Northern Echo's BUSINESSiQ holds Newcastle Level Up event about AI

The event was part of the Level Up campaign for jobs and investment and was held at the Newcastle offices of transatlantic law firm Womble Bond Dickinson. There were two panels for our audience, one comprising Level Up campaign partners and one of AI experts.

Our Level Up partners

Sarah Daun, Partner at Womble Bond Dickinson; Gary Carr, Regional IT director at Cummins; Dan Kitchen, CEO of razorblue; Marion Ingleby, Interim Head of Digital Services at Durham County Council; Colin Tempest, Director of Technology & Digital Solutions at believe housing and Tim Marsden, Knowledge Manager at North East England Chamber of Commerce.

Our AI experts

Eric Applewhite, Director Analytics at Deloitte; Caroline Churchill, Partner at Womble Bond Dickinson; Dominic Lusardi, Chief Information Officer at SeerBI and Lucy Batley, Owner of Traction Industries.

Join the Level Up campaign (Image: Newsquest)

During his welcome speech Nigel Emmerson, who leads WBD's Newcastle office, told the audience: "Womble Bond Dickinson have been here just short of a year but it was about 18 months ago we joined the Northern Echo campaign and it has been one of the best things we've done.

"It's been brilliant, the coverage we're had and the publicity has been great. And I think the campaign has achieved a great deal. Levelling up is really important to us, and we see this office as part of our statement to the region that we are totally committed to it and we want to play our part in leading the North East. More and better jobs is what we're about."

Dan Kitchen, CEO of the newest member of the Level Up team, told us change was continually happening: “Tech has come on huge amounts in such a short period. I think technology was relatively simple at one point, and it's now become very complex, there's a huge amount of different specialisms and it has gone from being a utility to being the thing that runs every business, and that sort of transformation from it being something you use, to something that you need as a critical part, is a huge thing.

Dan Kitchen (Image: Newsquest)

“Now as we go into the coming years with AI’s capabilities, that's going to change what we do. If you want to maintain competitiveness in a marketplace, you've got to have that investment in tech and automation, or you're going to be left behind.

“I thought it was an interesting point when we are talking about having a panel of experts on AI that none of us have got more than a few years experience in that field because it is moving at such a ridiculous pace.”

Sarah Daun said the tech expertise we are building was impressing investors.

She told our audience: “I think a lot of this is about momentum. Once as a region, you start to get more and more people collaborating together it almost has a snowball effect. So you get somebody in a particular space doing something like an AI business, the more people that then attracts to the region.

Sarah Daun (Image: Newsquest)

“We're at the centre of a real opportunity here, given the health industry that we have, and the heavy manufacturing, the energy projects that are going to happen in the region, all of the work on decarbonisation, the existing FinTech platform we've got - that all will help to attract other people to come into the region. And then when you combine what we've already got, from a tech perspective, with the supportive and collaborative ecosystem that we've got with Dynamo, Sunderland Software City, Cyber North, and the fabulous universities, it's a perfect storm for a region that's really going places in the digital space.”

At believe housing, Colin Tempest added: “I think increasingly, technology strategy drives business strategy. We're doing a lot of work at the moment with digital transformation, as I'm sure a lot of people in the audience are, and we've got this vision that we want to deliver an effortless customer experience for people when they're dealing with us through online channels.

Colin Tempest (Image: Newsquest)

“The challenge for us is all the bits and pieces in the background, the legacy technology, the old clunky processes, we have that kind of inhibitor in terms of achieving that vision.

“Our solution to that is, through programmes like cloud adoption, moving to a more modular platforms based approach, where you can have an ecosystem of products where you can plug in tools like AI, vision, diagnostic tools, smart assistants, and bring that together to try and create something in a much more agile way, so we're not building things from scratch anymore.”

Marion Ingleby was asked about the scale of the Council’s work as they roll out tech across the county. She said: “We've got some fabulous people that are trying to do some amazing things to make a difference to people - so how do we harness that potential? How do we harness that talent that we've got within the region? How do we create aspiration?

Marion Ingleby (Image: Newsquest)

“I think part of the space that I'm particularly interested in is digital inclusion and the improvement we can make for people through a move to digital delivery of services.

“We have 140 services that we offer via online service, but we know that isn't for everybody. And that might be because we actually just don't physically have connectivity into the areas where they live. How do we get that connectivity there? Because if we haven't got people connected, they can’t actually engage in the conversation and be part of what's going on.

“We have to create that aspiration in young people that they want to engage in the digital sector, and see that as a career for themselves.”

At engineering giant Cummins, Gary Carr is at the centre of tech every day. He told our audience in Newcastle: “Tech has become a real enabler for the business.

“When I first started atCummins, 27 years ago, it was more of a necessary evil. Now, we can't do anything across the business without involving it, and it is the cornerstone for everything we do from manufacturing and supply chain, into our customer service.

Gary Carr (Image: Newsquest)

“Over the last few years, we've seen some big leaps with the technology and we are trying to balance up between the manufacturing aspect where you've got big expensive machines moving through the line to then how do you actually take that technology and use it to give you a competitive advantage with products?

“We've got a lot of technology now in the products that go out to customers, so we gather a lot of data from that and we do a lot of machine learning and analytics to help us understand where we can do performance improvements, fuel efficiencies and predictive maintenance.

