businessinfomag.uk 32 magazine PRODUCTIVITY In September, as part of its LogiWORK event series, Logitech hosted a panel discussion on AI and productivity at the London offices of Deliveroo. James Goulding reports Ask the experts: AI & productivity taking their first steps in AI, Amelia Kallman uses it to improve her writing skills. She is currently writing the first draft of her third book and turns to AI when she needs help to articulate a point or make her copy more descriptive. “It’ll come up with 10 different ways to say something. It’s very rare that one of them is exactly what I’m looking for, but it enables me to say I like this and I like that. Using it as a tool in that way means my first draft is a bit more like a second draft,” she said. Kallman added that easy productivity gains such as these have accelerated AI adoption to the point where ChatGPT now has 200 million active weekly users and is being used by 92% of Fortune 500 companies. In her role as a consultant, Kallman has witnessed businesses using AI in a similar way to how she uses it in her writing, not just to save time but to reach an outcome that synthesises input from human and machine. “I recently consulted for an agency that works with experts in different fields. They put all that expertise into a model that they queried and asked to come up with a future scenario and three potential strategies for addressing it. They could have stopped there and given that to the client. But what’s really interesting is they then went back to the experts and asked ‘What do you think about this?’. Two of those strategies were dismissed but one was quite meaningful and is not something any one of those experts would have come up with on their own. For me, it’s about how we can use AI as a tool to enhance and amplify our own intelligence.” achieve more with less – less time, less resources, less money, less people. Everything that’s digital today is going to become AI‑enabled, and everything that’s AI-enabled we’re going to be able to communicate with through natural language conversation. I like to think of it as an evolution of a tool, like the microscope or the telescope that allowed us to see into things that we could not see on our own. Now, we’re able to merge disparate data sets to identify patterns that we otherwise couldn’t see.” Doing more with less Panellists’ use of AI to date has mainly been as a timesaving personal productivity tool, notwithstanding its use by developers and technicians in the creation of entrepreneur Grace Beverley’s new AI venture, Retrograde, an end-to-end autopilot for managing and automating creators’ interactions with clients, from initial contact and negotiation to the briefing and contracting stages and finally invoicing. Logitech’s own Anatoliy Polyanker describes AI as an all-in-one personal assistant, interpreter and consultant that helps him save time and make decisions faster. As an example, he explained how he had prompted ChatGPT to compare two very technical, detailed solar panel quotes for his house in Switzerland. Within seconds, it had produced a side-by-side comparison of the two and how they compared to the market in his area, cutting a two-hour task down to one that took five minutes. In common with most people Logitech has been focused on the productivity of computer users since it was founded in 1981, starting out as a manufacturer of computer peripherals, such as keyboards and mice, before diversifying into the related areas of music, gaming and video. More recently, it has been exploring the potential of AI to boost the productivity of its customers by building AI features into its products. These range from Logi AI Prompt Builder, which gives instant access to ChatGPT from Logitech mice and keyboards, to AI-powered object detection in video bars (turn to page 16 to see how Logitech is using this capability to automate and streamline the booking and release of meeting rooms). Moderator Viviane Paxinos started out by asking the panellists (see box) for their understanding of AI and how they are using it in their daily lives. Futurist Amelia Kallman pointed out that most discussions today refer to generative AI, which she compared to the emergence of the microscope or the telescope. “Since October 2022, what we’ve been talking about specifically is generative AI, and this is the biggest thing to happen to AI in our lifetime. So far. Not only has it become free and accessible and available for everyone, but it’s able to sift through and select from unlabelled and unstructured data, and this is unlocking the second half of automation,” she said. “We’re moving out of this age of digital transformation into an age of AI transformation when we are going to be able to
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