One of our international keynote speakers at the L&D + HR Symposium, Daniel Hulme, Chief AI Officer, WPP (UK), presented his insightful keynote on skills-first Artificial Intelligence at the L&D + HR Symposium 2023. Several key topics emerged from the audience’s questions at the event; here, he gives his responses.

1. Alarmist
Alarmism comes from a lack of understanding. It’s important that business and government leaders – in fact, everyone – is educated about the challenges and opportunities. It’s important to understand the applications of AI and the value they can bring; there are plenty of case-studies. It’s important to understand the immediate risk associated with AI’s opaqueness around decisions as well as if they overachieve their goals. But it’s also important to understand and create regulations against the macro risk, the PESTLE of Singularities.

2. Bias
Some types of AI technologies are easy to check and eradicate bias – optimisation for one. Machine learning (or LLM-based) is inherently bias, they generalize the world like we do, and there will typically always be examples where they get it wrong. There are two types of bias; one from not having a diverse training data set, and then other is in the objective or intent. The former is a question of safety, and later a question of ethics.

3. Choice
Use an AI advisor that can help identify who are authentic and who are snake oil. Use the 6 applications of AI to make sure you’re matching the right approach to solving the problem: https://www.wpp.com/en/wpp-iq/2023/02/how-should-we-think-about-ai

4. Upskill
Honestly, you can provide plenty of L&D opportunities, but employing people who are curious means they are usually proactive and ahead of the company.

5. Content creation
I wrote a little about this top in a recent article on Generative AI: https://blog.satalia.com/beyond-chatgpt-generative-ai-is-just-one-small-part-of-a-cambrian-explosion-of-innovation

6. Mental capacity
I believe that humans always have a desire to know and create. I think AI will unlock more of us to do that and do it exponentially.

7. Focus
How to cultivate creativity and critical thinking.

8. Leadership
Listen to my keynote 🙂

Note: The only way to listen to the keynotes is to attend the Symposium, so don’t miss the opportunity at the next event! The L&D + HR Symposium brings together 180+ enterprise L&D Leaders in the beautiful Hunter Valley