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Malcolm Mason is a professional services consultant at Sure Business, with a focus on cloud and data. He gave Meg Winton a walkthrough of the wonderful world of AI and its benefits
WITH every day that passes, it seems like AI can do something else that’s completely revolutionary.
It has enabled breakthroughs in health, absorbed the repetitive administration tasks of our everyday jobs, and no doubt crafted many perfect holiday itineraries.
It really does feel like we’re in a place where the opportunities AI can offer no known bounds.
In Malcolm’s role at Sure Business, he speaks to local businesses to understand what they want to achieve, then provides the relevant technology.
“We deliver a solution that makes sense for the business, not just makes sense with technology,” he said.
It may feel like a new concept or novelty to many of us, but Malcolm said we have probably been using AI all our lives, as it had been around since the 1950s.
He said that since then, development had “accelerated” which has brought us to now, where most of us have become familiar with the latest development – language models, such as ChatGPT.
We use AI like Google Maps, Cortana and Alexa every day, but do you know how they work?
Language models, put simply, analyse patterns in data.
“If I was to read a block of text and use word prediction, I’d use a pattern within that text to work out what that word is,” Malcolm explained. “It’s where we’ve got some data, a label or understanding of a relationship.”
The same approach is found in imagery and videos.
“You’re associating images or videos with labels, so again, we’re talking about pattern recognition.”
Reinforcement learning perspective was another area of AI that Malcolm felt has been growing in prominence but hasn’t been used to “great effect”.
“It’s training a model to learn by its mistakes, like using a reward mechanism when playing a computer game,” Malcolm explained.
“It’s teaching the computers how to do that at a very high level.”
As AI advances, more tools have become available for the benefit of businesses and individuals.
Microsoft Copilot, Malcolm said, was a software most businesses were familiar with. It can generate content and sift through large amounts of text to find a specific piece of information in seconds.
And AI has become so accessible that you can find “off the shelf” models online that are free to use.
“Hugging Face is a global library where you descend for all open-source elements,” said Malcolm. “You’ve also got prebuilt and pre-trained models.”
“They’re all available for businesses to use with local deployments,” he added. “Previously, this was relatively complex, and people needed to understand the algorithms.”
AI has certainly been seen as offering a wealth of opportunities, but Malcolm says businesses should remain wary as the technology develops.
“You want to ensure your business’ intellectual property is firmly kept out of the commercial models,” added Malcolm.
There are also bigger legal and ethical considerations surrounding AI, especially since “off the shelf” algorithms are readily available.
“These models have been trained on data that you’re probably not aware of,” he highlighted, “and you’re responsible for the models you deploy within your business.”
We can’t stop the integration of AI into our personal and professional lives, so Malcolm said it was important to strike a balance between remaining careful while embracing the change.
“My advice to any businesses that are deploying AI solutions is to quickly put a data governance strategy around it before doing anything.
“But also, don’t be too cautious; otherwise, you’ll get left behind.”
Watch and learn
Learn more about the wonderful world of AI from Malcolm, and the opportunities and challenges it can offer, watch the full vodcast by scanning the QR code
below.
