New AI Models and Tools, Aerial Fights and Sustainability – Techstrong AI Podcast EP13

Hello and welcome to this week's edition of the Tech AI Podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me again today is Mike Ard. How are you?

I'm doing great. Happy to be here. As always, Same.

We have some very interesting news in the world of ai and we're gonna start off with an article you wrote about Salesforce and they're adding some different AI capabilities into their Slack. So can you talk a little bit about that? They've been touting this Slack AI platform for some time now, but they added some additional capabilities including, uh, the ability to summarize not just the conversation, but create yourself a little news digest out of it that'll pop into your system every morning to tell you what conversations are going on and what's been updated.

And you know, that's a nice nifty little feature, but they were also demonstrating some interesting things where it's integrated with their sales cloud platform and you can now pull conversations and threads from not just Slack, but also the Salesforce platform, also Gmail and also LinkedIn. And your sales team can just immediately aggregate all that to generate a sales proposal based on what's going on in those threads. And I know from personal experience, not everybody is on Slack, right?

So most salespeople and most other folks who deal with a lot of external constituencies, shall we say, aren't any email a lot. And a lot of times those conversations are happening on social media platforms as well. And being able to pull all that together is, is gonna be a huge time saver.

I mean, the folks at Salesforce was saying they internally, they're saying organizations are gaining a full day of additional selling simply because their salespeople aren't doing all this scut work. So I found that to be kind of compelling and interesting and, and, and a great use case. On the other side of that equation though, Salesforce has a survey where basically it said that a lot of the, uh, professionals that they interviewed are not using these AI tools yet.

And a lot of it has to do with, well, they're not necessarily sure they trust the data sources. So sometimes these things are not all that accurate, but I think some of it just comes down and they haven't built in into their workflows yet. They haven't experimented enough with the, the tools and maybe they need some actual training.

'cause I think what we're doing here is just throwing these tools at people and say, have at it. Yes. And I think there might be some overwhelm there.

There's so many tools and when you're trying to use this big sprawl of tools, it can get a little overwhelming. I for one, love Slack. And of course we use Slack a lot here at Techstrong.

And I like these additional capabilities to collaborate across the different platforms. I find that that's gonna solve a lot of issues that some team members are having to be able to have that all together. And um, and I do think training though would be useful for those who don't feel as comfortable.

Yeah, full disclosure, it is well known that I am not the biggest fan of the Slack platform and it has nothing to do with the company or the software. It has everything to do with the way people use it, which is there's just too many conversations being started for no apparent purpose and then they never get cleaned up and it's just too hard to navigate and figure out what's going on. So I'm hoping this AI tool will solve that problem for me.

Absolutely, Mike. So next we're gonna move on to Microsoft has some news. Uh, it has put out an AI model that creates lifelike talking faces.

It'll be interesting to see how this is used in the future in business, but what are your thoughts on it? Have you seen this? Yeah, I think this is gonna freak everybody out.

This is a research project, so it's not exactly commercially available yet, but basically they are capable of taking an image of you and then they go find your voice recording somewhere and then they stitch that all together so that they have something that looks like you that is talking and um, maybe it's not perfectly aligned with your lips just yet, but it's getting pretty close and it's gonna get a lot smarter. This is gonna scare people because now anybody's image could be used for anything. We already have all kinds of problems with people taking, uh, various, uh, shall we say, heads and images and mixing and matching them in ways that are, shall we say, uh, pornographic.

And this is just gonna be, uh, the next level. And uh, I'm pretty sure that this may drive the, uh, Congress and everybody else to act on some pretty severe regulations 'cause it's something that just shows you what the extent of the capability really is in a way that, you know, a lot of people are gonna find, shall we say, troubling. Absolutely.

I mean, we're already seeing a lot of troubling deep fakes across the internet and we certainly do need some regulations to get on top of this now before it does get worse. So, um, that'll just be interesting to see how they go about using this research and, and how it's regulated. I I'll promise one thing though will always be us actually doing this podcast here on this video, rather than using some sort of AI platform.

