Ronald Goseco l June 30, 2023 l The Manila Times
THE digital revolution has brought remarkable advancements in technology transforming the way we live and interact with each other. The concept of digital intensity, which refers to the degree of digitalization and technological integration within various aspects of society, is the way to measure this. In recent years, digital intensity has emerged as a powerful tool in “bending the curve,” a term used to describe the ability to alter the trajectory of progress, ultimately contributing to the growth in nations.
This was a topic that was discussed during the Finex General Membership meeting in May. We invited Peter Maquera — chief executive officer of Microsoft Philippines who shared his thoughts on the Accelerated Evolution of Generative AI, which he described as the next frontier in digital. He shared the history of artificial intelligence (AI) and the collaboration between OpenAI — the creators of ChatGPT and Microsoft.
We know Microsoft but know very little about OpenAI. It turns out that no one single person or entity owns OpenAI. The company was founded by notable figures such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutshever and Wojciech Zaremba. The formation of OpenAI was accompanied by a commitment of $1 billion in funding to pursue its ambitious mission of developing artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity. While OpenAI was launched as a nonprofit, it evolved into a so-called capped-profit company in 2019. This means that investor returns will be capped at 100 times the investment.
In addition to the investments from prominent stakeholders like Peter Thiel, OpenAI received funding from other entities, including Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in 2019 and followed through with an additional $10 billion this year. Despite this investment, OpenAI is not owned by Microsoft. The partnership ensures Microsoft Azure will remain the only cloud provider for OpenAI and Microsoft will deploy GPT models across its products and introduce new categories of products. The top 4 categories and use cases were shared by Maquera. These include Content Generation like call center responses, Summarization like financial analyst reports, Code Generation like converting natural language to query proprietary data models and Semantic search for information discovery. Maquera assured us that comprehensive enterprise compliance and security controls will protect our proprietary data and this information will not be used to train other AI foundational models in their closed systems. This was a concern raised during the meeting because of the recent Samsung cybersecurity breach this year when their employees accidentally leaked confidential data via ChatGPT.
Maquera also shared the 2023 Work Trend Index that involved 31,000 persons in 31 different countries showing trends on Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn. There were three major findings. The first is digital debt is costing us innovation. Digital debt is defined as the loss of profit or momentum from not adapting digital technologies. Businesses don’t achieve the required level of digital transformation. This is measured as the difference in advancement a company has with regards to its peers. The second finding is there is a new AI-Employee alliance. The report showed that although 49 percent of those interviewed are worried that AI will replace their jobs, 70 percent would actually delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads. The report showed that employees are comfortable using AI for finding information (86 percent), summarizing meetings and action items (80 percent), analytical work (79 percent) and creative work (73 percent). It also confirmed that 82 percent of leaders interviewed believe that employees will need new skills to prepare for AI. The top skills described include analytical judgment (30 percent), flexibility (29 percent), emotional intelligence (27 percent) and creative evaluation (24 percent). The report also showed the top objectives that leaders want from AI. These are increasing productivity (31 percent), helping employees with necessary but repetitive tasks (29 percent) and increasing well-being (26 percent). Reducing headcount was still last on the list but appeared to be rising.
He also shared a use case in education that doubled the learning curve of students under tutorial instruction using AI with the same amount of time. This power of AI demonstrates the digital intensity that could bend the curve and improve outcomes in this particular industry. Harnessing this power is a clear opportunity for our country to catch up with the rest of the region in this aspect.
According to the publication of Statista Aaron O’Neill last May 4, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the Asean is showing growing economic strength but also shows our country lagging behind our comparable peers. Recall that GDP is the total value of all goods and services in the country in a year and per capita translates this to the population.
Maquera concluded that digital intensity could be the game changer that could bend the curve of progress and open up new possibilities for the nation. We believe it’s a good point and opportunity. By integrating digital technologies and fostering innovation, we can harness the power of digital intensity to address complex challenges and shape a more inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for the country. This might also be our chance to catch up with the rest of our neighbors.
*** Ronald S. Goseco is a Finex Foundation Trustee. His opinions are his own.