their explicit consent as part of an updated privacy policy that went into effect on September 18, 2024.

This prompted concerns from the regulator, ICO, who welcomed the latest announcement from LinkedIn, saying it would work with the company to develop its approach.

Stephen Almond, ICO executive director regulatory risk, said: “We are pleased that LinkedIn has reflected on the concerns we raised about its approach to training generative AI models with information relating to its UK users. We welcome LinkedIn’s confirmation that it has suspended such model training pending further engagement with the ICO.

“In order to get the most out of generative AI and the opportunities it brings, it is crucial that the public can trust that their privacy rights will be respected from the outset.”

Read more…

FTX’s Ellison given two-year jail term for fraud

Former FTX executive Caroline Ellison has been sentenced to two years in prison for her role in the collapse of the currency exchange.

Ellison joins former partner Sam Bankman-Fried among those convicted over FTX’s collapse, which has been called one of the biggest financial frauds in cryptocurrency history.

Ellison accepted a plea deal that saw her admit to charges including wire fraud and money laundering. She also testified against Bankman-Fried, who has already been sentenced to 25 years in prison for stealing more than $8bn (£6.3bn) from customers.

Under the plea deal, Ellison has also agreed to forfeit more than $11bn (£8.2bn) to the court.

Apologising in court, she said: “On some level, my brain can’t even comprehend the scale of the harm that I caused.”

Read more…

ChatGPT-founder Sam Altman outlines “superintelligence” timeline

We are as little as eight years away from the creation of artificial general intelligence, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

AGI, which Altman refers to as “superintelligence” in a recent essay, is a computer that can reason as well as or better than humans.

“It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days; it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there,” he wrote in the essay titled The Intelligence Age.

Altman, who helped build ChatGPT and usher in the latest generation of generative AI, used the 1,100-word essay to make a case for giving as many people as possible access to AI to facilitate a leap in human prosperity.

“In the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy. There are plenty of miserable rich people, but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.”

Read more…

James Cameron joins board of AI startup

Hollywood director James Cameron has joined the board of UK-based AI startup Stability.

The Academy Award-winning director, famed for future-looking blockbusters including the Terminator series and Avatar, said he was interested in the intersection of CGI and GenAI in image creation.

Stability is the company behind the AI image model Stable Diffusion, which, alongside Midjourney, helped capture the initial mainstream interest in GenAI several months before ChatGPT’s release.

Cameron said: “The convergence of these two totally different engines of creation will unlock new ways for artists to tell stories in ways we could have never imagined.

“Stability AI is poised to lead this transformation. I’m delighted to collaborate with Sean, Prem, and the Stability AI team as they shape the future of all visual media.”

Read more…

The post CrowdStrike apologises for outage, and LinkedIn stops training AI with UK data appeared first on TechInformed.

And yet, for all the hype, real-world experience suggests that many smaller companies struggle to get a foothold on the GenAI ladder. They’re often unable to find the right use cases to drive real-world value from this transformative tech.

The ChatGPT-inspired frenzy is partly to blame for this disconnect. With the spotlight fixed on Silicon Valley’s multi-billion dollar attempt to disrupt industries and rewire business models from scratch, the smaller, day-to-day needs of the wider business community are getting lost in the mix.

There’s no question that startups and scaleups across a broad cross-section of industries can benefit from GenAI’s capabilities. But first, we need to be realistic about what kind of changes are possible with limited resources.

The following 3A’s framework – Automate, Accelerate, and Augment – is designed to help SMEs do exactly that. It’s a playbook for achieving low-cost, low-risk AI results within a timescale of just one or two years:

1. Automate to free up human creativity

This step involves identifying high-volume, low-complexity tasks that can be automated using GenAI to cut costs and redirect human creativity.

One company leading the charge is Hyro, which is helping companies across sectors understand how to automate repetitive communication tasks. Take call centre automation, where Hyro’s GenAI-based tech directs complex queries to agents and diverts simple calls, such as rescheduling appointments, to self-service channels. The company has made particular progress in helping healthcare companies increase their responsiveness to customers cost-effectively.

Over in real estate, property companies are using GenAI to craft accurate listing descriptions and image captions in just minutes. London-based Coldwell Banker has added GenAI skills to its Listing Concierge, a marketing platform home to a wide range of services from hi-res photography to videography.

While its business remains “very human-focused”, the tech enables agents to “spend less time on manual tasks and more time delivering tangible value to their clients”.

Meanwhile, in the global education sector, Morgan Stanley Research analysts predict that the smart application of GenAI could spark $200 billion in extra value by 2025. Potential use cases involve a chatbot tool to review and grade essays or exams or a virtual assistant to streamline class scheduling, freeing up more time for teachers to interact with their students.

US course provider Udacity has gone one step further, using OpenAI’s GPT-4 to create a virtual, on-demand AI mentor. This online chatbot provides learning tailored to the needs of each individual student when they need it the most – helping to summarise concepts or provide definitions, for instance. It can handle thousands of personalised interactions at once in a range of different languages.