That's the promises. Yes, yes, indeed. Good to put that out there.

So I know a lot of us love Top Gun and so I have some cool AI use cases coming up next, uh, recently the US Air Force and, uh, in combination with DARPA did a test. Uh, they did a test run between an AI algorithm and an actual pilot and they duped it out. Uh, the outcome was pretty interesting.

Can you share with us, I think the AI either won or came pretty close. I mean, it showed that it was pretty accurate. And the other thing we keep coming back to with these AI engines is they keep getting smarter and smarter.

So I I'm sure that, you know, there's a lot of pilots out there that are probably not in love with this idea, but I'm not in love with putting pilots in harm's way in combat either. So maybe we can just have the machines fight it out and let us know how it all turns out later. Yes.

I, I think this is a, a really interesting use case. Uh, overall, I think we're seeing a lot of, uh, AI being integrated into military operations, which I think is wonderful because like you said, um, not being in harm's way quite so much and putting more of those dangerous jobs, uh, in the hands of AI would certainly be a win for all. So, uh, that wa that was a pretty fun article that you can read on Techstar AI to learn all about that.

I'm not quite clear how all this turns out though, so let me get this straight. We spend a couple of billion dollars building out an AI plane and the bad guys or the adversaries, depending on your point of view, um, will similarly do the same thing and then our two planes will shoot each other down and then what we're gonna look at each other and go, well that was great, but you know, the outcome is kind of didn't change anything. Well this is one of those, uh, problems.

It makes me think back to, what is that movie war games, I think where the AI's in charge and then the whole thing just blows up, you know? So, uh, you know, uh, yeah. So you're gonna fight AI with AI and how, I don't know, there's always a, a question there.

Just May, it just may show us how silly war really is. So there you go. Yes.

I mean ultimately would love for there to just be no war. Yes. World peace.

Yeah. Um, so moving on to the world of healthcare. We have Cedar-Sinai, um, hospital is using AI to um, improve their virtual platform to connect with, um, children and um, other language speakers.

And um, and we're seeing AI used a lot more in this capacity in healthcare, um, especially virtual. So what are you hearing? I thought this was great.

In fact, we just had one of our colleagues, uh, had to take a friend to the hospital and in, in a foreign country and she had to go with her just because she had to translate. I think, you know, we won't have to drag people along that translate for folks and we can probably get a lot more done and a lot more, shall we say, accurately for folks who don't speak a given language. Now, I know this is kind of a hot button issue for some folks, but the fact of the matter is not everybody's gonna speak the same language and we're all moving closer together.

So we are gonna encounter folks that do not speak the exact same language or, and may not speak it nearly as well as you do. And, uh, no sense of getting upset about it. Let's just use AI to kind of get to the heart of the issue.

And especially in healthcare where, you know, somebody is sick, we need to tend to them. Let's not worry about who said what and what language. Let's just get to the resolution.

Absolutely. And I, I see I've seen a lot of people utilizing apps on their phone these days when they go somewhere and, and um, they don't understand the language. They pull out that app and they speak back and forth using that app.

Yeah, I'm not even sure we all need to learn additional languages going forward. At some point we'll just have a universal translator kinda like they have on Star Trek, right? Yeah, I mean it certainly breaks down barriers and makes it easy, easier to communicate, which is great.

Uh, and again, maybe that contributes to world pace eventually. Yeah, and, and I'll be honest, you know, English might be my first language, but there are places where I go where people speak English and I still need a translation 'cause I can't understand the dialect. Okay.

So next, another article that you recently wrote about, um, the insurance industry and cowbell using generative AI for underwriting purposes. Can you explain, I think that this application's gonna be pervasive all through the insurance industry soon because there are just mountains of documents that describe what I may or may not be liable for and nobody understands them whatsoever. So now we can use gen AI to summarize a what's in those documents and kind of figure that out.

