This week on BizWorthy, we’re spending the entire conversation on artificial intelligence and the opportunities and challenges it presents. The Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter is devoting its coverage this week exclusively to those topics. And the Ledger’s Tony Mecia joins us now.
Marshall Terry: You spoke to some businesses in the Charlotte area about how they are already experimenting with AI. In particular, The Ledger looked at banking and finance. What did you find?
Tony Mecia: They've been at it for a while. I mean, the big banks have been putting money into artificial intelligence for some time. They all have chatbots where you can, you know, check your account balance, get information about your account. You know, Bank of America's is named Erika. Wells Fargo has a virtual assistant named Fargo. Truist has one called Truist Assist — not as catchy of a name, in my opinion. They're also using it for some sort of functions that customers don't necessarily see. You apply for a loan. There are ways you can process loan applications using computers that don't require as many humans.
Terry: What other industries are already using AI, and how?
Mecia: You know, it's really sort of exploded into the public consciousness in the last year because of the rise of ChatGPT. But there is artificial intelligence in our everyday lives and a lot of consumer products. You know, you think of Amazon Alexa, you think of an iPhone or speech-to-text sort of applications. You know, one of the most immediate applications where I think we're seeing a lot of people experimenting with it is in areas like writing, editing, marketing — where you can take ChatGPT, give it some instructions and it can spit out very quickly text that is pretty decent, you know, that can kind of resemble writing of a human. And I mean there are errors in it oftentimes. But they're often errors in things that humans write, too. So, a lot of people we talked to said, well, we don't exactly know where it's going, but we feel like it's important to start trying it out.
Terry: So those are some of the opportunities that AI presents and some things that are already being done. What about challenges for businesses as far as AI goes?
Mecia: Yeah, when we talk to businesses for the series this week, some of them said you still need a human checking this stuff because there are inaccuracies that come out — and it's known as hallucinating, is what they call it. Sometimes it will make up the answer — which is a huge problem. It's one thing if you're writing marketing materials. It's something else, you know, if you're dealing with, say, in a health care setting — where you really need it to be accurate, for example. So that's a challenge. The tech companies are working on that. And for businesses, you know, they just have to be mindful of that. The other consideration, Marshall, is data security in areas like banking and finance, and areas where you have sensitive customer information. If you're a business, you don't just want to be experimenting with AI on the open web. Hackers can get into it. So you want to make sure that you have those security considerations as well.
Terry: An economist with Goldman Sachs recently predicted that AI could automate as many as a quarter of the jobs in the U.S. and Europe. Obviously, that's not something workers want to hear. But what's the view from business owners, though? I mean, to be blunt, are bankers about to see their jobs replaced by machines like mill workers were a few generations ago?
Mecia: Well, I think there's some of that going on. You've already seen some job losses in some industries from companies saying, you know, we don't really need human workers anymore. We can outsource this to chatbots. Writing that doesn't require creativity, marketing, design. There are some of those areas where you actually have started to see some of those job losses. But a lot of business workers that we talked to for this series said that they really view it as a productivity tool, not as much as, 'OK, well, we're going to lay some people off and turn it all over to ChatGPT.' But really, the choice that they see is, well, either we don't do these things, or we do them with computers. There are all these jobs that we used to have that we no longer have anymore. Telephone operators, you know, pushing the cables into the little sockets to connect the call. We don't have whole bunch of telephone operators on the streets who are unemployed. And people went on to do other things, and it's hard for people who are displaced, but that's sort of another step in the advance of technology. And businesses see it as an opportunity to be able to do more things than they could have with, you know, the same number or in some cases, fewer people.
Terry: So going forward, what do you think? Is AI going to be as revolutionary as the internet, electricity and the steam engine, or is it overhyped?
Mecia: The CEO of Google's parent company said that he considers work on AI that they're doing to potentially be more significant than the invention of fire. And, you know, it's not just ChatGPT. There's a much wider application in terms of things like data analysis, processing and the interaction with humans on all of that. It's not just a fad, I don't think. I think it's something that's here to stay. And it's a technology that I think we're all going to have to — like it or not — get used to over the next few years.
Support for WFAE's BizWorthy comes from Sharon View Federal Credit Union and our listeners.
