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The Continuous of Artificial Intelligence in Our Society

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The Continuous of Artificial Intelligence in Our Society

Artificial intelligence is changing the modern workplace, raising important questions for our society.

Everybody knows artificial intelligence (AI) is meant to bring a huge competitive edge to those who successfully adapt it.

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The challenge, however, is to identify what makes AI adaptation truly successful. In the past few years, we’ve seen many technology fads come and go. Maybe it didn’t bring enough value. Or maybe, employees found it too difficult to use, and tossed it aside in favour of ‘traditional’ methods.

The two unlikely friends came from opposite sides of the world. Both were dressed in crisply tailored suits and sat with an azure blue backdrop behind them on the stage of the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference. Chinese billionaire and co-founder of e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Jack Ma traded opinions with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

While Ma joked AI might stand for Alibaba Intelligence, Musk took a more sober stance. AI will be smarter than the smartest human, he said. By what degree? His adjective: “vastly.”

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But what does “vastly” mean for you and I?

Remember when you were a child and the new kid in the neighbourhood proved to be an absolute brainiac? Maybe your heart sped up a bit at the thought she would pull down the curve in math class. Artificial intelligence is a little like that. We know it’s here. We know it won’t go away. But we don’t know how it will change our lives as employees, leaders, customers, supplier partners, consumers, human beings.

Transformation and Change Management 

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Author Eric Hoffer once said: “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

In a poetic way, Hoffer describes the heart of change management. Applying Hoffer’s point to AI, it’s not enough to be “learned” or experts on the technology. AI will be transformational, making everyone within the organisation’s ecosystem a “learner” of AI. In fact, focusing on the psychological and cultural changes within your organisation is critical for any transformation or technology adoption.

I saw the importance of this firsthand recently as I completed a cybersecurity programme at MIT Sloan Management. AI and its implications on people were topics we discussed. Why? Because we are like humans playing with fire for the first time. Understanding our relationship with AI and how people inside and outside our organisations adapt to this new technology frontier directly impacts an organisation’s strategic approach to keeping an organisation safe, sustainable, and well defended against the misuse of AI.

Like many things, questions beg more questions.

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How do we prepare for the change AI is now triggering? What is the psychological and cultural impact of AI and machine learning? How will our decision-making process change when we turn to bits and bytes as a key contributor? How do we equip people with tools for success? How do we allay fears that jobs will be compromised?

These “softer” questions go beyond the technology and data. And that’s exactly the point.

Adopting AI culturally within our organisations not only requires support from the board and executive level, but also a framework that helps people understand their role throughout the transformation.

So, What Now?

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Fact: It is inevitable for organisations to focus on workforce transformation regardless of what they believe. They will either disrupt or be disrupted.

Getting ready for embracing changes starts at making sure all employees have a baseline understanding of emerging technology such as AI and cybersecurity. Include discussions around their opinions and ideas. Building and managing an organisational culture of embracing emerging technology beginswith an employee’s on-boarding training and continuous learning programme. Discussing the values, attitudes, and beliefs that drive AI and cybersecurity behaviours in an organisation will help employees reduce anxieties.

Therefore, changing behaviours means taking into consideration values, attitudes, and beliefs. Leaders and executives play an important role in conveying the importance of technology advancement and how that directly correlates to the greater success of the company.

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Other points to consider include the following. I would challenge organisations to write out a statement addressing these points for greater clarity.

  • Why we need to adopt AI and machine learning.

  • What problems are we solving through AI as a team or as a company.

  • What needs to be done and how people contribute to success.

  • What workforce composition looks like from a technology perspective.

  • The training programme to re-skill the existing workforce and prepare them for the future of work.

  • The CEO and leadership team’s role in AI adoption.

  • How is AI adoption success being measured.

Change Begets Leaps

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Change is hard; change is frightening; change disrupts our world (world, here, being defined as the world we as individuals operate in — going to work, attending school, taking our children to soccer, having a beer with the neighbour on Saturday after mowing the lawn).

Change, of course, is also good. There would be no glory in eschewing penicillin or pasteurisation in the name of keeping things the same.

In an article by Scott Mathis, he wrote: “AI will not replace humans. AI will enable humans to ask the right questions to innovate.”

After seeing Musk and Ma trade opinions about AI, I venture to guess both would probably agree that asking the right questions, rather than barreling down the path of AI without regard for the people using it, is the right place to start. Those questions begin, not just with their careers or the way they buy products, but the long-term psychological impact on all of us and how our culture will change as a result.


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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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