Udacity is keen to emphasise that its Gen AI mentor is offered alongside real-life mentors. The platform also advises students to review the chatbot’s output in case of errors. This highlights the importance of regular monitoring in automation. It’s a shortcut for productivity and helps foster a culture of innovation – but humans must also be present to ensure relevant and valuable outcomes.

2. Accelerate real-time responsiveness

This acceleration phase is about using GenAI to reduce the time and resources needed where speed to market is critical. Retail is one sector embracing GenAI’s ability to accelerate performance, using it to create new product designs, generate content and make personalised product recommendations.

For instance, Shopify Magic, is a collection of free AI-enabled features integrated across Shopify’s workflows to make it easier for would-be entrepreneurs to launch, manage, and grow a business.

Meanwhile, French supermarket Carrefour has AI-powered chatbot, Hopla, that caters to its target audience of busy individuals in their 30s and 40s. Juggling family and work responsibilities, this demographic has limited time to spend shopping, so assistant “Hopla” produces menus and corresponding shopping lists that are scoped to changing individual budgets and dietary preferences.

Robust data analysis and modelling capabilities are central to this step to ensure accuracy, however. A culture of agility is also essential so businesses can quickly seize the opportunities brought about by AI-powered accelerations.

3. Augment for ultimate decision power

In the augmentation part of the framework, businesses use GenAI-driven insights and predictions to enhance human talent in areas such as forecasting and decision-making. Healthcare is a sector that’s well suited for GenAI-enabled augmentation.

The World Economic Forum suggests that a GenAI virtual assistant could provide a viable “second opinion” in healthcare, instantly evaluating records for missed information or alternate diagnoses – thereby allowing professionals to arrive at the right treatments sooner.

This same potential to mitigate human error or bias can also be powerfully applied in a manufacturing context. For example, the Bosch Research team is using GenAI to synthetically map potential product defaults for the company’s Hildesheim manufacturing plant, before they occur.

In a setting where even small errors can lead to costly batch recalls, the AI-based inspection model generates artificial images of all defect types, including new product lines. This allows models for automated optical inspections to be trained at a much earlier stage. Bosch predicts these improvements will bring about productivity increases in the six-figure euro range.

It’s important that GenAI augmentation isn’t seen as a quick fix though – or a low-cost replacement for human talent. The big win for businesses of all sizes will be harnessing the power of GenAI to maximise the workforce’s potential.

Adopting a 3A-style blueprint can help businesses focus their investment and resources, enabling them to determine how GenAI will drive strategic gains. The result is a quicker, more tangible route into AI adoption, dodging the need for eye-watering budgets or seemingly impossible goals.

Most of all, quick-win changes with GenAI rely on businesses viewing it as a super-powerful junior assistant. It can complement human abilities with its scale of training and data-crunching might, but it cannot replace our intellect. As such, it works best as a driver of small, steady productivity benefits rather than a cure-all for sweeping upheaval.

The post Forget the hype – this framework is key to quick GenAI wins appeared first on TechInformed.

In the latest update of its quarterly IT spending report, the US consultancy said that as GenAI investment has increased, add-ons or tokens are taking return on investment (ROI) to a negative.

The technology is also proving expensive elsewhere, as data centre systems spending is expected to increase by almost 25% in 2024 because of a rise in GenAI planning, up from the previous quarter’s forecast of 10%. By comparison data centre spending in 2023 was just 4%.

“The compute power needs of GenAI are being felt across the data centre [sector], and spending in that segment reflects this ravenous demand,” said John-David Lovelock, VP analyst at Gartner.

“The significant increase in data centre spending is no surprise, given GenAI’s rapid growth and storage demands,” said Chris Harris, VP field engineering at cloud database provider Couchbase.

“But to unlock GenAI’s full potential, organisations require a data management strategy coupled with modern infrastructure.”

“Organisations must ensure they can control data storage, access, and usage, enable real-time data sharing, and maintain a consolidated database infrastructure to prevent multiple versions of data,” Harris advised.

“Doing so will significantly reduce the risk of project failures, cutbacks, or delays – and allow companies to confidently explore new GenAI use cases,” he added.

Elsewhere, Gartner expects less investment. For the IT services sector, the influential firm trimmed its prediction for 2024 spending from 9.7% in Q1 to 7.1% in this quarter – due to a lower-than-expected spending on consulting and business process services.

The consultancy blames this on CIO “change fatigue,” but anticipates “a larger rush towards the end of the year to make up for the slow start,” according to Lovelock.

The post Gartner: GenAI is costing software firms, not turning a profit appeared first on TechInformed.

Now the UK has entered the election campaign period there was little promise of any major policy announcements on the first day of the tech event’s 11^th anniversary, which this year moves to a new venue – Olympia, on the edge of London’s Kensington.

With most of the conference stages swathed around stands and booths, the event is starting to resemble the outline found at most other tech shows, with stands taken by IBM, Unilever as well as hordes of nations promoting start-ups and investment opportunities.

