Nov. 28—Dayton-area companies are already using artificial intelligence to leverage their expertise and maximize the efficiency of their workplaces. Several local experts weighed in at Wright State University on Friday, looking at the advantages and pitfalls of using machine learning in the workplace — everything from managing the deluge of applicant resumes to why it might not yet be time to fully export employee training to the bots.
Right now, artificial intelligence adoption in business is a lot like Formula One car racing, said Clayton Rothwell, Principal Engineer at Shield AI. Experienced users can exercise both cars and AI to their full capabilities, going farther and faster than a driver with a suburban minivan. But inexperienced users with the same technology can crash and burn, quickly making very costly and very damaging mistakes.
"It's actually very difficult to anticipate beforehand, a priori, what (artificial intelligence) is going to be good at, and what it's going to be bad at," he said. "And so you have to be prepared for finding that boundary and providing some data or evidence to support your use case."
New technologies will not replace humans. However, they will change the nature of the work that humans have to do, working as a team with artificial intelligence to accomplish goals, said Julio Mateo, Senior Research Scientist at 361 Interactive.
"The goal here in my opinion isn't to take over human functions," Mateo said. "We're trying to enhance the capabilities, enhance performance and achieve things that we couldn't achieve alone."
Proctor and Gamble, the Cincinnati-based manufacturing giant, is already using AI for its employees called ChatPG. The model is trained on internal data, said Alex Gutman, Director of Data Science at P&G, and has already proven several use cases.
"We are an international organization," Gutman said. "We have people with English as their second language. They write a document, ChatGPT, or in our case ChatPG, which is our safe, firewalled version, can translate it and fix some of the nuances in the English language."
While P&G has immense resources to experiment and develop artificial intelligence, if companies are considering adopting internal AI models, there are several important questions to consider, Gutman said.
"The first thing is just to assess if AI is actually going to help you achieve your business goals," he said. "And I say that because so many people get enamored with this technology that they rush into using it, and then there's immediate backlash when it fails. Then they kind of close the walls to AI, and they miss out on all these other opportunities."