The biggest trend in the tech world this year has been Artificial Intelligence (AI). The ability to make machines a lot more intelligent or think like humans is as interesting as it is scary.
On the one hand, AI is enabling companies to understand and reach their companies better and is being applied to a variety of fields. One of the latest advances is in the medical field, where scientists in the Netherlands have been trying out using AI to better understand tumours and determine how much action can be taken on them.
On the other hand, there are fears that AI might develop to the point where it defies the human beings who have created and fed it with the data it needs to work.
In mid-September, an unusual closed-door meeting of the heads of the biggest tech companies developing AI unanimously endorsed the idea of regulation by the United States government.
“It’s a good thing for the world and a good thing for society,” says Wendy Gonzalez, the Chief Executive Officer at Sama, a Nairobi-based company that helps structure transform the data that powers AI for their customers.
Ms Gonzalez equates the push for regulation with similar work in data protection, which started with the development of General Data Protection Regulation in Europe that has formed the foundation of a lot of the work elsewhere in the world.
“As we are building the models, there are two components that we feel really strongly about. Number one is we should have regulation for sensitive AI applications. Number two is how do you make sure that the model is working the way you expect it to,” she says.
AI has been used at Safaricom over the last five years to develop products, analyse data and to understand its customers better with the aim being to serve them better.
Kamau Maina, the Big Data and Customer Value Management Lead at Safaricom, says the use of AI in Kenya is still at a very rudimentary level.
“The benefit of having forerunners is that they have made all the mistakes, or at least most of the mistakes, and they have taken long to get to where they are,” he says.
Open AI, the company behind Chat GPT, was established in 2015, and has made its models free to use for a wide range of applications, such as natural language processing, content generation, and chatbots.
For Kamau, this means that his team doesn’t need to spend five years building AI.
“I just need to know how they did it. And I should cut my production time, much shorter. But the benefit is, is that I don’t have to spend too much time doing the rudimentary work to do to build an AI requires a lot of data,” he says.
Kamau and Wendy spoke to the Safaricom Newsroom podcast. Listen below.
