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SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Pieter Geldenhuys. He is the director of the Institute for Technology, Strategy and Innovation, ITSI. Pieter, I really appreciate the time today. AI, artificial intelligence, has really arrived on the scene in the last six months or so. We’ve had ChatGPT, of course. Before that there was Stable Diffusion. There was Midjourney in the graphical space. It kind of makes me think of the personal computer in the seventies and eighties – and perhaps even the internet which arrived in the eighties and nineties. We knew it was going to be big. Truthfully, we were way underestimating it in many ways.
PIETER GELDENHUYS: Well, your sentiments mirror those of Bill Gates. He equated the rise of Generative AI to that of the internet. The impact on productivity is enormous. If I take a look at the way in which I construct my emails, I would normally take about 10, 15 minutes and then carefully reread them. By utilising these new AI tools, I can simply dictate it in a matter of seconds, press a button, and then choose the format of the email and have it available literally a minute later. So the impact on productivity improvement is enormous. That’s just one example. That’s the beauty of Generative AI. If you use it correctly and if your prompts are used correctly, you can unlock huge productivity improvements in your organisation.
SIMON BROWN: Absolutely. It’s going to completely integrate itself into our lives, professionally and socially as well. I like your point there, though. It’s almost about prompts, and that’s going to perhaps become the skill, in many ways, as to how we talk to it.
PIETER GELDENHUYS: You’re completely correct. If we take a look at an artificial intelligence entity like OpenAI and the way it has been trained, you can’t trust everything it says. It literally takes, you know, ChatGTP builds a sentence one word at a time. And the moment it looks at the next word, it gives a weighting to it based on how often it has been used in the context that you specified.
And now there’s a temperature setting. If you go and look at the playground behind ChatGTP, there’s a temperature setting, and if the temperature’s low, it takes the most obvious words that would appear next in a sentence based on the corpus of a text that has been trained upon. But if the temperature is higher, it would then choose a word that might not be as applicable in a normal conversation. The moment that word is chosen, then suddenly the conversation changes. When you have a high temperature, sometimes ChatGTP gives you a lot of nonsense back. So you have to be really careful that it knows how to construct words, it knows how to construct sentences, and it uses this corpus of text in order to construct various sentences that might be unique and haven’t been written before. But it doesn’t mean that it reflects the truth. And therefore the type of prompt that you type in has to be a very specific in order to train this AI agent to look at the areas or the probabilities of text that would be more applicable to what you want to say, and that you can trust the words that it generates at the end of the day.
SIMON BROWN: That’s it. It’s training. It’s also training us. We had to learn how to use a personal computer, a smartphone, the internet. That brings me to the point. You’ve teamed up with NWU Business School. You’re going to be doing an AI Master Class. Talk to me a bit around that, and who it’s particularly aimed at.
PIETER GELDENHUYS: It’s mainly aimed at individuals who don’t have a technical background but are business professionals, so individuals who want to improve their business performance.
We focus the outcome of the course on three areas. The one is to focus on your personal productivity. How can I compare documents? How can I compile documents? How can I write a marketing strategy, but [one] aimed at a specific industry or a specific company? And what are the tools you could utilise in order to enhance your productivity?
The word is ‘amplify’. How do you amplify your performance or save time in a day by using these tools that are available? That’s a part of it. If you, for example, look at the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem, it’s about optimisation of the Word, Excel and PowerPoint capabilities in an organisation. And that’s the first leg. How do you optimise your own personal productivity?
The second part of our course is to redefine certain processes in the organisation. I’m going to give you an example. It is now possible to bring out six or seven different advertisements for an organisation that speak to the different personality types of the individuals that watch the advertisement. But how do you construct these advertisements? That’s where these AI tools can help you. They can analyse the personality types of your audience, and then they can give you advice around the video sequence and the words that can be used in these videos. Then you can utilise those videos and you can plug [them] into another AI engine called ElevenLabs, which can mimic your voice [chuckle] and then you can construct a video far quicker than before.
So these are some examples of how you can change your processes, for example, on the marketing side. For a small company this is wonderful. These are capabilities that were viable only for a large organisation. Now an individual with a small company with one or two employees can literally roll out five or six different video advertisements in a matter of two days. It’s not the same quality as your big advertising firms, but for a small company that advertises online this is unique. That’s the power of AI.
We also focus on the corporate setting. How can big organisations that have to prepare board packs, board presentations, optimise their time by using these AI tools? That’s the second leg.
And then the last leg is there’s a big difference between human thinking and AI thinking, and that interface between the two is really critical. How can you create new value using AI? So we teamed up with one of the key leaders in South Africa, a person by the name of Neville …….5:54 He’s doing design thinking that was pioneered at Stanford University. We are utilising the design-thinking tools, but then using the AI capabilities to optimise the design-thinking process. That’s the last part.
So personal productivity, business process re-engineering, and unlocking innovation using AI are the three legs of our course.
SIMON BROWN: The key point you said is we don’t need those programming schools up front.
We’ll leave it there. AIMasterclass.co.za, for more information. Moneyweb Insider Gold subscribers get a 10% discount off the course. Dr Pieter Geldenhuys, director at the Institute for Technology, Strategy and Innovation, I appreciate the time.
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