Generative AI: Steam Engine of the Fourth Industrial Revolution? | Davos 2024 | World Economic Forum

welcome to uh our first of no doubt very many conversations on the transformative technology of our time uh good to see so many of you here I gather this is one of the hottest tickets this bright and early so uh We've we've got the crowds in um and I'm not surprised uh AI is pretty much on every panel uh on every shop front on the prominade there's nothing that anybody else wants to talk to and rightly so it is the transform technology of our time is it the steam engine of the fourth Industrial Revolution as the we says is it the printing press that's another analogy I've heard or even fire um so what is it what is its impact going to be how do we harness the opportunities how do we guard against the risks just a small subject we're going to talk about um with a terrific uh group of individuals from all parts of the world and parts of government and the economy and just nobody really needs any introduction but very briefly next to me is Senator round Senator Mike R's from South Dakota welcome next to him uh Minister Alama Sultan Alama from the UAE next to him Julie sweet a a Davos dwen if I may say so uh chairman and chief executive officer of Accenture uh next to her Arvin Krishna chairman and CEO of IBM and last but absolutely not least Cristiano Amon president and chief executive officer of qual so you have a huge amount of expertise on this panel um let's get going and I'm going to start because you're sitting next to me Senator with you um which is if this really is the steam engine of our time let alone the fire of our time how do you think about Ai and how do you think governments should think about AI thank you uh and this is a very timely uh uh subject matter for all of us I'm on the armed services committee and I'm on the Intel committee I look at it in terms of what it means for National Defense and what different countries will be doing using artificial intelligence artificial intelligence whether you're talking about what used to be air land or sea now you're talking not just about air Land and Sea you're also talking about space and cyberspace artificial intelligence will impact how we fight Wars in all of those domains it speeds everything up what used to be something that took time in the old days of a couple days to get ready now we're talking milliseconds and the country with an army or in armed services that has employed uh artificial intelligence will have a leg up on everybody else in all of the domains well that's a sobering moment to start on thank you but you're absolutely right so that's that's one one end uh Minister let's turn to you because UA is a country that has really grasped this technology and you are now you know you have you have built a model which is one of the you know more impressive models of around Falcon as those of you know um you're clearly making a bid to be a very big Global player in this space explain to us why and what your what your goals are I think uh if we look at the title of this session whether it's a steam engine or the printing press or electricity or fire AI has elements of each and every single revolutionary technology that Humanity has embraced in the past and has used to actually leave frog and develop what is it equivalent to I think it's its own technology there are certain elements of it that are going to scale up um intellect and let's say the the brain power that countries have as well as their ability to compete on the global front especially if there are countries that are mediumsized or smaller compared to the large Giants around the world uh in the UAE we we believe in the power of artificial intelligence as well as proactive regulation so instead of rejecting it how do we use it if effectively um and how do you embrace it I will use a statement that I've used in the past I think our Moto for artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence is very important and there's a good way for you to understand how important it is um there's no dictionary in the world that can tell you the difference between the world the word complete and finished but there's a way for you to understand it if you use Embrace artificial intelligence you will be complete if you do not and you're late you'll be finished and if you if you reject it all together you'll be completely finished did is that from Chad GPT or from you no from me it's hi not AI That's pretty good I'm going to copy that that's excellent writing it down um Julie we've had the this the important National Security perspective we've had the complete or finished or both um tell us when you look around when you talk to your clients when you see where do you think the adoption is fastest where is the most difference being made fastest uh well it's interesting because a year ago actually everyone was talking about it at this but it was all about how cool someone could write your speech right that was like the whole thing here wow you know I I did my strategy it's very different a year later right so we're working on over 700 projects they're across industry so a lot of times people ask me well which Industries are going fastest and I said actually that is a recipe for for Dangerous complacency because actually every industry has leaders who are working very quickly in it and they fall into two camps if you're not ready to use it so you don't have the right data you're not in the cloud then they're experimenting with things that come from their applications their ecosystem so you know things like Microsoft co-pilot and um