The AI Roadshow in Christchurch 2024
It was a pleasure to attend the 2024 AI Roadshow with an awesome turn out & engaging speakers held at the classic limes room in the Christchurch Town Hall. Some excellent speakers talked us through the newer AI tooling & changes in the industry since it exploded onto the tech landscape in 2022 with OpenAI’s ChatGPT becoming the most quickly adopted software in history.
There was a mix of techies, senior execs and business owners wanting to understand GenAI tooling better - the benefits & the risks it can bring.
There’s no doubt for business users it can create efficiencies in the three areas highighted below:
1) Chatbots / AI Agents
2) Document Creation - ie RFP responses, board reports, responding to emails etc
3) Company Brain (central system) - to bring together disparate systems, document management & workflow automation
Sarah from AWS did a great talk and shared data from a recent study in which they conducted across New Zealand from 1700 employees and 513 employers. Some results on the two pics below…
Whether you like GenAI or not it’s accessible and free to all users so people will use it in your business so it’s best to adopt a policy on it. Embrace it and choose some safe ways to use these new tools for your business…because as they say…the genie is out of the bottle.
What is an Agentic workflow?
An Agentic workflow is an innovative process of interacting with LLMs to complete complex tasks and produce outputs that are significantly more accurate than traditional methods. It’s done by splitting up the outcome into smaller chunks and using different prompts into the GenAI tool to create a more accurate outcome as the diagram shows above.
So what are the future predictions from the AI experts?
Thanks again for a well organised event, those who spoke and those who came along - let’s hope we can do it all again next year!
I’m Paul, lover of coffee, dogs, biking, surfing & skiing. Founder & Principal Consultant of Sunstone, an IT Recruitment & HR company specialising in recruiting IT roles within software, web, mobile, AI, blockchain, data, cloud infrastructure, security & networks in Christchurch & South Island of New Zealand.