Inuwa reiterated this in his keynote address on “Artificial Intelligence: Effective Communication for National Security” at the 2023 Security and Spokespersons Awards and Conference which held in Abuja.

Alluding to the fact that Artificial Intelligence(AI) is already changing daily lives, almost entirely in ways that improve human health, safety, and productivity, Inuwa averred that AI is beyond a tool, as it is a new way of building a relationship between humans and machines.

“In building that relationship, we need to look beyond just having a tool we use for our daily activities and start thinking in the direction of developing a system which can help meet certain human needs”, Inuwa said.

While highlighting some of the benefits of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, the Director-General said that the algorithm which is the AI that powers social media is a machine that needs to be trained and controlled, to avoid it spiralling out of control.

“Due to the happenings on social media, industry practitioners are pushing for ‘explainability in the AI’, also referred to as ‘black box’ within the AI algorithm.”

“Imagine having a system that makes decisions for us and does not understand the way it came about making that decision, now, that is indeed a red flag, having AI go out of control, so, we need to get AI to be always for humanity, because it is the most existential threat to humanity today”, the DG stressed.

Inuwa said, “countries around the world are making efforts toward deciphering the functionalities of artificial intelligence and coming up with policies and putting standards in place to ensure they are AI ready countries, and so Nigeria cannot take the back seat”.

“In Nigeria, we are looking at it from three perspectives: having AI ready principles, data and AI ready security”.

“This invariably means that as a matter of principle, we should have redlined that AI must not cross, to achieve this, last year we started our journey by crowdsourcing on how to build National AI Policy and we have the first draft ready”, Inuwa maintained.

According to Inuwa, “when the present administration came onboard, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu mandated the Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy to accelerate the diversification of the Nigerian economy by enhancing productivity in critical sectors through technological innovation, and we strongly believe that to achieve this, AI is our best tool to use in that regard”.

“To take this further, we launched a call for research, where we are offering a grant to forty-five Nigerians to do research on Artificial Intelligence, so that we get a feedback on how to use AI in Health, Education, Agriculture, Finance, Security and many more.”

“We are giving up to N5Million to each researcher because we want to co-create and design the policy collaboratively, not the government using armchair theories to come up with the policies, we need everybody to be onboard”, the Director-General noted.

The NITDA Boss who also emphasised the need to speed up efforts to connect the unconnected in order for them to be digitally feasible ahead of the AI adoption and deployment in the country, added that if they are infeasible, the AI will not consider them while making decisions.

Inuwa who went on to explain other perspectives, including data and security, sued for global standards for the regulation of AI.

“We are seeing how AI is becoming biased, gender biased and even exhibiting racist behaviour, partly because of the data used to develop it. So, if you develop an AI system amd train it in another country and decide to take it elsewhere, it will not work, hence, the need for global data for every one use to train it”, Inuwa enunciated.

Also harping on Nigeria’s abundant resources, talents and youthful population, Inuwa affirmed that the country has a competitive advantage in becoming the frontier in digital technological innovation.

“Although we lost out during the first, second and third Industrial Revolutions because they needed capital investment but in the fourth, we can use our talents to compete with any country in the world, given the fact that talent is the human component of technology”.

“To achieve this, the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, unveiled the Strategic Plan for the Ministry which has strategic pillars, including, Knowledge, Policies, Infrastructure, and Trade”, the DG mentioned.

In conclusion, Inuwa avowed that AI is a top priority for NITDA as the Agency’s National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR) underpins the attention drawn to it.

The event which was the 5th in its series was organised by Image Merchant Promotion Ltd in conjunction with Coalition Society Organizations also featured presentations on Security and Spokespersons Communication Awards as well as goodwill messages.

The post AI Offers Nigeria Good Opportunity to Increase Sectoral Productivity – DG NITDA appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Businesses are embracing AI and increasing productivity across every industry, with 45% of executive leaders reporting increased investments in AI.

Early enterprise adopters are already seeing the benefits, and freeing up more than 30% of time from every employee so they can be more strategic and creative.

Moving forward, every company will undergo an AI transformation to increase productivity and drive efficiency.

As the technology continues to advance, it is becoming easier than ever to apply its insights and tailored content to everyday business decisions.

By infusing trusted AI across every job, business, and industry, together we can unlock a more productive, innovative business economy.

Nowhere is the potential for transformation more clear than with conversational AI – assisting users within their flow of work, enabling them to ask questions in natural language, and receive relevant and trustworthy answers that are grounded in secure company data.

The capability to offer options for additional actions beyond the user’s query – such as a recommended action plan after a sales call, or creating a new service knowledge article – is fundamentally reshaping how people build and interact with business applications to achieve higher performance and job satisfaction.

At Dreamforce recently, Salesforce introduced the next generation of Einstein, its AI technology, bringing conversational AI to any workflow, user, department and industry. This includes Einstein Copilot – a trusted out-of-the-box conversational AI assistant, built into the user experience of every Salesforce application.

The great advantage of this technology is that it can be customised and built to the unique specifications of any business, allowing employees to easily integrate it into their day-to-day work.

For marketers, for example, it means benefiting from automatically generated email copy for campaigns, creating smarter campaign segmentation, and creating website landing pages based on personalised consumer browsing and buying preferences.

In commerce, it means taking care of complex and time-consuming tasks like managing multi-product catalogue data, creating product descriptions in multiple languages, personalising product promotions, and generating search engine optimisation (SEO) metadata that drive conversions.

Embedding AI assistants into websites will enhance customer interactions by powering real-time chat, or integrating with messaging platforms like WhatsApp, or SMS.

In healthcare, an administrator can automatically reduce patient scheduling no-shows and generate appointment summaries. In financial services, an advisor can analyse client spending and savings history to offer personalised coaching and create tailored plans and goals.

The need for secure AI architecture

Any business’ AI strategy is only as good as its data strategy. Yet today’s customer data has never been more fragmented.

On average, organisations are using 1,061 different applications, yet only 29% of them are currently integrated.

What companies really want is one connected platform or one that will connect all of their data. In this era of AI, organisations need a customer data platform that acts as a single source of truth enabling them to drive business resilience, meaningful customer engagement, and future growth.

With a secure AI architecture, teams can benefit from generative AI without compromising their customer data, while at the same time letting companies use their trusted data to improve generative AI responses.

It’s crucial that AI recommendations are reliable, and that users are enabled to train models on their own data and validate these responses. Every effort to mitigate harmful outputs by conducting bias, explainability, and robustness assessments should always be a priority in AI.

By combining an integrated customer data platform with a conversational AI platform that draws on secure, trusted data, business leaders and their employees can be confident in making better, data-driven decisions.

The era of generative AI is just getting started, but the full potential of this technology’s benefits is yet to be realised.

There is so much promise and opportunity for businesses to gain real value and growth, ultimately giving employees and customers a better experience.

The post Trusted, Conversational AI will Drive Productivity & Decision-making – Here’s How  appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.