but if they actually are pretty Advanced then they're doing things right at the core of their operations in every single industry so when you see a pie chart and you say oh I'm an energy company and I'm the smallest you know relative to say life sciences which is going fast there's no room for complacency because in energy there are companies who are moving quickly so I think you know the test for me in terms of why is this so you know so important is that in the last 30 years I can't remember a single technology where I could stand in front of a seat CEO put up yes we still use slides something that showed every part of the Enterprise and a material impact with credibility where someone would say you're crazy no one says we're crazy that is very different and so there isn't a area there's not an industry that's not going to be impacted and we'll get into what does it mean to win um I I was going to ask you this but actually I'm going to move on and ask Arvin this question which is I'm sure you agree with everything that Julie said that every industry is being impacted just talk us through let's let's look at it via tasks perhaps or approaches because I hear coding is the area that is really being impacted most right now beyond that what are the next tasks business processes is it customer relations which elements of of of the kind of overall business are going to be most affected yeah so first it's great to be here and zany thanks for the question you got to start with overall productivity artificial intelligence today's form is going to generate $4 trillion of annual productivity before the end of the decade that is incredible economic competitiveness for companies and Nations hence the excitement and those who embrace it I completely agree with the minister and the senator are going to be advantaged forever okay so then you say which tasks absolutely coding is one we can see 20 30 40% productivity for a programmer who Embraces AI as opposed to one who doesn't customer service of all kinds whether you're writing emails back whether you're answering phone calls whether you're trying to answer really tough questions all the way to people call in with tough problems and can you get them through those quicker with a higher satisfaction than without using artificial intelligence so whole wide area in customer service and then there is this wide to build on what Julie just said this's this wide area I'll call digital labor can you help make your accounts receivable can you help make your HR function can you help make your Finance function can you help make invoicing Contracting Supply Chain ordering as you go into each of these it is not necessarily job displacement but it is absolutely an impact if you Embrace AI you're going to make yourself a lot more productive if you do not then probably I agree with the minister you're going to find that you may not have a job so you've got to embrace it and as you go across these areas and it is here and now this is not 2 3 years out you got to get going now so you've got to embrace it or you'll be finished but we'll get to the how and what governments do but Christian let's just ask with you from the perspective of the technology itself what is going to be needed to accelerate the pace like because quite often we have these we have sort of hyp moments about a technology we think it's going to change the world and then actually it takes longer diffusion takes longer than we think what is it that's is that going to happen this time and what needs to be the case for for it to happen fast no that's that's a great question look I one way to look at this the reason you know we see this explosion of AI and geni is really enable by the ability that you have now access to data and computing power really at the end of the day AI is a different way to write software and an AI processing is going to be the next way of doing computing and I think what we are seeing right now is this is developing at a very fast Bas it's started in the data center and will continue to grow in the data center but it's going everywhere I I like to describe it if you think about the history of computing and the best example about the power of Distributing Computing is you have a computer in the palm of your hand right now which is your smartphone to fundamentally change society and that is also going to be true how you're thinking about Ai and I think that's some of the things we we do uh our job has been how we can create incredible amount of uh processing power that we can put on every device we can put it on your phone you can you can put it on your PC you can put it on your car and then you can run this everywhere you can run this on industri you can run this on on building uh you know uh uh smart uh Power boxes you can run this on on a meter you can run this on a manufacturing equipment and I think that is what's going to bring AI to scale and it's a different way of thinking about Computing look um uh Julie and Arvin gave a bunch of examples on the Enterprise and the transformation Enterprise is Big I'm going to give a little bit of some examples different on the consumer side um we just had CES show a couple weeks ago so we did a demonstration I think together with our partner BMW you get entire database of of the car you put it into the dashboard you you're you're in your car you get a little light on the panel you ask the car what is this light and the car will say this is what it is this is what could possibly happen this is where uh it's uh where where specifically is the problem here's how you can drive it I think you should set