00:00Artificial intelligence has been elevated from a tool for efficiency to a central pillar of China's national development strategy during
00:08this year's two sessions.
00:09As the race for AI dominance between world powers hots up, Jeff Moody's been speaking to Piers Linney, who advises
00:16companies on AI implementation.
00:19Inevitably, people are going to frame this arms race between the big players, okay, and the US and China are
00:25the big players in terms of infrastructure, the investment going in and the models.
00:29But people forget, this is early days, and I always liken it to Internet 1.0, where Cisco was the
00:37most exciting and the biggest company in the world.
00:39And where the value was really created was much further up the food chain, so in terms of e-commerce,
00:45software as a service, and now you're seeing, especially in terms of China as well, robotics.
00:49So I think it's important now, but that's not where the value is going to be created long term.
00:54What about other countries? Does it leave them far behind?
00:57Countries like the UK, what do you think they should be doing?
01:00Everybody's got to be thinking about how do you adopt and implement and use this technology to get ahead, to
01:05change the way you do things?
01:07Because those that get ahead in an exponential world, going back to your arms race point, they're going to stay
01:12ahead.
01:13Of course, this is changing the world geopolitically, isn't it?
01:16We've now got rare earth, minerals, data centers, this vast need for energy becoming more and more important.
01:23There's going to be a time where, hopefully, that the AI helps us to solve some of these issues, energy,
01:27for example, and maybe fusion in the not too distant future and healthcare related issues.
01:32But between now and then, there is going to be this kind of scramble for resources and for all the
01:37inputs that are required to turn literally sand into intelligence.
01:42And that's what you're seeing the battle over in terms of, you know, even perhaps Greenland and the rare earths.
01:48You help companies in their implementation.
01:52What would you say to a company that says, look, we can see the benefits here, but we're really worried
01:57about what this means for our staff and for our business models going forward?
02:01You've got to start.
02:02You can't sit on the sidelines looking at this anymore.
02:06If you are a senior leader, you sit on a board, you're having a serious conversation about implementation, not pilot,
02:12implementation this year, you're not doing your job.
02:15And the point here is to use a technology where it's robust, it works, it can add value, and then
02:21find a place, a use case, where actually when you're doing that, it's delivering a return on the investment.
02:26Otherwise, why bother?
02:27And what you're going to see is that it creates value and that you then start to take all your
02:32stakeholders on that journey.
02:33And even employees we see that are hesitant about artificial intelligence, when they see it augmenting them, automating the mundane,
02:41preventing them from doing repetitive tasks,
02:43because you see the lights go on and they want to implement more of it.
02:47That's the key.
02:47But you've got to get it beyond pilots and go into production.
02:52When it comes to regulation, what more do you think needs to be done?
02:55Because, I mean, you only have to look at social media now to see that you can no longer trust
02:59your eyes.
03:00I mean, a few years ago, if you saw a picture, you knew that it was true.
03:05Now it's much harder to know what to believe and who to believe.
03:10I mean, you're seeing a lot now with, you know, what's going on in the world at the moment.
03:13A lot of sort of fake news and AI-generated images and videos.
03:17And going back to the arms race analogy, there's an arms race in cyber.
03:21There's an arms race in content verification.
03:23And you're going to see more and more proliferation of content that anyone can create on the fly that is,
03:29you know, Hollywood quality.
03:30So you've got to understand what is real.
03:34This may be where this is where blockchain really finds its place in the world in terms of being able
03:39to identify what's real and what isn't and provide watermarks that are indelible.
03:43And that's where the world's going.
03:45So it's important that we all understand and make sure that the data we're using, the data accessing to make
03:51decisions is real.
03:53Because cyber, I think, and I don't think it's the AI models we need to worry about.
03:58It's bad actors using them.
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