London didn’t need a stand, however, as it had Khan who used his opener to promote the city’s self-appointed status as a tech superhub.

“Our city is one of the largest and most influential tech centres on the planet,” he enthused. “We boast more than 100 unicorns; we are home to more software developers than any other European city.

“The big names from Google to Microsoft are expanding their operations here with investments that are making London a global hub for AI and innovation. “

Khan added that London’s unashamedly “pro-business pro-tech” stance, would inform the capital’s new growth plans, which he said would have “AI and innovation” at their core and would aims to create 150,000 new jobs in London over the next four years.

Self driving unicorn

This year’s TechNation report, UK Tech In the Age of AI – released on the first day of the show – revealed that the city now has 171 tech unicorns (start-ups worth over £1bn) which were all created within the last three years.

Another of the report’s top lines was the fact that the UK is now the number one destination in Europe for AI investment, with the UK AI sector reaching a combined market valuation of $92bn in the first quarter of 2024.

Encouragingly, more scale ups are also now choosing to remain in the country to seek further investment – including Wayve, a self driving, AI powered start up founded in 2017 by New Zealand-born Cambridge graduate Alex Kendall.

The entrepreneur followed Khan onto the stage, to talk about opportunities in the next big thing: embodied AI. His tech firm recently raised $1bn in funding from Japan’s Softbank alongside California chipmaker Nvidia and Microsoft to invest in embodied AI for automated driving in the UK.

Kendall explained that embodied AI would enable automated vehicles to learn from and interact with a real-world environment, including the ability to learn from situations that do not follow strict patterns or rules, such as unexpected actions by drivers or pedestrians.

The entrepreneur added that the UK’s newly approved Autonomous Vehicles Act  – which will make it legal to run autonomous vehicles on British roads as soon as 2026 – meant that the tech firm would not be caught up in the broader sweeping AI legislation coming out of the UK and EU, because it’s now governed by these more domain-specific rules.

While the UK Government has claimed victory over the Wayve investment (the biggest yet for a UK-founded AI-start up) and has been supportive legislation wise –Kendall added that there was still more work to be done in terms of nurturing and supporting deep tech companies.

“In terms of scale up capital in the UK there is still an incompressible cycle time. With deep tech in particular – the depth of expertise and the risk taking is just not there. It will come – and can be built on early success stories – but it is not there yet.

The founder added that continued investment in the scale up ecosystem was needed – and not just for fintech and SaaS start-ups – but in more deep tech companies.

“Government policy can influence things with tax and regulatory structures – but it’s about giving the ecosystem time to grow,” he added.

Natwest’s Cora + launches

IBM’s UK CEO Nicola Hobson introduced two of its enterprise partners onto the stage, to demonstrate how firms have been “seizing the AI opportunity.”

First up was Wendy Redshaw, chief digital information officer at NatWest Retail Bank, who unveiled the new Gen-AI infused version of their customer service digital assistant, Cora+ which had launched that morning.

The previous version of Cora, introduced in 2017, has already helped the bank’s customers with over 10m online banking queries in 2023 (compared to 5m in 2019).

Cora + incorporates both generative AI – using multiple foundational models from IBM, Meta and Open AI – as well as traditional AI – so that customers can have a more natural conversational engagement with the bank.

Redshaw explained: “For example, previously when a customer asked for a mortgage or a lending product, a link would be provided to a general page and the customer would scroll through and navigate different options. The customer would have to do some of the work.

“Cora+ will be able to understand the context and nuances of each query the customer makes and can provide accurate and personalised responses,” she added.

Getting ahead in advertising

Media agency WPP’s chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius was next up, predicting that “AI and Gen AI would transform every part of the knowledge work that we do today” from strategy and consulting to law to marketing and ad production.

According to Pretorius, achieving the benefits of AI starts with leadership: “Never before in my career have CEOs been so focussed on one topic across all industries. It requires all our business leaders to have vision of how AI can be acquired and to drive that through the organisation and industry,” he said.

The CTO added that an AI strategy also required a focus on partnership with tech firms like IBM, “to be able to integrate with multiple third-party technologies and data.”

Another key factor was investment, Pretorius added, as he revealed WPP now invests 2% of its net sales revenue in AI investment.

Embracing AI also involved transforming the workforce “at every level,” he added: “The UK has incredible talent pools, but you must transform the people you have as well as bringing in new skills. We’ve sent a large cohort of people to do AI post graduate diplomas and invest in our people.”

WPP’s creative Technology Apprenticeship, he said, was focussed on hiring young people from diverse backgrounds that were “disproportionately female” so that they could develop AI skills in a body of staff that was“ more representative of the word we live in.”

According to Pretorius, WPP has amassed at least 50 Gen AI applications across its advertising business – from helping to generate concepts, creating storyboarding videos with Text-to-Video as well as creating content for products that don’t exist yet, to stimulate early-stage demand.

The post London Tech Week 2024: Wayve, NatWest and WPP “seize the AI opportunity” appeared first on TechInformed.