By Victoria “NIKE” De Dios
It is undeniable that the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has caused varying opinions across the organization or even in the boardroom given the various issues that confront this technology.
Issue such as AI will replace the job of human beings given the fact that its primary purpose is to be efficient and help the productivity rate of a business. While for others, it is just a labor-saving device.
Regardless of one’s point of view, many enterprises have already adopted the use of AI as this is not just a trend, but also a necessary tool that helps to enhance business operations, boost productivity, and grow significantly.
Erika Fille Legara, Managing Director at Center for AI Research (CAIR), shared how small and medium enterprises in the Philippines can take advantage of the free services offered by a research center harnessing the use of artificial intelligence (AI). She cited two ways in which how AI can affect or benefit not just SMEs but also all businesses regardless of the size.
“First, it will improve the general business landscape –procurement, etc, etc. but internally, it could also enhance your own business operations introducing levels of innovation in terms of efficiencies,” she said during the general membership meeting of the Philippine Exporters Confederation Inc. (PHILEXPORT).
However, Legara said SMEs face obstacles to AI adoption, including data scarcity, culture, no clear business case, cost, capability and understanding.
“Even for big companies, culture is a problem. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We’ve been doing this since 1980s, why change it? So if the leadership has that level of culture, it is difficult for us. But these barriers can seem really daunting especially for SMEs but they are precisely why they set up the Center for AI Research which we just launched last week,” she said.
“Then there’s data scarcity especially for SMEs, all (data) are recorded using notebooks or log books and it’s not yet digitized so how can we build machine learning models if your data is everything manual?,” she added.
Legara said entrepreneurs do not have a certain level of expertise to collect data, they just need to know how to input these data in the computer like in Excel, or from paper to Excel.
“It is really digitizing –something that the machine or the computer can readily analyze,” she said. “If there is demand even from this group on digitization, we are actually exploring not us who will do it but we will look for partners who can help you digitize and encode all the information as a start.
In the coming years, Legara said the Center will focus on sector-specific AI innovations.
She said it aims to tackle challenges in manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture and beyond leveraging AI to create tailored solutions.
“We are housing full-time data scientists (and AI professionals), we hired (high-paying) people so we can just focus on defining your use case, giving us your data and let’s build the solution for you and it’s tailored-fit really for your own businesses,” she added.
Legara said the CAIR has the capacity to share both personnel and computational resources as needed.
“Typically, the enterprises we worked with sometimes do not know what they have and what they do not have so we will help like walk you through and even give you questions so that you can also ask internally whether or not you have these data sets. Sometimes you have data but it is not something that you can share so there is no AI-driven model that we can do for that one,” she told companies in mixed English and Filipino.