Business Scotland talks to Cheryl Allebrand from global IT and business consulting services company CGI about the rapid advancement of AI, and how Scotland’s business community can utilise it as a force for good.
How has AI evolved over the past decade, and what are some major milestones in its development?
In the past 10 years AI has evolved from specialised automation to generalist collaborator. Put simply, more people can use it in new ways for more things.
What’s behind this shift? First, it is important to understand that AI has become a ‘catch all’ term. The technologies underlying it are not all the same, meaning new technology has come onto the scene while old ones haven’t gone away. However, both traditional and the new generative methods are both referred to as AI.
‘Algorithms’ that make decisions entered the public consciousness in the form of Machine Learning (ML), which can teach itself how to undertake and optimise specific tasks. In companies and other organisations during this time, ML evolved from finding patterns in historic data (descriptive analytics) to forecasting what is expected to happen (predictive analytics) to recommending what action should be taken (prescriptive analytics), moving the window of oversight from what has happened closer to action.
When OpenAI’s ChatGPT set public imagination on fire a couple of years ago, lay people began to learn about Generative AI, which, as the name suggests, can create things based on what it was taught. And since it was taught such a broad range of things, its application areas seemed limitless.
Generative AI enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. What was particularly exciting was the chat interface that allowed anyone to communicate in the way we would write to each other.
While we had all become comfortable asking questions of Google’s algorithm, Generative AI now provides a new path to move past general and vague answers to well-reasoned, specific replies.
Generative AI is the latest-stage evolution in the AI paradigm shift from automation to intelligence to creation. While generalists bring value to a lot of different situations, many work situations require a reasonable amount of specialisation. For that reason, a portion of this Generative AI work is shifting back to specialised “agents” that have one job but will increasingly work in specialised sectors.
This mode of use is where we expect to see the next wave of useful application to businesses.
How can Scotland leverage AI to enhance its key industries, such as oil and gas, tourism, or financial services?
AI can be used in a variety of ways, including the following:
Improved decision making: This is an important one for both industry and the private sector. It enables a more accurate, faster, and informed decision-making process.
This is in part because the Large Language Models (LLM) that power Generative AI are great with unstructured data, meaning that they can identify patterns that would otherwise require significant time and effort to uncover. Traditional AI generally relies on structured data.
There are other ways it helps Scottish businesses better manage risk, not least in the form of better predictive maintenance on machinery or Machine Vision supervision of remote locations for the Oil & Gas industry.
Manage mundane, valuable work: AI can help automate the boring so we can focus on the important. It can extract relevant information and manage extensive documentation to create compelling reports for funding applications or investment decisions.
For example, it can track and analyse flow and impact of spending for governments or financial institutions. Meanwhile Generative AI can improve data visualisation to enable insight recognition.
Improve information access: This helps ensure an informed citizenry or other groups and improves experience, including for employees. It can simplify and speed up interaction with information, providing customised responses and scalable, anytime access to multi-language support.
Provide proactive support: Beyond traditional personalisation, it can match information with needs, enabling proactive, targeted information sharing or gathering. Scottish local authorities can use Generative AI to tailor insights for communication with different groups, customising information to different length, style, languages, expertise levels, interests, and reading comprehension level.
Do more with less: Initially clients looked to Generative AI to deliver efficiencies. But we see things shifting. During in-depth interviews we conduct every year with business and IT executives that we serve across the industries and geographies globally, called CGI Voice of Our Clients Survey, this year we discovered that leaders are increasingly rebalancing recent focus on cost savings to include revenue growth.
Both goals are supported by AI because in addition to operating savings, AI can deliver improvements without driving up the cost to serve.
How can Scotland ensure that its AI initiatives promote economic growth while also fostering social inclusion
Beyond determining whether an AI project is feasible and worthwhile, it is critical to ensure that guardrails are in place to implement initiatives that are aligned with values of fairness and inclusiveness and are in all other ways ethical.
Furthermore, tenets underlying trustworthiness need to be ensured, so the models must be explainable, interpretable and transparent, and accountability for the models, their use and impact must be clearly defined.
Also, the solution itself must be robust, to reliably deliver replicable results. For example responsible AI principles are baked into all of CGI’s AI work and we have created multiple measures to keep our clients and everyone they impact safe, including an AI maturity assessment, AI strategy framework, responsible AI principles, risk and compliance management frameworks and tools.
Generative AI opens up new ways of working that can increase both efficiency and quality of work. It can act as a collaborator, from a starting point helping to bring together ideas and information to an editor refining work, and now with agents, it can take on defined portions of workload — that still need to be checked.
Scottish authorities and organisations should help ensure the workforce is prepared to work in these new ways, both understanding what AI does and doesn’t do well and how to get the most out of it.
Particularly now that the modality of ‘voice’ is being used to interact with these language-based systems, it’s important that Scottish voices are represented in the training, so that Scottish people are understood and benefit from the full variety of solutions.
Even when it comes to written text, Scotland’s cultural references and phraseology must be trained in. This is of growing importance as foundational models are primarily coming out of the northwest US. The government needs to encourage investment in AI that recognises Scottish people and culture.
I actually asked AI this same question, and it came up with a few further good suggestions:
Scotland can ensure that its AI initiatives promote economic growth and social inclusion by implementing policies that encourage diversity in AI development, providing training and education to underrepresented groups, and ensuring that AI applications are designed to benefit all segments of society. Additionally, ethical guidelines and regulations can help prevent biases and ensure fair use of AI technologies.
How will AI transformation influence global competitiveness and international relations?
Again, according to CGI’s latest Voice of Our Clients global survey, compared to those who are just now building and launching their strategies, digital leaders are more successful in expanding their data strategies, modernising legacy systems, driving business model agility, using managed services, and implementing advanced technologies, including AI.
In conjunction with the report, Dr Diane Gutiw, Vice President, Global AI Research Lead at CGI said: “AI presents a paradigm shift that we haven’t seen since the adoption of the Internet. As CGI’s global research demonstrates, industry executives are pursuing AI to evolve entire business models, inform critical decisions, increase efficiency, and accelerate both savings and growth.”
AI below raised further important reasons to invest in implementing AI solutions where appropriate.
AI transformation will significantly influence global competitiveness by enabling countries to innovate faster, improve productivity, and create new economic opportunities. Countries that lead in AI development will have a strategic advantage in various sectors, including defence, healthcare, and finance. AI will also impact international relations by shaping global standards, fostering collaborations, and potentially creating new geopolitical dynamics.
