As Generative AI (gen AI) has become a resounding buzzword throughout 2023, organisations in Singapore are warming up and waking up to its transformative possibilities.
In a recent panel discussion led by IBM executives in Singapore, the discourse centered on the benefits clients can derive from the technology. This includes improving customer and employee experience, boosting productivity, and facilitating modernisation. As the year draws to a close, executives navigate using the technology responsibly to build and maintain trust among users.
Gen AI solutions
Organisations are beginning to be interested in leveraging gen AI capabilities for greater productivity and efficiency. With the launch of watsonx, IBM’s data and AI platform, organisations can infuse the core operations of their businesses with gen AI capabilities. Colin Tan, GM & technology leader at IBM Singapore shared the launch of a collection of gen AI models in the watsonx Granite model series.
It was an industry-first to publish information about training methodology for the foundational model as well as providing IP indemnity (contractual protection) for our foundation models. This enables clients to be more confident AI creators.
“I believe IBM is one of the companies that should provide indemnity on the third-party IP rights. We are so confident because we even share the data sources that make up the granite models,” Tan says.
Accelerating Generative AI
Ng Lai Yee, Singapore managing partner and country leader at IBM Consulting identifies three key domains where gen AI contributes to organisations’ efficiency and productivity: customer experience, talent productivity, and modernisation.
Bouygues Telecom is a standout example, utilising gen AI to drive their strategic vision for contact center optimisation, resulting in enhanced customer, projected to save $5 million annually.
“We're breaking out to help our clients when they want to do HR transformation journeys. Internally, we've done that and IBM has experienced an improvement in our HR productivity with this generative AI capability that we've put in,” explains Ng.
“The third area is app modernisation. We're helping our clients to cloud migration and modernisation. We are also embedding gen AI into solutions for our clients, whether they went on a journey to create lots of APIs whether to have Gen AI models, optimise APIs, look for duplicates, and hopefully integrate some of the APIs or even to do app generation,” NG adds.
Fostering a trusted AI
Despite the undeniable uses and advantages of gen AI, executives prioritise its responsible and ethical use. As it becomes more important to foster trust in the technology Purushothama Shenoy, CTO at IBM Singapore says that Singapore has been at the forefront of defining AI governance frameworks.
“Even during the use of traditional AI, Singapore has been at the forefront of defining AI governance framework and started defining principles. Now there are implementing how those principles can be put into practice, I think that's a big shift moving from principle to practice,” Shenoy shares.
Shenoy says that the company has been working with two organisations to drive trusted AI. The first is IMDA, which has set up the AI Verify Foundation to harness the collective power and contributions of the global open-source community to develop AI Verify testing tool for the responsible use of AI. The second is the Monetary Authority of Singapore which helps them provide a complete AI lifecycle governance tool for continuous monitoring of operations.
As 2024 approaches, the use of generative AI will be automatic for most organisations in Singapore. However, a deeper question remains: Will organisations be able to prioritise using the technology through the lens of responsibility, transparency, and ethics? The answer affirms organisations’ commitment to fostering a trusted AI landscape in Singapore.
