The future of digital transformation

Last month Paul McCartney announced that artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been helping with the production and recording of the last ever Beatles record to be released this year. McCartney described the technology as simultaneously useful and scary, but what are the practical applications of AI and other emerging technologies for business?

In first place businesses need to make sure they are looking at the right kind of technology, advises Microsoft national technology officer Kieran McCorry. “The current focus on AI technology is generative AI, meaning the use of large language models (LLMs),” he says. “LLMs are a type of artificial intelligence that process natural language – they can create new text and content from the text or information that you input.”

This is the technology that powers ChatGPT, the AI Chatbot launched publicly by OpenAI last November, he adds. “However, it’s important to remember that the ChatGPT service is a free consumer platform. We recommend organisations that are looking to use AI in their business use platforms specifically designed for enterprise customers, such as Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, to avail of enterprise-grade security and privacy controls.”

And the technology does have practical use. “Generative AI allows businesses to focus on efficiencies and increasing the effectiveness of their employees, freeing them up and removing some of the mundane laborious tasks, like searching for data and summarising documents, that soak up much of their time,” says McCorry. “This same technology, which is great at summarising content, also allows businesses to gather insights from diverse and distributed data that might be scattered across their organisation and otherwise inaccessible for the most part.”

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It also has applications in the cybersecurity sphere. In 2020 Palo Alto Networks launched what it calls the world’s first machine learning powered next-generation firewall, with AI as the core of the firewall to stop threats, secure IoT devices and recommend security policies essentially in real time. Since then it has embedded AI capabilities across almost all of its security subscriptions, from DNS security to advanced threat prevention.

“In the cybersecurity sector AI and machine learning (ML) offer valuable solutions to address complex and evolving threats,” says Helmut Reisinger, chief executive of EMEA & Latin America, Palo Alto Networks. “It is all about training models to learn automatically from large amounts of data. By leveraging and learning from large data sets a system can detect patterns, trends, anomalies, automate detection and classification processes, make recommendations and ultimately execute actions. Machine learning can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of cybersecurity systems, enabling proactive threat detection and mitigation.”

He points out that Palo Alto analyses 750 million new and unique events online every day. “Every day we detect 1.5 million new attacks,” says Reisinger. “That would not be possible without AI and ML.”

Workday EMEA chief technology officer Clare Hickie believes the opportunities presented by the technologies are limitless and include everything from improving the user’s experience by having personalised content served to them through to better productivity by using automated and assisted workflows.

“One very practical application is around skills,” she says. “As we reach the limits of traditional careers, skills data becomes the foundation for effective workforce planning, recruiting and internal mobility. Workday Skills Cloud uses AI and ML to analyse skills, understand their relationship to each other and map that to a company’s workforce. It can highlight existing skills available and where skills gaps exist, putting people front and centre. This can reduce high-cost, time-draining manual efforts spent trying to do the same thing.”

Another practical application she points to relates to finance. “Organisations can better manage risk and reduce inefficiencies through AI and ML. For example, finance teams spend an inordinate amount of time gathering information and reconciling transactions throughout the month and at quarter end. AI and ML help them quickly identify financial patterns, trends, and anomalies which in turn enables teams to complete the financial close process more quickly and efficiently.”

There are challenges, of course, including disruption to existing business models. “I think the key thing is to embrace the technology,” says McCorry. “Experiment with it. See how you can make it fit for your organisation, your business. Start off with small scale pilots and trials to see how business operations can be improved and grow from there.

“Skilling up the workforce is key too. Businesses should invest in training their employees about how best to use this kind of technology and position it appropriately as assistive, complementary technology. I get dismayed when I hear of companies that are banning the use of the technology. That’s like banning the use of the calculator and insisting that employees do calculations by hand.”

They also bring cybersecurity challenges. “Bad actors have the opportunity to build better tools, faster,” says Reisinger. “Just as we will use AI for good things, they will use AI for bad things. AI tools are increasingly available for low prices on the dark web, and the emergence of ransomware-as-a-service models are lowering the barrier of entry for cybercriminals and driving an increase in such attacks. This shows a clear need to elevate cybersecurity by leveraging best-in-class capabilities focused on AI and ML so enterprises can fight fire with fire.”

Beyond those opportunities and challenges, Hickie believes Ireland can become a global leader in this increasingly important area. “Just one example is Science Foundation Ireland’s ADAPT centre which has been pioneering AI personalisation and human-computer interaction through a wonderful collaboration of leading third-level institutions,” she says. “In parallel, we know Ireland is the EMEA home to many of the world’s most innovative companies and now has the people, the skills, the know-how and the vision to be a leader in this space.”