up an appointment I'm going I already checked the availability I'm going to step an appointment for you and and you'll be able to have a contextual conversation with your car and then and uh and the same thing you can see how people can use this tool for training and do tasks that you don't know how to do it and thei is going to teach you how to go step by step what I like uh also is how it's changing how we as a human interact with computers today you have uh and I I go back to the smartphone example because it's so much as part of our daily lives you have applications and you the human you go in and you operate Touch One app get an information from one app to another app now you have this engine that is running every time is running in in his processing all the data in your phone is your own data stays in your phone and uh it's going to try to predict your every move it's going to be an assistant for everything and you're going to see the conversation that uh Arn just mentioned about the productivity increases when you're doing a job it's going to be productivity increases on everything how how you communicate and text uh between people how you schedule meetings how to get access uh to information and I think we're just at the very beginning I will end by saying you it was fascinating I go back to what um Julie said about an year ago and we're kind of showing the art of possible like we can run large language models on the phone and we have people talking to us about tens of use cases some ideas right now an year later we're starting to see thousands and I think that's the speed of development it's a revolution and I agree with the senator I think is a great opportunity for Innovation and Technology leadership so Senator I was I was watching you having the same reaction that I was when we were hearing that we're going to start talking to our car uh which you can to some cars already a little bit but um you hear this incredible description about how the world is going to change you in uh the US Senate um how do you and your fellow Senators prepare for this I mean I know you are you're having briefings there's a lot of conversations but but how do you think about what legal regulatory framework what do you need to do to to get ready for this well to begin with that we we looked at it and we actually had a a blue ribbon commission AR was part of it for our National Defense and in it they laid out all of the different areas that it would impact our National Defense but as we went through it there were classified portions of it that were not available to the public some of us had the opportunity to look at it and as I went through that I was really enamored by the really good things that could happen with regard to healthcare and uh at the same time the very serious issues that we confront in National Defense and then also what this will do to our economy as well and the changes in the economy when we got together as a group of senators and and by the way I know everybody thinks that if you're Republican and Democrat you don't talk to one another it's not true in the Senate we actually get along very well we go out to dinner together we work together uh Chuck Schumer who is the uh majority leader in the Senate is a Democrat I'm a republican uh he actually asked if we would join with him and and two other members uh to to do a bipartisan approach on looking at how we integrate Ai and we started out with nine information seminars for members of the Senate and the folks that really do all the work and that's our staffs but we got together uh we basically said we want to bring in the best and the brightest and we had folks come in and literally visit with us about what they saw as impacts of AI from their perspective and we had tons of different approaches and since we were doing it behind CL doors they spoke very candidly some of them agreeing some of them disagreeing but giving us lots of information about the concerns they had what about patents what about copyrights how do we incorporate the use of AI and protect uh the the you know the innovators but how do we also incorporate what AI will do to help them how do we um how do we regulate it but at the same time incentivize so that AI development will not slow down with regards to area of healthare we believe that it will be transformational in healthcare we think the vast majority of the American public will buy into AI because of what they will see in the quality of life that can be improved as AI is integrated into health care if we can do those types of things then we can truly make a difference and not just the bad things that AI could be a part of but rather the good things that it brings as well will far outweigh the bad if we do this correct ly we learn correctly we provide incentives for AI development and once again in a competitive area United States is going to do their best to stay at the top of of the competitive brackets but also that we not harm our own citizens with unbridled AI that does not have appropriate regulatory oversight so uh in a second I'm going to get you some free unsolicited advice from the three uh industry industry Representatives here but but Minister let's first hear from you because uh you a sort of similar question that I asked the senator but tell us a bit about how the UA's approach to this because you you you you you completely finished you don't you're certainly not completely finished you're perhaps the opposite thanks to AI just tell us you're harnessing Capital you know data you you now have the actual llm itself what's your strategy for ensuring that your