“You've got to balance what's right for the business rather than going too fast and trip yourselves up trying to adopt technology which doesn't fit. In different marketplaces, yes, we're behind but I think in the manufacturing space we're trying to push and not be bleeding edge, but be close enough forward that we can leverage the technology changes that come along.”

Tim Marsden told us: “The North East England Chamber of Commerce does work across all sorts of sectors and large and small to find out how businesses grow.

“I think their reaction to tech is a bit mixed, to be honest.

Tim Marsden (Image: Newsquest)

“Engineering and manufacturing companies are tending to embrace it a little bit more, with the likes of robotics, but that in itself raised concerns about whether they are replacing or enhancing existing staff.

“What do we do with those staff who may be affected – do we retrain or risk losing them altogether?

“On a broader basis, I would liken the rise of AI to where we were with social media ten years ago. We didn’t understand much of it and wondered where it was all going, so some of our members are being cautious about AI and there is some scepticism because it is so fast-moving and some businesses need to consider the best route forward.”

In the next panel discussion about where that AI growth will take us, Dominic Lusardi gave us some fascinating background: “The speed of change is AI’s very nature because what you do today will be built on tomorrow,” he said.

“Where we've seen this fundamental change, and this acceleration really came around was cloud computing, a fundamental element that has enabled this ‘zero latency’ networking. It's important to understand a little bit about computing – in that you have this thing called a computing stack, which you go in and you go through a network card and through the motherboard and all of these things to get to what it is you want to do.

Dominic Lusardi (Image: Newsquest)

"The technology fundamentally changed that and you could go straight to the CPU. So what would you do with that? Quite honestly, a lot of us would have no idea. Maybe access data very quickly?

“You can imagine where that went fairly quickly after that. Rather than have some databases that work very slowly and don't communicate efficiently between each other, I can now have databases or data that can cross communicate with zero latency. So I can query a dataset of 10 billion records and get an instant response.

“So that's kind of where we found ourselves with AI, even though it had been around in very basic format – if you've played Mario Kart that's the perfect example. You're battling against the computer that is effectively AI.”

Lucy Batley told us how AI ‘thinks’ and gets smarter: “It's taking a massive amount of data and becoming a data hoover, and then all it's doing is looking for patterns. People think data is this mythical magic dust that floats around – but it's just information.

Lucy Batley (Image: Newsquest)

“So you've got different types of information and Chat GPT is basically taking all the information off the internet and Wikipedia and books and then using statistical analysis to predict the next word. So it's almost like the next version of predictive text. It's understanding patterns and then making predictions from it.”

Caroline Churchill added: “It speaks back to us in a way that we can relate to as a human. Chat GPT can produce a very articulate article with content that is grammatically correct. If you read through it, you think that that must be the answer, it sounds so accurate, but it's because of the the datasets it is looking at. The accuracy of what goes in will always impact what comes out the other end.”

Eric Applewhite looked at the human side of AI and said: “AI is not sentient, but as humans we also operate a neural network. We also take in tonnes of data, curate it and then try to predict on a token basis what to do next and what patterns match.

“It's like kissing cousins, right? We're so close, it's almost scary, but we’re not the same thing.

Eric Applewhite (Image: Newsquest)

“AI has been around for a while, but what's changing now is the power of cloud, and the amount that we can process and that's going to continue to get more powerful. The next thing that's changed is hardware has gotten way better.

“The Nvidia chips that do the processing and other types of chips are getting better and better and better at processing the data to operate the neural networks.

“That's taken us to a point now where not quite yet, but some of what AI can do will be indistinguishable - and it's not science fiction, but there's an ethics issue about keeping human beings at the centre of co-piloting AI. We have to maintain our role as pilot because this is going to be like a generational challenge for us.”

For our hosts Womble Bond Dickinson, Caroline Churchil looked at the legislation side of AI.

She said: “The view from the UK perspective is to have sector-led guidance, and there is already legislation in place to deal with using AI in particular contexts. For example, if you are using AI, to run through those large datasets to predict what somebody's going to do next, and you're involving personal data, then that's already regulated under the UK General Data Protection Regulation.

Caroline Churchill (Image: Newsquest)

“We have things around fairness and discrimination, and how AI can distort that and other pieces of legislation that deal with fairness under the Equality Act, and discrimination with the Equality Act.

“But we also have our consumer laws around things such as Dark Patterns, which try and predict what you're going to do next to sell you something. The government's idea is to have industry sectors produce their own guidance because they are the specialists in that area.

“We also use AI in our own business, as well as a lot of guidance on how we are using it and processing personal data. The Information Commissioner's Office has done a lot of really good work around issued guidance on making sure it's fair as you do your impact assessment around the use of AI, raising transparency.

“One of the big things is making sure there's transparency around decisions made with AI. And I think for me, that's the bit that excites me, and scares me at the same time. Because when I see something online I know that obviously, I'm being monitored and profiled to an extent.

"When a helpful suggestion comes up, quite often it's exactly what I'm looking for and I think that's really great from a tech perspective. But I have to put my privacy hat on and think what else they're looking at and what else is being monitored.”

• Our next Level Up live event will be in August when we will be talking about the global side of our North East businesses, with a focus on exports and international partnerships. For more about how you can get involved in the campaign, contact ryan.fenwick@localiq.co.uk.