By Jasmin Bedir, CEO at Innocean
It’s been a big week, with lots of conferences on the topic of AI. If you have followed my musings here, you’ll know that I don’t think conferences are necessarily where we should get all of our wisdom from, but I went to one regardless and in the spirit of sharing, here is where I got to.
The Australian Financial Review AI summit was pretty interesting and confirmed for me what I already believed to be true. There is a massive divide between big businesses and those of us who aren’t building data centres, semiconductors, or running banks.
Solutions to the dilemma of how to navigate the next decade in business in particular feel distant and opaque at best and something one must look at, but one is not exactly sure how and when.
Maybe it’s my own generalised anxiety about the state of the world that makes me feel restless and actually want to get on the tools. Or maybe it’s the possibility of losing one’s job within the next 48 months, which was a major headline at last week’s AFR AI summit.
As the cynical person that I am, I read it as a pretty grim message: Adapt or die. Or in nicer words, AI won’t replace you but you will be replaced by someone who knows how to utilise AI.
The capex and opex investments of large enterprises are in double-digit billions of dollars to be ready for the 4th industrial revolution, so how does one in a small to medium business not die?
If your AI literacy level is limited to a little bit of chat GPT-ing, and some fun images on Midjourney, you have reasons to worry.
But it’s not all bleak. Stela Solar, Co-chair of The Commonwealth AI Consortium, spoke about the large upside for SMEs, where business challenges can certainly be turned into growth opportunities.
But yes, our industry will look entirely different, and what that means not even Chat GPT can answer. But this I know: Adaptation is a choice for survival.
See Also: Jasmin Bedir: Is anybody listening?
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Top Image: Jasmin Bedir