Where is AI playing the most meaningful role at your organization currently?

I think AI has a place in the early stages of selection and recruitment in CV sorting, to avoid bias (as well as it was bias-free). I think that would help get more diverse candidates into shortlists.

I've been thinking about new ways in which AI should be applied, such as in data centers. We've got alerting and the network is the same thing with all the noise that comes back to it. AI could interpret all of those logs and be able to understand what it's interpreting versus just doing pattern recognition. That would be really useful because what should you pay attention to when you're getting a thousand alerts? How do you narrow in quickly to stop these outages, or stop a breach?

When we can get an AI to do that specific thing that will be powerful. I've been figuring out how to apply AI to that specific use case. This pandemic was a perfect example: How many people had to change flights, or had to go back and do something with their bank? There was so much inbound that these systems all broke. They couldn't scale with a pandemic. It was unprecedented, but that's still what we have to deal with because the next two billion people are coming online and they're all learning. Then what?

I haven't seen anything yet that goes beyond the chatbot, even the things that present as AI. I looked at Moveworks two years ago, and I said to the team over there at the time, “I just started here. I'm building an IT department for a 1,800 person company and I only have two IT engineers. I don't know what I don't know. The AI should be able to tell me what should be happening.” Because otherwise, you're just trying to automate a process that I haven't built. My issue was that all the AI did was automate processes I built but that's a rule-based chatbot, not AI. It should be a situation where if someone says, "I need access to NetSuite," and they're an engineer, then do they? Or will this chatbot just follow the rules that say an engineer gets access or doesn't get access?

What happens when someone does need something and I don't have a process in place? I can't automate things where we haven't defined our process. That's where the AI would actually help me. For our 500 customers, if someone requests access to NetSuite, that requires a VP level approval from someone in the finance org. If that AI knows that then it can say, "We're not going to put that request out there." Even though that's just pattern recognition across tons of other customers, that's what AI really is: “You haven't defined a process but here's what the typical process is, and we know this because we've learned across all these things with machine learning.” That is the AI tool I want. It’s more than just helping me automate this defined workflow. It might be out there, I just haven't seen it.

It could be endless from an IT perspective, or a security perspective, just being able to have that cognitive ability to look at a vulnerability or a security breach, think about it, make decisions, and take action. You could use it in HR for people that have complaints about the company; the AI can digest it and can respond back in a way that's meaningful and resembles a human. Eventually, it could be CEO. If you're really forward-thinking about it it could do everything within an organization.