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Is AI taking over key areas of business … or is it too early to tell?
By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>
ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is taking over the business world. Or is it?
Joel Delmaire, JobAdder’s chief product officer, believes AI is still in its infancy. It will take some time before the rest of the business world and the community at large catches up with it.
He said many companies did not yet understand it – but it was easy to see why.
“Keep in mind the technology is only two years old. Generative AI is really young in the industry,” Mr Delmaire told Talking Business.
“It takes a lot of time for companies to understand it, adopt it, use it in the right way and I would not say today it’s being widely used or widely deployed.
“But I would imagine in the next two to three years, you will see an explosion of its use in our day to day life.” 
The case for AI in recruitment
Job Adder is a recruitment software company, so Mr Delmaire is particularly familiar with the all the issues that come up with AI use in the recruitment space. However, he can talk about its application more broadly,
He said the government was quite correctly developing AI legislation to protect the community. At the same time, it could not develop legislation that would stop businesses from innovating.
“The challenge is, if you want to do that, you can become over-specific, in the way you prescribe working with AI and it puts a burden that is quite significant, especially for small companies in terms of applying the regulation to the point where you stifle innovation,” Mr Delamaire said.
“We’ve seen that with all the technologies in the past. It’s a really hard line to balance, specifically because the problem is so broad.”
Mr Delmaire said he was not convinced Australia would be able to train enough AI specialists fast enough. The regulations, he said, make the assumption that all companies will be able to find the talent and people who can comply.
“It’s a very tricky profile to find because you need, on one hand, to be familiar with legislation and regulation and on the other hand deep in the technology – and there are very few people in the market that can do that,” he said.
“The challenge in that space is it might create a very uneven playing field.
“Companies that are bigger can afford the resources, that can find the talent and pay premium talent and you take the risk of having smaller companies being pushed out in the ability to work in that space,” Mr Delmaire said.
“I would be very concerned to be a start-up trying to build my new business on something that’s backed by AI today, with what can happen in the short term.”
Regulators will help level AI playing field
Mr Delmaire said one of the good points was that regulators around the world were moving in the same direction.
“Hopefully we don’t end up in a place where we have pockets of different legislation between the EU, the UK, the US and Australia,” he said.
As an example In the recruitment space, if a candidate writes in and nominates dates for interviews, AI can easily process that. If AI gets it wrong, it’s no big deal. That can be easily fixed with a phone call or email.
But an important issue with AI is ethics. AI, after all, draws its data from the internet and it is very easy to have biases come into its guidance. AI can very easily replicate those biases.
“The challenge with AI is it looks smart. It can say absolutely the wrong thing and be 100 percent wrong,” Mr Delmaire said.
Having AI vetted by human beings would help. However, even that has limitations.
“One of the answers is to always have a human in the loop, but then you lose some of the benefits so you probably want to do that when it’s really critical that you don’t get it wrong,” Mr Delmaire said.
“Keeping in mind that humans are also biased, either consciously or unconsciously … You probably want to make sure that your AI is not more biased than the average human, but you will never protect from the fact that we are human and we are biased.”
Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness
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