Preparing Your Company for the AI Revolution: Insights from VivaTech

This article is part of the Viva OpenAI 2024 Sessions. In our previous article, we covered the exciting session at VivaTech in Paris on May 22nd, where Romain Huet, a French entrepreneur and engineer, took the stage to discuss the latest advancements in AI. Romain, who leads Developer Experience at OpenAI, was thrilled to return to the city where his career began, witnessing the evolution of the French AI ecosystem over the past 15 years.

Recap of the Last Article

Romain’s presentation focused on enhancing the developer experience and seamlessly integrating AI into applications. He discussed three pivotal topics: the trajectory of AI development, the introduction of GPT-40, and OpenAI’s future directions. Romain highlighted OpenAI’s mission to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity, the rapid adoption of OpenAI’s platforms, and the expansion of AI applications beyond ChatGPT.

He showcased GPT-4’s transformative capabilities, including real-time vision and coding assistance, efficiency improvements, and interactive features like function calling and knowledge retrieval. Romain emphasized the critical role of startups in driving AI innovation and the importance of responsible AI development to ensure inclusivity and mitigate societal risks.

Today, we delve into the next exciting session, “Preparing Your Company for the AI Revolution,” where industry leaders discuss concrete use cases and best practices for AI adoption.

Preparing Your Company for the AI Revolution

Building on the insights from Romain Huet’s presentation, the “Preparing Your Company for the AI Revolution” session brought together industry leaders to discuss concrete use cases and best practices for AI adoption. The panel included Professor Gina Neff, Executive Director of the Minderoo Center at the University of Cambridge; Xavier Vazquez, Chief Technology Officer of IBM Technology and R&D France; Corinne de Bilbao, Chief Executive Officer and President of Microsoft France; and Beatrice Sansayz, Global Consulting Data and AI Leader at EY.

EY’s Strategic Investment in AI

Beatrice Sansayz started the discussion by highlighting EY’s strategic imperative in AI. “For us, AI is a strategic imperative,” she stated. EY has made a significant investment of $1.4 billion over the past three years, culminating in the launch of EY.AI. This unifying platform integrates a comprehensive technology stack, an extensive ecosystem, and a focus on talent development. EY’s approach is threefold: transforming clients, disrupting themselves internally, and advising regulators globally. With 400,000 professionals re-skilled through their AI academy, EY is driving some of the most significant transformation programs for corporations aiming to build their AI versions.

Microsoft’s AI Adoption Journey

Corinne de Bilbao looked inside at Microsoft’s early and aggressive adoption of AI since 2010. Emphasizing infrastructure, ecosystem, and adoption, she noted that the past six months have seen a doubling in employee generative AI adoption. “Employees want gen AI, and leaders are trying to figure out how to do it,” she remarked. Microsoft’s strategy involves a top-down and bottom-up approach to training, ensuring that AI is used daily across all functions—sales, marketing, support, and development. The key to success, she highlighted, is making AI use an everyday habit and fostering a community of users within the organization.

IBM’s Distributed AI Landscape

Xavier Vazquez shared IBM’s perspective on fostering a distributed AI landscape, reflecting diverse languages, cultures, and values. IBM promotes open science and open source to prevent centralization and ensure inclusivity. Their strategy includes developing platforms that offer freedom and allow integration of proprietary, open-source, and custom models. IBM collaborates with Meta, LLama Three, and Mistral AI, supporting deployment across environments like public and private clouds. Vazquez also mentioned IBM’s development of small, specialized models like Granite, focusing on quality data and eliminating biases.

Responsible AI and Capacity Building

Professor Gina Neff highlighted the importance of responsible AI and capacity building. The Minderoo Center at the University of Cambridge focuses on helping society harness technological changes to benefit people, communities, and the planet. A £30 million investment in Responsible AI UK brings together research and industry to address organizational and cultural challenges posed by AI. Gina stressed the urgency of making informed decisions to ensure AI benefits are broadly shared without exacerbating existing inequalities.

Opportunities for Smaller Companies

The panel also discussed the opportunities AI presents for smaller companies. Beatrice Sansayz argued that AI could democratize access to advanced technology, lowering costs and enabling smaller players to compete. “The cost of technology, which is a huge barrier to entry, is coming down,” she noted. Corinne de Bilbao added that smaller companies could leverage AI’s natural language capabilities without needing advanced technical expertise, making it easier to adopt and benefit from AI.

Historical Perspectives and Future Outlook

Drawing parallels to historical, technological shifts like printing and robotization, Xavier Vazquez emphasized the importance of adopting AI to avoid being left behind economically. He noted that countries that embraced technological advancements ultimately saw significant productivity gains and new opportunities. Gina Neff reinforced this by highlighting the potential job displacement AI might cause, urging the need for inclusive strategies to ensure broad participation in the AI-driven future.

Transforming Business Processes

The panel concluded with a discussion on AI’s transformative nature. Unlike previous technologies, AI is objective rather than process-based, offering unprecedented speed and efficiency in achieving outcomes. Businesses are encouraged to rethink their processes and focus on optimizing outcomes with AI. The potential for general AI to further elevate productivity gains underscores the need for companies to stay agile and forward-thinking.

As the session wrapped up, the consensus was clear: AI holds immense potential to revolutionize industries, and big and small companies must prepare to ride this transformative wave. With strategic investments, inclusive approaches, and a commitment to responsible AI, businesses can harness AI’s power to drive innovation and growth.