The March 11, 2023, IT World Canada podcast, Hashtag Trending, features an interview with Diane Gutiw, Vice-President of Analytics, AI and Machine Learning for CGI’s Canada operations. She discusses how analytics and AI can be responsibly designed, developed and applied in business to make smarter and quicker decisions.
Diane comments, “We don’t want to squash innovation, but how do we make sure that it’s been done in a way that it doesn’t have bias, that it’s inclusive, that it’s transparent, and that it’s safe?”
For organizations concerned about the accuracy of AI, Diane shares an example highlighting that with appropriate training and monitoring, chatbots are “brilliant” at managing complex questions and different scenarios.
“These conversational tools are very good at quickly breaking down questions, but you do need to keep it on the rails. With any AI, we always run a huge amount of training data to make sure the answers are precise, and we continue to monitor to make sure that it’s staying within the boundaries.”
She emphasizes data quality is crucial to the success of any AI model. It requires making sure that “the information you’re feeding the model is correct in order to get the correct output.”
In Diane’s experience, very few models make a decision without human intervention, like credit checks or university applications, for example. She adds that AI is supporting humans in making decisions, not replacing them.
To effectively implement AI, Diane suggests that organizations focus their planning around two key areas that will have a quick return on investment: investing in cloud technology and cloud data platforms to align with security and privacy best practices and using data to increase resource capacity.
Listen to the full podcast at IT World Canada.
