Tech leaders at Collision Conference: 'AI is our biggest opportunity'

Artificial intelligence was, as expected, the talk of the 2023 Collision Conference in Toronto last week. Some executives, interviewed by Yahoo Finance, weighed in on productivity efficiencies the technology is delivering now. Others were concerned about ethical issues — and regulation. For most, all of the above.

But they all agreed on one thing: AI is, in fact, a transformational technology.

Here's what a few of the execs had to say:

Colin Murdoch, chief business officer at Google's (GOOG, GOOGL) DeepMind

"The pace of progress on AI is now faster than ever before," said Murdoch. "We’re at the first rung of a very long ladder in terms of AI applications. AI may start as a chatbot, but I believe it has the potential to do so much more, including cure what today is incurable or solve some of the most critical challenges of our time such as the climate crisis."

He added: "AI helps people leapfrog expensive time-consuming steps to advance scientific discovery and benefit humanity, which is analogous to the transformations we observed during past industrial revolutions."

Dr. Kareem Yusuf, senior VP at IBM (IBM).

Dr. Yusuf — who is leading the launch of IBM's generative AI product, "watsonx" — is focused on, among other things, increased efficiency via AI.

"We're talking about meaningful improvements in productivity," said Yusuf. "In the HR use case we've been seeing 40% improvement in productivity for HR professionals because they are able to dynamically work through a task — opening a job requisition in one place, say, Austin, and another, say, in Toronto. These are different pieces of paper, different policies that need to be activated, and AI can help quickly assemble and bring to the fore."

However, Yusuf is similarly aware of the need to prioritize AI ethics amid this growth and productivity spree.

"In the context of business, ethics and transparency are really important," he said. "Do you know where the data that the model has trained on has come from? You cannot hallucinate in the business context as a whole, so that then drives how we do what we do [with AI]."

Tom Verrilli, chief product officer at Amazon's (AMZN) Twitch

Verrilli told Yahoo Finance that AI will be able to solve some of the problems that Yusuf worries about — and this is particularly true when it comes to safety on the internet.

"We have a really robust set of community guidelines, and we don't talk about it a lot, but we have a really effective set of machine learning teams who work to spot patterns or bots," Verrilli said. "We have a whole bunch of automated detections to try and keep Twitch safe. At the channel level, it's important that we give creators the tools to build the community they want rather than to impose one on them. We also have auto mode, where, on something like 64 different levels, you can vary what type of content you want to allow a channel."

He added: "We're really lucky to have millions of community mods because the emotional investment I have in your channel makes me want to protect it as a longtime viewer."

Sita Chantramonklasri, founder at Siam Capital

Chantramonklasri, who founded a VC fund focusing on the intersection of sustainability and tech and has made numerous investments in the space, believes there are opportunities at the AI and sustainability crossroads.

"The application of AI to climate and sustainability is going to be the difference between whether we do or don't get where we need to be in five years, 10 years, 20 years [in terms of climate change]," said Chantramonklasri. "AI is obviously a catchall phrase, but how I'm referring to it here is to describe this transformative technology that has the potential to close the gap on the data we have and the data we need – in some cases, that data's never existed before."

Navrina Singh, CEO at Credo AI

Singh said that there's a Sword of Damocles that hangs over AI's head, including the many existential risks that experts often focus on. But, she said, overreacting to worst-case scenarios isn't the best way to move forward. Fear of risks can be a "distraction" and take the focus away from the hard work of, say, developing regulations.

"The learning that we're going to get from solving problems right now is going to better equip us for future problems that systems are going to expose...very quickly," she said.

Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks and on LinkedIn.

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