Google Cloud Director – Winnipeg Free Press

Google’s chief technology officer for cloud solutions says that over the next year or two, many organizations will go from experimenting with AI to actually using it.

Will Grannis says that as companies move beyond trial mode, more and more of them will use AI-powered platforms and tools in areas ranging from financial services to healthcare.

He believes that this change will be the result of the increasing awareness of this technology in the world and the constant drive to increase productivity and efficiency, especially in the labor sector.

“Public sector, private sector, commercial sector — it doesn’t matter because we all want to run our businesses more efficiently,” Grannis said in an interview during a recent trip to Toronto for the Collision technology conference.

“Today, it turns out that many activities performed manually do not bring much value.”

Canada’s productivity rate, or the amount of output the country produces for each hour worked, has fallen in recent years to a level 30 per cent lower than in the United States, according to a Royal Bank of Canada report released June 20.

The Bank of Canada’s senior deputy governor, Carolyn Rogers, went so far as to call the trend an emergency in a speech in March.

Data cited by RBC argues that AI could reverse this trend, potentially allowing every worker in the country to save between 100 and 125 hours a year and increase productivity by eight per cent by 2030.

Grannis said customer service and software development are areas that are particularly amenable to AI.

He has heard of Canadian support centres that receive up to 70,000 calls a day and are mostly handled by humans.

The introduction of AI into these centers means agents answering calls can be prompted for details about a customer’s history or the services they’re using. They can also get help translating between languages.

In many software companies, engineers create applications and other products.

“The first thing most software engineers do is try to find something that looks like (what their company needs), and then copy and paste it, and then modify it,” Grannis said.

With AI, they could ask the model to sketch out code, describing exactly what they wanted to accomplish. The AI ​​would be able to perform the task using any programming language the programmer wanted, and engineers could ask another form of technology to even criticize the work of the first. A third could fix any problems it discovered.

“This type of workflow management leverages artificial intelligence and can benefit from it,” Grannis said.

“Now software engineers can use their creativity, they can use their expertise, and they can produce software development 10, 100 times faster.”

A June report from Microsoft found that programmers using generative AI tools were able to complete tasks in 56% less time than those not using the technology, and those using the technology for writing were able to reduce the time they spent working by 37%.

However, many fear that the increasing reliance on artificial intelligence in such tasks could contribute to rising unemployment.

A 2020 Statistics Canada study found that 10.6 per cent of Canadian workers were at high risk of having their jobs transformed by automation, while another 29.1 per cent were at moderate risk. This transformation can include anything from losing a job to a complete overhaul of responsibilities.

Grannis said that to cope with such changes and retraining to meet the needs of the changing labor market, employees will need to become familiar with AI as soon as possible.

“It can’t just be about using an app or just taking an online course,” he said.

“It takes a little curiosity.”

Younger people already have that curiosity, he added. They use technology to write drafts or code and find software vulnerabilities, which they then have to deal with during cybersecurity internships.

“So in many ways it makes other groups and demographics feel more comfortable,” Grannis said.

For people to feel comfortable, they must also be helped to understand the limitations of technology.

There are many things that AI can’t do, and even the things it can do aren’t always perfect.

Artificial intelligence is known to have a tendency to hallucinate – to provide false or misleading information based on data it believes to be true, when in fact it is not.

For example, Google’s chatbot Bard claimed last year that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope had taken the first images of a planet outside our solar system. The images were actually taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004.

When asked whether AI will ever get rid of all its problems and achieve a perfect state, Grannis replied, “Well, AI is made by humans.”

“Humans are not flawless,” he said. “So I assume there will always be work to do to improve AI.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 2, 2024.