country is benefiting and is at the Forefront of this new technology uh I think when it comes to artificial intelligence the technology itself is at a disadvantage compared to any other technology that Humanity has gone through in the past there's a lot of negative stigma because of the movies that we watched as children the science fiction books the Terminator and IR robot and others about AI taking over the world and destroying Humanity it doesn't mean that these risks are not uh you know risks that could possibly happen but the the possibility of them happening are very low today compared to the possibility of the positives of the technology that we can deploy as the cator said and as as well the industry leaders have said on the panel in the UAE we look at AI with let's say two um views first is we need to be a responsible AI Nation so our Moto for deploying AI is building a responsible artificial intelligence nation which spells out brain um the second is we believe that there's a lot of ignorance when it comes to the technology especially in government so when you look at the industry players they have a lot of expertise at hand and and they're actually developing the technology when it comes to government our first reaction is we don't understand it let's put red tape around it and let's ban it we want to have a different approach if we look at certain things like climate change right there are very similar challenges when it comes to climate change in AI it's a matter of time it crosses border borders and there's a lot of different things that we need to do and we don't have the human capacity to do it with so we need to deploy AI to combat climate change and we also need to deploy technology to combat the the risk of AI and the use of AI as well so what we believe is uh in the UAE first we're going to deploy AI in things like for example oil and gas combating climate uh in let's say Trying to minimize traffic uh and the hindrance on quality of life things that are non-controversial that improve quality of life positively and then work with our partners like the Us and other countries around the world to ensure that the negative Aram ramifications of the technology can be combed because they will cross borders and it's only a matter of time before we have a catastrophe why did you decide that as a country you needed to have your own AI capability why didn't you just you know go to open AI or so we are working with the likes of open Ai and IBM and many other partners that are on this panel and others as well but the fact of the matter is you are always dependent on these players if you have 100% of your capability your technological capabilities coming from them the other thing is we have a lot to add think about the UAE we have 200 nationalities living in a densely populated set of cities which makes our data data set quite unique which will allow the AI capabilities that we develop to be truly Global especially in healthcare especially in certain things where today there is a lack globally the second is we have Cutting Edge infrastructure which allow which allows the velocity of data that comes in to be used very quickly and for us to actually deploy much faster than others and our regulat regime allows for us to move much quicker than countries that have let's say more bureaucracy all right so we can bring a lot to the table why don't we help work with our partners but at the same time you provide value to them by having our own capabilities and then try to Leap Frog as a country and work together so it's a Leap Frog opportunity for you to Julie uh the senator talked about how it was important to get the regulation right um let's let's offer the senator some some advice on what areas uh and where you think having seen this uh technology and seen your clients think about it where do you where would you advise the senator that the Senate should focus and not focus well I probably take a step back and start with what the minister said is you know when the leaders don't understand it they just try to regulate it right so whether you're a government or a company the single biggest differentiator between whether your success goal will succeed or not is your leadership do you actually really understand the technology and that is very different than prior technology revolutions where yes most SE sues today understand their business is a technology business but the you actually have to understand it at a very deep level because it's not there are a million use cases as Cristiano said there there's Stacks there's a lot of great videos but you have to operationalize it and when you operationalize it you certainly have to do it in a responsible way like let's remember there wasn't a responsible PC or responsible Cloud there's responsible AI for a reason right and so I think whether you're the government or a company an education and actually understanding it so you can make the choices and learn actually how to operationalize it and my passion is Around Talent uh because this will be a great technology if we can bring people along the journey and we have to be able to Res skill them and we will not be able to Res skill unless we think very differently about Talent both as a government and as a company and we spend a lot of time not because it just drives our business or that but because fundamentally it's very basic well-paying jobs for people solve a lot of problems and AI will create a lot of new jobs but you won't be able to take the current people and put them in the jobs unless you partner together government and companies on reskilling so