Chief Executive Officer of Intelipro Limited, Leonida Mutuku, has urged businesses to begin investing and accepting Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it holds the key to drive work-efficiency and accelerate growth in the future. AI makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks at higher efficiency and a predictable rate.
According to Ms. Mutuku, businesses should not be scared AI will be taking over the work of humans but rather take advantage of it to improve productivity and improve service delivery to generate more income. The fear of AI taking over the workforce, she noted, has totally has gripped many; thereby tuning their minds against AI amid its positive and impactful roles for businesses.
She made these comments during a Republic Bank and B&FT webinar organised under the theme ‘Digitisation, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Things: The Impact of and Immense Opportunities for Ghanaian Businesses’.
She said AI can be programmed to execute tedious and boring work schedules while humans concentrate on the interpretation and prediction of results – adding that results produced by AI will not only be efficient but also believable. “Artificial Intelligence helps you to automate that tedious, boring work, and all you are left to do is interpret results and help your company as to how they can utilise the results of this machine rightly to do more business efficiently,” she said.
Ghanaian software developers in recent times have been on a mission to build AI platforms for young people to start new businesses and create jobs. Companies like software firm SuaCode.ai aims to train millions across Africa to code from their smartphones.
In 2019, Google opened an Artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory in Accra – the first of its kind in Africa. The new lab uses AI to develop solutions in healthcare, education and agriculture.
Ms. Mutuku believes marketers and communicators need to think ahead on how the area can effectively flourish in this new world by putting in place measures, policies and infrastructure to meet the new emerging world of technology.
Artificial intelligence is already being applied in medicine for enhancing diagnosis and prognosis of diseases, developing renewable clean energy, cleaning up the environment, providing high quality education to people all over the world, and helping people with disability. However, the incredible potential of AI provides new challenges as well as amazing possibilities for many professions and industries.
Addressing how fast businesses can be promoted to create a perfect understanding with their own customers, Ms. Mutuku said offering masterclasses on AI regularly, especially for non-technical business managers, will be key. This is to provide them with a practical understanding of how to use analytics and data science to improve their businesses, and also be able to trace business problems and solve them as well.
