New Zealand AI founder Justin Flitter was in Invercargill last week to present the Great New Zealand AI Roadshow for businesses across the region.
He said AI was not changing what people did, but how they did it.
Massive productivity gains were being seen by businesses using AI tools to automate tedious and repetitive tasks, Mr Flitter said.
"We want to try and strip out that boring tedious stuff to free up humans to do more of the high-value work that requires EQ [emotional quotient], relationship and creativity — that AI is not good at, it's the things that make us uniquely human.
"We want us to be able to focus our time on doing those things so that business moves forward faster."
"In the next 10 years, we are going to see 100 years of innovation."
But rapid changes in business also brought anxiety and fear of the unknown — especially for job security, he said.
Mr Flitter believed job losses were a misconception as he expected roles would be redistributed.
"For the most part, it’s not going to take your job — it’s going to change how you do your job.
"It’s going to chip away at some task that you do ... augment your work and supercharge your capability."
Employers were paying individuals with AI skills up to 30% more, he said.
During the roadshow, delegates were encouraged to look for opportunities where AI could be used in business processes and workflows.
Connected NZ employment liaison adviser Clare Hamill said she was amazed to discover how fast technology was changing.
She believed AI would be useful to produce, for example, training videos for immigrant employees entering Southland’s dairy industry.
There was also the potential for school pupils to have their own tailored AI support person, she said.
Mr Flitter had cautions for users of free online AI writing tools which "scraped" the internet of public content to produce material without acknowledging its sources — leading to the risk of plagiarism..
Shadow AI tools, or AI applications being used without company IT oversight, were also "a big security risk" to business, he said.
However, Mr Flitter believed developing an understanding of how Ai worked was key to dispelling user-anxiety.
The ability to effectively use Ai in the workplace would be a vital future job skill — those reluctant to use it ran the risk of quickly becoming irrelevant, he said.
It was now able to self-learn from the billions of daily interactions with us, he said.
"Every interaction we have is helping these systems get better and better."
- By Toni McDonald