we're going to come to skill in a second and what kind of skills people will need to thrive in this well but one question for you first you talked about the or the SE suite and and whether CEOs are prepared and understand this technology and in fact I may ask the other two of you too when you talk to your clients like what overall level of understanding is there I mean does the average CEO and there are many of them here really understand this technology do they know it's big and they need to do something about it what's the level of of understanding do you think I think there's a level of understanding that they need to learn more we have 150 people signed up here to do workshops not attend panels because they understand they have to know more but right now you've got a lot of focus on the value a lot of focus on the talent the SE Suite needs to understand better the actual technology and we are seeing them do the work so I I don't I don't think there's a gap in belief but this is still really really early right and uh it's going to take a while uh but it's moving fast a would you agree with that it's moving really really fast you would say that this technology is moving at about 10 times the pace of the previous big one if I look at it semiconductors internet AI I would put it kind of in that category and if you look at the rate and Pace it is incredible but if you sort of step back go back to the point that the minister and the senator made how do you put God rails while allowing Innovation to happen that's kind of the Dilemma because if you just put God rails that's bureaucracy that's red tape so how do you allow Innovation to happen and the advice that I would give is it's really hard to kind of regulate the technology itself because if you do that Innovation stops so regulate the use cases so the more risky the use case the more regulation there should be that's an approach that can be taken and has been taken in Prior Technologies two hold the developers of these models accountable from a legal sense so if they are misusing data or misusing something or letting it get applied badly hold the developers accountable from a legal sense and three because it is an economic Advantage Foster an open ecosystem not a closed ecosystem if you can kind of get regulation that allows for those three then I think you're going to satisfy industry but you're going to give the guard rails that both the senator and the minister asked for and you mean an open International ecosystem or an open National ecosystem I think that this is where people get very confused can you tell me a digital technology that you can keep to inside a physical boundary the two things are a this is where I would me the senator might disagree here because some of what the US is doing uh with with its chip export um a chip is a physical good it's a physical good but it is designed part of the goal of this is to prevent acceleration in this area yeah yes but but but can you allow others or are you stopping others from accessing a cloud service from over the Internet of course not so if you're going to allow digital Technologies you're going to allow them then there are certain activities of a nature the senator talked about where they do not want to access it remotely they need it physically other than military purposes there's very few you can think about that require that level of physical locality so I think it actually satisfies both but digital Technologies are really hard to contain to a border chrisan I'm going to come to you in just a second but I I want to get back to the senator here because this is a really interesting one because the US is in effect using a physical means to try and control the development of digital capabilities it is with with the chip it is so sensitive to us that we remain a leader in terms of the high-speed technology available in the most advanced chips that we measure our spread from US versus our near-peer adversaries in a technology period of months how many months ahead do we believe we are in the development of AI capabilities and by simply restricting the availability of chips and in fact the most advanced chips we know it's not a long-term success but it is a short-term success while we can uh slow down other development while we proceed as best we can to maintain our Competitive Edge other areas networking is one area that we have a real advantage and it's one that we can never allow ourselves to be uh uh in second place on and so that's the reason why the why why we do have the restrictions on it we know it's not a long-term fix but it gave us a few more months in terms of our technology Edge Christian you you um in some ways you're impacted by this too do you do you s sense do you agree with the senator that these kinds of fixes are short-term ones buying the US time look at the present moment we're not impacted because we're not focused on the data center we're really focused on building the capability to phones to PCS to Industrial devices uh to cars and and everything that is happening outside the data center um look I'm our our ex expertise is not uh on National Security we're really focus on building Computing Technologies what I will say is uh this technology is very broad it's very pervasive and uh it's going to have long lasting applications I tend to agree with the senator uh you know over time uh we will we will see this uh technology everywhere but I want to go back to some of the two topics you brought it up um one was the regulatory framework and the other one is the speed of this technology within the Enterprises um there was