AI Platforms Are Here: What Every Leader Needs To Know - Gihan Perera, Futurist Australia

AI is about much more than ChatGPT or Copilot. As a leader, think about AI at three levels: professional, projects, and platforms. And all of this still needs human judgement, so building AI literacy across your team is just as important as the technology itself. https://swiy.co/go-ai-platforms-are-here Are you sick of hearing negative stories about AI? Some of them are negative for good reasons, but also be aware of the good that AI is doing in the world. I'll share a few examples here - not only to make you feel good (but maybe that's good enough reason by itself!), but also because it will help you plan how to bring AI into your team and organisation. If you follow me on Instagram, you might know that every day I post a story about some way that the world has become better - a new trend, innovation, government initiative, or people. Here are four Australian AI examples from the last year: 1. Researchers at Queensland University of Technology found that smarter farming and synthetic biology could transform croplands into tools for climate action by capturing and storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the air. 2. Researchers at the University of Melbourne developed AI that uses weather data and fire records to predict land-cover change with over 90% accuracy, helping land managers and policymakers with erosion control, fire risk management, and biodiversity conservation. 3. Researchers at Edith Cowan University in Perth have created an AI system that helps clinicians in detecting and staging serious conditions using ordinary scans like bone density images and ultrasounds. 4. Australia’s beloved science communicator, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, has launched Digital Dr Karl - an AI chatbot trained on 40,000 of his scientific papers, articles, and media to help address climate scepticism at scale. OK, so let's talk about what this means for YOU ... These are all examples of AI platforms. They're very different from you sitting in front of your laptop, typing a query into ChatGPT, Copilot, or Claude, and getting a response. That's generative AI, and that's what made mainstream in 2022. But these AI platforms have been working quietly behind the scenes in every industry and every sector for years (sometimes decades). When you think about adopting AI, think about three levels: professional, projects, and platforms. The professional level is using AI - ChatGPT, Copilot, etc. - to improve everyday work so you can focus on higher-value work. You know what I mean: draft an email reply, create an outline for a report, analyse a spreadsheet, or design a workshop. The project level is where a small team works together to create something using AI that delivers value. You may already be running small AI projects. The third level is the platform level, where you buy (or build, if you have that in-house expertise) an AI-powered platform to help you with your core work. That could be: GPs using AI to record patient appointments and draft follow-up notes banks using AI to assess mortgage applications businesses using AI to help their call centre staff serve customers better retail stores using AI for managing inventory insurers using AI to assess premiums and manage risk ... and so on The same is true for your industry and sector. It might already be true in your organisation. That makes it even more important to lift the AI literacy and education of everybody in your team. But it needs a different kind of AI literacy. AI platforms work behind the scenes. So you don’t need to learn how to write Copilot prompts or run Claude projects. But as we rely more on AI platforms, we need to apply our human intelligence to interpret, question, their outcomes. It’s always about people first, technology second – especially with something as complex as an AI platform. If you’d like to know more about this, come along to my free online presentation “AI At Work” this week. It’s open to everybody, and we’ll look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of AI at all three levels. Register for the virtual masterclass: https://swiy.co/go-ai-platforms-are-here