“Lenovo Late Night I.T.” is a series of Youtube videos where its host Baratunde Thurston and his guests turn the latest topics upside down, shake ’em, and see what falls out. Today, they are posing some essential questions about AI-Powered Automation. How does it help businesses save time and money? How will it force humans to adapt? And which of the three laws of robotics will be broken first?
Here to lend her insight is Anima Anandkumar. Anima is a director of machine learning research at Nvidia, where she leads a group that develops next-generation AI algorithms. Anima is a passionate advocate for democratizing AI and has launched several open-source initiatives, efforts to increase reproducibility, and championed fairness in the industry.
The second guest is a digital anthropologist, Brian Solis. Brian is the global innovation evangelist at Salesforce, where he focuses on digital transformation, customer experience, and cognitive enterprise among other things. Let’s watch their conversation and here is the time code to make it easier:
1:15 How do you define AI, Intelligent Automation in the context of the workplace?
5:26 What are your observations and your own personal thoughts about, are we gonna be reducing jobs or are we actually gonna be generating more jobs?
7:12 What if people don’t wanna transform? What if the repetitive work is the thing they’ve trained on, what if it’s the thing they know and they’re actually really happy with?
10:35 What are you seeing in terms of companies who were getting the intelligent automation thing right? Do you think most are kind of behind the curve here, getting it wrong? What’s your assessment?
13:23 What are some of your least favorite implementations of intelligent automation or repetitive automation? Where you’re like that’s not a great place or it’s being done poorly.
16:19 Is anyone asking employees and workers what they want from automation? Maybe there are some really great use cases because there’s a pain in the butt part of the process that they have to deal with, that they would love some machine to help them with. But no one’s asked them, have you seen that go down?
21:40 Are there things that we should not apply automation to?
23:43 What advice do you have for a CIO or CTO? How do they step up the game?
