Can Artificial Intelligence help businesses in the Highlands?
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Alfie Tiley and Vyron Christodoulou, data scientists at The Data Lab answered our questions about AI and what role it can play in business...
Q: What are the benefits of using technology like ChatGPT and Google Bard?
A: "ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are both natural language-processing Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots. They take free-form (usually) text prompts or questions from the user and provide a natural language response.
"They have been around in some form since the 1960s, but significant advancements since then mean that chatbots in their most recent form, like ChatGPT and Bard, are an extremely potent technology. Built on large language models trained on vast volumes of data, including large swathes of the internet, they are incredibly versatile – meaning they can tackle many tasks they were not explicitly instructed to do.
"This, combined with being user-friendly and publicly available for free, has likely helped drive their exceptionally rapid uptake amongst individuals and the business world (ChatGPT is reported to be the fastest-growing app in history).
"The use cases for chatbots as powerful as ChatGPT and Bard are extensive and ever- growing as users continue to explore and test the limits of the technology.
"Often mentioned benefits include their assistance in accelerating or automating repetitive tasks or learning new topics. But they can also be deployed, for example, to help increase user creativity by generating new ideas or helping to riff on existing ones, to write fully functioning code from scratch, to debug or explain existing faulty code, or to translate directly between human languages.
"From an industry perspective, businesses should look to deploy chatbots like ChatGPT or Bard with caution.
"Chatbots tend to “hallucinate"; to provide convincing but entirely madeup answers in an authoritative tone. So entirely replacing human employees with this technology, for example, has the potential for serious unforeseen negative consequences down the line as insidious mistakes in the chatbots’ outputs are missed.
"Therefore, the real value of adopting these technologies by businesses lies in helping human experts to do their jobs better and faster. Experts assisted by powerful AI chatbots can carry out existing work, learn new skills, and accrue new knowledge with substantially improved efficiency.
"But their existing domain knowledge must be broad enough and deep enough to catch any subtle hallucination errors from the chatbots."
Q: How can AI help small businesses in the Highlands and Moray?
A: "AI can and has been applied in various ways to provide data-driven decision-making to SMEs.
"It has been used to help NatureScot with protecting Scotland’s wildlife by detecting and classifying various species. It automatically processed thousands of images with high accuracy and helped scientists save time from manually labelling images.
"In the food and drinks sector, AI has been applied by the Highland Food and Drink Innovation Network to optimise its logistics and save on operational costs for both logistics service providers and food and drink manufacturers.
"On the renewable energy front, monitoring and maintaining the performance of small to medium hydro energy assets can be a time-consuming process for nontraditional energy companies, such as farmers, estates, community groups, and councils, who typically own them.
Lochaber-based Energy Mutual applied AI to help design an optimisation framework for energy usage, a step towards developing a larger framework to optimise energy storage.
"Overall, AI, when applied ethically, can help SMEs by providing datadriven solutions. It can assist humans with their day-to-day jobs; automate menial tasks, help protect the environment, increase revenue, reduce costs, or optimise efficiency, all with the power of data and AI."
Q: Are we on the cusp of another industrial revolution?
A: "It is extremely hard to tell. Certainly ChatGPT, for example, has received huge and sustained attention from the global media and an unprecedented rate of user uptake.
"It has been hailed by many (including prominent figures like Bill Gates) as a truly revolutionary technology. ChatGPT, Bard, and other generalised, generative AI technologies indeed appear transformative, with the potential to rapidly boost the productivity of businesses across numerous sectors, saving employees time and effort and reducing friction in human-machine (and human-human) communication. And to date, their enthusiastic uptake and continued rapid development show no sign of abating.
"Given wide enough adoption, we might expect corresponding boosts to national or global economies that embrace these technologies, as AI efficiencies translate into increased productivity.
"However, whether such a widespread economic boom is realised really depends on whether the technology lives up to its promise, as well as the pace and extent to which it is adopted amongst the industry.
"Other factors such as privacy and data protection legislation or government regulation might also restrict its use or temper its uptake in the future.
"Lastly, even if generative AI delivers on its potential, this does not necessarily mean that the benefits will be felt equally across the economy and society. Historically, disruptive and transformative technologies have displaced workers from jobs - as they render certain roles redundant – but have also created new jobs in roles related to the new technology.
"In any new industrial revolution, the hope would be that the rate at which new roles were created would at least match that at which old roles were extinguished. However, it cannot be taken for granted that this will be the case in the future. Nor whether displaced workers would even be able to transition into newly created roles without substantial delays or additional training."
Q: How do you support small businesses with these technological changes?
A: Data is a powerful tool that can help almost all businesses grow and achieve better outcomes.
However, identifying those opportunities — and then successfully delivering on these — can be challenging, particularly when resources are limited.
At The Data Lab, we help businesses discover growth opportunities that data and AI present, develop their networks and connect them with knowledge and expertise to help them boost their productivity.
We work with small and medium enterprises from various sectors, such as technology, manufacturing, hospitality and food and beverage suppliers.
We have helped over 1,000 Scottish SMEs benefit from our innovation and skills services and connect to the Scottish data and technology ecosystem.
We offer advice, training, networking opportunities, and funding access, regardless of where you are in your data journey – whether you are just starting to look at data in your business or on your way to implementing a data strategy.
The Data Lab’s Highlands & Islands Hub supports businesses to harness the power of data, from access to academic expertise, student placements, and funding.
If you want to find out more about the support available to your business, contact Pauline Graham, business development executive for Highlands & Islands Hub at: Pauline.Graham@thedatalab.com