a lot of discussion about responsible um Ai and guard rails I want to maybe talk about something else and touch on one of the things that the senator mentioned um the respect of intellectual property is very important for you to have an innovation company the United States benefited from that Europe benefited from that uh you know was a company who just really focused on this I think 20123 where were the number one company in the United States in patent applications I think Arvin was a very close second as well because because it's it's both companies is based on Innovation and this is a novel area when you think about the role of patents in the in in AI so what the senator mentioned is extremely important how how can uh we can protect the value of uh human invention and uh intellectual property as we enter into this new world because at the end of the day we wanted to maintain the innovation-based economy that it's extremely important the other point on the regulatory uh framework is something that Orvin mentioned and I can't emphasize enough the importance of keeping the platforms open and that is a very important topic because what what AI is doing and as I mentioned before is the new Computing platform and is disaggregating different systems you can run an AI on a phone and you can go to an application on the phone or you can go to the cloud it doesn't matter so so it's not about one closed ecosystem it's about open ecosystem and this whole conversation that we had about CEOs uh looking at this technology as a necessity for their companies to stay competitive we need to make sure that everybody has the right to innovate and not just few companies have the right to innovate so the importance of keeping the platforms open uh it's a very important uh step in the Regulatory and I will just finish my point on your question about how fast the CEOs are reacting to this I think Julie mentioned on this Irvin mentioned on this I think the overall industry understood before AI before this whole conversation on gen the digital transformation is going to be required in every industry gen is just accelerating that it's accelerating that by a lot I think there was a recognition in the industry that I need to be digital now with Gen it's a necessity and is now the understanding between I'm going to be in business or I'm going to being in business that's a positive thing and I think it's going to drive uh a lot of development growth in uh in innovation in the industry well I would as a as a as a media organization absolutely second you on the importance of of Ip and copyright in this I mean there are it it this will be a and you mentioned it yourself Senator too this will be a big issue um I want to do one more round with you guys and then I'm going to hopefully get some time for a couple of questions from the floor but let's Julie you mentioned skills what skills people will need I remember moderating panels like this when we didn't talk about generative AI but we did talk about the digital transformation and what what skills would be needed in the digital transformation let's kind of update that conversation now and okay now we're going in a world of generative AI it's going all coming much faster you know those of us who have kids young adults there's a lot of question what kind of skills do you need to thrive in this world you must think about it Minister from a government perspective when you're thinking about what do you want your young UA citizens to be learning what kind of skills do you want them to have to thrive in the next decades in this world absolutely I remember attending a panel in Davos a few years ago where um they said if you don't learn how to code you're finished and today in hindsight we discovered that chat GPT and many of these tools can actually do that for you I think the only constant is change and we need to build a populace that is able to adapt to change that's able to embrace Technologies and that's able to also always be agile and have a robust set of of skill sets and be curious about the future what we did in the UAE so just quickly to touch upon some of the things that we did the first is to combat ignorance in the government we launched a program with the University of Oxford where we trained senior government officials to understand what artificial intelligence is what ethics of AI are how do you use it responsibly what is good and bad use cases as well we have over 400 officials across the government of the UAE that have graduated from this program that are today leading the charge so you know we have more awareness in the government we launch another program which is on the 29th of October of every year we have a day that we celebrate technology and coding and Ai and all these tools so we said there are two ways for us to teach people about artificial intelligence either do a pull approach to them come to this Hall and we do a seminar on artificial intelligence or to do a push approach so on that day every single person in the UAE gets an SMS on their phone that says um technology and artificial intelligence is the future start your journey to understand what the future is and how you can play a role in it click the link they click the link they write a line of code and they understand how easy it is and then they can create a journey towards actually learning what artificial intelligence is how it's impacting their lives if they're going to be an architect a doctor even just a normal citizen what AI is going to do for them and over 180,000 people in a country that is not very big have actually gone through that