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Local businesses, entrepreneurs and students gathered at the Digital Greenhouse to hear from IBM at the latest AI Frenzy event, organised by Barclays Eagle Labs.
James Cruickshank, power systems technical architect at IBM, opened the session with a fun exercise demonstrating how AI could be used to track down a wanted criminal (in this case Professor Moriarty), before exploring the various uses that AI could be put to by businesses and other organisations.
He also traced the evolution of AI, through ‘artificial intelligence’ where machines mimic human behaviour, ‘machine learning’, where those machines learn with experience, to the current concept of ‘deep learning’ neural networks that have the capacity to learn by themselves by consuming data.
“Businesses can get a lot out of AI,” he said. “If your business has lots of data, and you think you could use it to make predictions about behaviours or trends, then those are two big green flags to say that you could use AI to improve your work.”
Attending events such as AI Frenzy would be a good starting point for anyone interested in using AI in their business, and there are also many resources available from IBM, according to Kathryn Waller, a manager in IBM’s Barclays client team.
“We have a worldwide developer community that supports each other, and many resources that can be accessed. While you still need some coding skills and knowledge many code patterns are available as plug-ins from our community site, so if your business is interested in chatbots, for example, there are options to experiment with rather than starting from scratch,” she said.
Barclays Eagle Lab eco-system manager Gez Overstall said: “We’re really grateful to James and Kathryn for coming over and sharing what IBM is doing in this space with local businesses. AI is past the hype stage now and we want to make sure that businesses in Guernsey are able to use this expertise to support their growth and innovation.”
Pictured top: James Cruickshank.
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