The Innovation & Design Programme had the pleasure of welcoming Mr Manuel Ho, founder and CEO of INTNT.AI, to share about artificial intelligence (AI) and the power of intelligent bots on 10 September 2021 (Friday). Mr Ho spoke about the way his company is leveraging AI to enable intelligent bots to meet the ever growing customer demand for highly effective solutions to increasingly diversified application requirements. Joining Mr Ho as a guest speaker was Ms Lai Kai Lin from ByteDance, who has extensive experience in the intelligent bot space and was recently a senior product manager at Grab.
Mr Ho began the presentation by discussing the recent history of intelligent bots from a perceived $200 billion chabot disruption back in 2016 to its current status as part of the hype cycle for AI. He emphasized that this transformation could be contributed to proper training which he deemed the “bane of AI bots” but absolutely necessary in order to obtained the level of accuracy to make them highly effective.
Ms Lai then described a very specific project she worked on related to detecting inappropriate and abusive language use on a messaging platform to prevent such chats from occurring in the first place. She explained how the project transformed from a keyword based prediction approach to a natural language processing model while articulating the amount of effort required to make the project successful particularly when considering the diversity in the ways that languages are spoken and expressed even within the same country. This generated a discussion on what actually makes a machine learning tool “smart” and the importance of ensuring that data going in will produce the desired result coming out (i.e. the old adage “garbage in equals garbage out”, etc.).
The conversation concluded with a discussion on how industry is embracing AI and what are its implications. Using specific examples, Mr Ho concluded that it is basically a cost-benefit analysis which considers the interaction of the expected volume of use, the value provided and its scalability.
The Innovation & Design Programme thanks both speakers for sharing their experience during this webinar.