journey and the numbers are just you know snowballing into bigger numbers the final thing we did was we actually deployed AI education within our schooling so from grade five onwards people learn how to code from grade nine onwards uh kids in schools actually learn what artificial intelligence is what are the ethics of it and they also understand whatever their career path is going to be how AI is going to affect it wow Senator what do you think SMS is to every citizen of the United States look what they're doing is phenomenal and they're in a position to be able to do it very very rapidly uh we we can't do that in the United States but we can be open to Innovation and we can be inviting one of the challenges that we have right now is is is immigration and we have we have in the United States we have a lot of people that would like to come to the United States who are very very capable of being real winners in terms of the development of AI and we need to be inviting to them I tell my colleagues I said can you imagine the world today if we had not allowed Albert Einstein to immigrate into the United States the same thing goes on right now with regard to Ai and there are lots of people out there who want to participate and in the Free World we need to make sure that those individuals have an opportunity to go where they want to go and we want to be able to compete by having an inviting workplace for those individuals as well as well as across our entire country uh allowing for the education of individuals regardless of if they're in a rural state or in in in an urban community to allow that to happen South Dakota I'm in the middle of the country I have 880,000 people in the entire state but we've got Dakota State University which is specializing in uh in cyber security and artificial intelligence in fact arv and I had spoken about that and and we want that for young people that might not otherwise have an opportunity to grow the talents that they have we have to take advantage of these young people and the talents they've got and allow that to to grow and so what you're doing is one major step forward and and I think it's very forward looking so just to to comment on that we are working very closely with the us so we shared the curriculum that we did with Oxford with uh my counterpart in the US is reading the AI charge as well I don't think there's an Apples to Apples comparison the US is a continent compared to the UAE the U is a you know it's the size of one of the states of the 50 states of the us so I don't think you can emulate exactly what we're doing but we can learn from each other yes and what what what was one thing that you you think you can teach or work with others can learn from you even if their size is much bigger so we've been doing this since 2017 um we've we've so I've been appointed in 2017 we learned a lot we also learned as well that there's a lot of hype relating to this and governments tend to over regulate at times because of you know the the unknown and the ambiguity but if we work together we're able to see where we learn from each other and what we can do I'll give you a simple example in 2017 the whole conversation was about self-driving cars if we don't regulate them the world's going to end because these cards are going to crash and they're going to kill people and you know all these things and it was a matter of time so we need to regulate it now did we regulate self-driving cars not yet did it change the world not yet it will change the world in the future but the the goal poost keeps moving and governments lose interest very quickly we need to ensure that we actually follow through in what we want and second that we don't you know jump into the hype but we actually look at what responsible regulation means what responsible deployment means and how we can do this together collectively because I don't think a single country can get it right on its own that's very interesting Julie you you you mentioned skills you brought it up um one of the things that I think probably we did less well in the first era of globalization was to think about what skills people needed to thrive particularly in the US and other advanced economies that's one of the reasons that there was this backlash against trade we didn't actually equip people to have the skills they needed what are the skills now that you think people need I mean is it coding is it as the minister says an ability to keep seeking the new what makes people flexible into do that what kinds of skills do you think when you see your clients what are the what are the skills that have the employees are thriving with well let me be very practical we have 740,000 people we hire 100,000 a year we ask one question to every person regardless of whether you're a coder or you're a strategist or you're a doctor or you're working in HR we ask one interview question to everyone we say what have you learned in the last six months we don't care if it's how to bake a cake but we have to have people who like to learn and that question is incredibly insightful because what you're teaching in 2017 about AI is really different in 2019 we had 500,000 people we started a program called TQ we said whether you worked in HR a strategist in the mail room you had to have certain basic technology skills you had to know what cloud was you had to know what AI was you had to know what an agile organization are so this is basic digital literacy that every company has to have every person and that meant that was traditional AI when geni cames on we already had all of our people because we're using it in how