By Udo Thiele, Head of Development and Modernisation at EasiRun
A colleague shared a short story with me recently when we met for a chat. Let me share that story: “My mum is retired but still does a few hours’ work for a small payroll company. Not that long ago, she told me that she regularly asks A-1 for advice about more complex subject matter questions and situations.”
“What is A-1?” my colleague asked. Her answer: “Well it’s this program they introduced a while back.” She then showed my colleague what she meant, who could not help but laugh. Thinking that my colleague was laughing about her, his mum was, at first, a bit insulted. But what really made my colleague laugh was a thought that had come to him suddenly: “My 73-year old mother has to show me, an IT specialist, where the future lies.”
Between skepticism and potential
Just like me, my colleague is an engineer. Naturally, like most engineers, he – like me – has a healthy skepticism towards anything that is not proven to be a fact deterministically or statistically likely to be true. Even today, I would not use artificial intelligence as the sole decision-maker for anything that affects human lives or critical data processing.
But, beyond those questionable use cases, AI in fact has lots of potential to substantially increase efficiency and productivity across a wide range of tasks. The challenge lies in telling apart pure marketing promises and visions of a handful of gurus from the real current possibilities. It is important that we don’t forget that human intelligence remains the crucial standard – many seemingly revolutionary AI-solutions are nothing more than swarm intelligence informed by human knowledge and thought processes, albeit cleverly re-packaged.
We should also carefully consider whether solutions are an innovative AI technology or merely existing functions that have been ingeniously re-labelled. After all, while they seem intelligent, often they are – admittedly very sophisticated – algorithms. In this context, those who can distinguish between real innovation and marketing stand a good chance to successfully use AI.
Our practical experience
At EasiRun, we have been considering how best to use the potentials and advantages AI offers internally and for our customers alike for some time. We test small local and large cloud-based AI models across a whole range of providers for a variety of projects and ideas. In doing so, we gain significant experience about the do’s and the dont’s.
We also work with academic institutions for particularly complex projects. AI is now used in our day-to-day business as usual: to write and edit texts, to identify new and potential business, to assist software development, and to design test cases.
Of course, all of this requires patience and AI users must learn how to design good quality prompts that will lead to usable results. The results in turn must be quality assured and carefully reviewed, which also takes some time. Nonetheless, the use of AI results in significantly improved quality and productivity.
Last but not least, we have many colleagues in our company for whom German is not their first language. For them, AI is a helpful tool to polish their thoughts and work output in German – from emails, over documentation, to sophisticated publications for media. This is a step-change and allows us to free up important resources for our core topics and competences.
More than a hype
Considering that the current AI-wave started a mere three years ago when AI chatbots became widely available, it is obvious that there is hardly another technology that has profoundly affected how we work in so many ways, across so many sectors, in such a short time, as AI.
The hype of the first few months and years has now passed. Despite today’s more realistic expectations of AI, this technology is here to stay and still has huge future potential.
We actively follow these developments and look forward to this future. And we would be delighted to support your company to successfully exploit all the opportunity that AI offers you. Speak with us!