Two is, as we get better with the AI engines, the reasoning capability is gonna improve and now we can orchestrate the dependencies between multiple policies that might exist. We can also create the paperwork faster. I don't think anybody who does this for a living enjoys it.

So I, and I don't think the people buying insurance enjoy sorting through all that stuff. I mean, sometimes I feel like you need a corporate lawyer just to figure out what the insurance policy is saying. I think all that's gonna get a lot simpler and uh, maybe we need to have these documents be as long as they are or maybe AI is gonna teach us to just say things faster and shorter.

Yeah, well, um, and, and I'm seeing AI across so many industries, the insurance industry, the financial industry, um, it's certainly, uh, making more processes more efficient and easier and simplifying them. Yeah, I mean when you think about it, right? So many industries create their own jargon and their own, uh, nomenclature and it's really set up as many ways to be a, a barrier to entry, right?

It's a, it's an effort to kind of say, uh, we are separate and therefore more expensive and we should, uh, cost more because we have specialized skills. But if you take a giant step back from it, this too kind of feels a little silly. I mean, how come I gotta like learn a whole different language to talk to an accountant to explain to to me whether or not, you know, did we make money this month or did we not make money this month?

It should be Kelly. It should be a lot simpler than it is. Yes.

And, and uh, we know and we've talked about the customers and the users are a lot more particular and they're expecting a lot better experiences across the board. So, um, AI is one solution to that. You could argue this is another form of language translation.

I don't really understand what half of these people are saying in their particular vertical industries. So now AI is gonna translate. So that brings us to last on our list, which is AI as it pertains to environmental sustainability.

And we've posted several articles recently in this regard about environmental footprints and energy reduction. It's a big concern of business leaders. What are you hearing out there?

I think it's a huge concern for folks. I mean, and I'm not sure we understand all the issues that go with this. I was listening to somebody else's podcast recently and they noted that if we theoretically saw a two to three degree increase in temperatures at the equator, we would probably be close to the point now where we would not be able to grow food there.

If I do not grow food there, people are going to move from there to somewhere else where they can grow, feed food, so that may be north or south. So now we're gonna have, you know, mass migrations happening over climate issues and that will all create all kinds of political unrest and it just all kinda starts to cascade downwards from there. So I think we need to look at AI and say how can we run our world a little more efficiently to not have those kinds of outcomes?

I mean, it may be too late in that regard, but at the very least we can start applying that AI to build, uh, climate tech, which will help us maybe take carbon outta the atmosphere. I mean, on the current rate we're on, you know, our children for certainly are gonna have major issues to deal with and we're probably gonna experience them as well. The challenge right now as I see it is we gotta engineer our way out of it 'cause we're not gonna conserve our way out of it.

Most definitely. And it's interesting the food scenario because I know we have also posted a few articles about how AI technology is being used for farming purposes and, um, irrigation and uh, checking on crops and things like that. So there's a lot of solutions that we can look at, um, with AI in a lot of different areas.

But certainly it is a, a big topic way To, you know, we need to also solve the shipping problem with AI as well, because if I can't grow food where the people are, I gotta get the food from where it's growing to where they are. And simple truth of the matter is, theoretically nobody in this planet should be going hungry. It's just that we can't get the food from where it's growing to the places where it's needed.

And that's where the chaos ensues. Yes. And this is where there's some interesting news out there about drone technology harnessed with ai.

It's gonna, you know, help with those last mile deliveries and deliveries and areas where it's, you know, trucks can't get to them and things like that too. So, so many, so many possibilities when it comes to ai. Yeah.

And all this is happening faster than you think. I mean, we started out talking about simple stuff like using AI just to create a sales proposal, but it's gonna have a profound impact up and down the line. And so as they say, buckle in because the world's about to change.

Most definitely. And if you wanna get more details on any of these topics that we cover each week, we bring these to you in short form. You can read the full articles on techstrong ai.

So make sure to go there and find the things that interest you and read more about them. Until next week, have a great day and have a great day, Mike. ai, you will not be disciplined.