we run our people understand the concept so when we say we now want you to work differently using this technology they're not starting from can you explain AI so you have to have people who want to learn and build a learning culture we invest a billion dollars a year in training and you have to be willing as a part of that to upskill because people in our Workforce have not received this training in their education and then finally we have to partner with governments to change basic education it's not going to help now but we need to think 10 20 30 years ahead and education in every country where global company has to change the UAE that's something that we can learn from the UAE alent what have you learned in the last six months it's a great question I'm going to ask everyone this so the reason that we get this question on AI more than other Technologies is it impacts rooms like this it is the first technology that goes after White Collar work or what I will call the lower half of cognitive work all right so if you acknowledge that it's not a particular domain skill I completely agree with Julie it doesn't matter whether you're a physicist mathematician a computer scientist a doctor a writer it means that if the lower half of cognitive work gets taken over by gen it implies that you've got to learn critical thinking that means critical thinking regardless of which domain your in becomes the skill that is far far more needed of course it means that you need to keep learning and continuous learning I think is a Hallmark a statistic there half lifee of skills used to be 30 years it's now 7 years so if you think about that that means in an average career you're going to change five times your overall skills a practical suggestion we have 250,000 people we took a week last August we gave a task or a challenge people could go modify those challenges everybody had to form teams one two three five people your choice go use our generative AI platform to go see how far you can go have a competition as a result of which 160,000 people came out well trained at the end of a week but in a fun exercise I think every company every organization can do something like that and it gets your people hands-on experience on a task that they care about I think that those are simple observations which you can do but which get the workforce trained and then comfortable as opposed to fearing the Technologies Cristiana the last word is yours what skills do you think people should focus on look I I think the as as Arvin mentioned uh everything that is a repetitive task some it's a task that it's very easy to predict you know as you process data AI will be able to do that and help you so I think uh people needs to really focus on how they can remain creative how they can remain focused on what the human can do which is it's uh it's going to be driving Innovation and how do people can be ready to embrace those Technologies so they can be more efficient because at the end of the day it's not about you're going to let's just thinking about generation of code it's not about you're just going to have less people the key thing is you can do a lot more with the people you have and I think that's what this bright future is enabled by this technology Computing and the evolution of computing we have we have seen is not bad like uh if you just look at how much technology so far have uh a big role in democratizing technology and make it accessible one of the things we're doing about trying to bring AI to every single device is really to democratize the technology and I think that's a great opportunity unfortunately we I'm going to get into terrible trouble if I open to questions because we only got one minute left so I'm not so forgive me but I am going to end by asking you all to say whether you agree with the premise of this whole session which is that AI is the steam engine of the fourth Industrial Revolution I mean is it that scale of Technology where are you in the it's you know fire at the most transformative to you know the tractor perhaps at the least I kind of where are you in that scale Julie yes it is the steam engine it is the steam engine absolutely Minister yes but even more so so it's not this time it's not hype it's not like you know it's not one techology right it's a field of computer science so so the hype is on certain use cases y but the actual computer science them Senator is this the most transformative thing you've ever seen when you see cancers being cured when you see Parkinson's and Alzheimer's being cured or significantly reduced then people will start to understand just how changing life changing this is yes this is like the steam engine Christian yes I agree it's it's like electricity it's like electricity a it absolutely steam engine is a great example that is a place to end on it is this is not hype even by devil standards this is not hype this is real and we've learned a lot about it thank you all very much thank

Channel: World Economic Forum

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Keywords: sustainable global goals, climate change, sustainability, davos agenda, World Economic Forum, Davos, politics, finance, economy, news, leadership, democracy, education, 4IR, technology, tech, AI, automation, work, future, world news, economist, world, forum, economic, world news today, worldeconomicforum, recommended for you, globalization, robotics, bloomberg, documentary, WEF, switzerland, external affairs minister, Davos 2024, Davos Agenda, WEF 2024

Id: vQUPfmxQhzI

Length: 45min 17sec (2717 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024