The proverbial glass is half full, thinks CGI. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) represents both a risk and a new business opportunity for the Montreal company specializing in technology services for businesses. This is especially the time to reaffirm its expertise with its clients, both in the private sector and the public.
“AI is really, really good at doing some things that humans can’t do. It seems like magic,” explains the Duty CGI Vice President of Analytics, AI and Machine Learning Diane Gutiw. “Generative AI is new, but it goes even further. It represents for us an enormous potential for growth, since we can adapt it in an ethical and responsible way to the needs of our customers. »
Experts and analysts seem to agree. In any case, the sensational arrival of a new generation of artificial intelligence applications that promise to automate a host of tasks related to the management and analysis of digital data has had no adverse effect. notorious on the stock market’s perception of CGI.
[L’IA générative] represents enormous growth potential for us.
CGI has been providing its clients with a combination of outsourcing, hosting and decision support services for years that has seen it through more than one crisis. The evolution of its title on the Stock Exchange bears witness to this: its current value is higher than its peak reached before the COVID crisis, then again towards the end of 2021. In New York, its stock is now worth 10% more than two years ago, while the Nasdaq tech index is still 15% below its own late-2021 peak.
CGI’s stock has gained 35% in value in New York since last fall, as AIs like ChatGPT, from California-based OpenAI, took the webosphere by storm. ChatGPT is the spearhead of a new series of applications more or less easily accessible by the general public and which have already caused reactions in all directions from technological giants such as Microsoft, Google and IBM.
At the service of humans
CGI management is keeping a cool head in the face of this new technological effervescence. It’s not new to see companies – especially in the manufacturing sector – trying to predict and optimize maintenance and their operation, recalls Mikko Lehto, vice president of health and society for CGI. In health, we have been trying for a long time to create predictive models with an accumulation of numerical data generally created from public and private databases.
The new AIs make it possible to do all this more quickly, but when it goes quickly, the risk of derailment is greater, explains Mikko Lehto. “You have to create a framework for use and impose safeguards,” he says. “Companies need to provide good transparency into the problems they are trying to solve by entrusting their data to AI. These must be transparent enough so that it is easy to see that they are being used wisely. »
Based in Helsinki, Mikko Lehto heads one of CGI’s most critical divisions. Governments and public health organizations are among its largest clients. These organizations produce data that they may hope to turn into a gold mine of medical information to be used to better treat patients. How this data is manipulated raises a ton of questions that no computer system, no matter how intelligent, can answer satisfactorily, says Mikko Lehto.
” There business digital health data is something we must be very careful about. We have to guarantee that things are done for the benefit of research and medicine,” he says. In the end, it is healthcare professionals who must be held accountable for decisions that will affect patients’ health, adds the expert. “You have to make sure that the interaction with a human expert remains at the center of the experience. »
No end of the world on the horizon
Ensuring the presence of a human at the end of the decision-making chain is a good way to avoid the disaster scenarios that many AI experts are predicting these days, believes Diane Gutiw. In worst-case scenarios, the technology would fall into the wrong hands, or it would manage to escape itself from the constraints imposed on it by its creators. Either way, she would end up taking actions that would harm humanity.
“There is no end of the world on the horizon,” assures the head of CGI based in British Columbia. “Business AI is not going to replace people who make decisions, it is going to help them make better decisions. It will fill the looming resource gap as older, more experienced workers leave the workforce. It is especially companies that do not have access to relevant information that will be at risk. »