Keynotes and Speakers for ITx 2018
Communications, IBM New Zealand
Shannon Thomas leads Communications for IBM New Zealand, and is a specialist in international B2B technology marketing and communications.
She has served on the Executive of the NZ Software Association and worked closely with the Canterbury Software Cluster on the highly acclaimed annual Canterbury Software Summit.
Shannon was also a member of the 2017 Global Women Breakthrough Leaders programme.
Artificial intelligence is here. It’s now in the real world, used by businesses of all shapes and sizes, all around the globe - and it is squarely on the agenda of both technology and business executives in New Zealand.
AI platforms like IBM Watson understand the world in the way humans do – through senses, learning, and experience. They learn at scale, gaining knowledge over time, reasoning with purpose and interacting with humans in a natural way.
Unlike the AI we see in the movies and pop culture, the capability of this technology is being realised not through replacing humans, but from augmenting human intelligence and helping professionals across a diverse range of industries perform their jobs more efficiently, more accurately and with greater insight.
In this session we will explore the opportunities AI represents to scale human expertise, ethically. We will also present practical options on how to leverage AI in organisations – from developers getting started with APIs to create virtual conversational systems to technology executives planning enterprise-wide intelligence systems for actionable insights.
We’ll share examples of real world applications of AI and show how organisations are getting insight from their “dark data” - the 80% of data they already own but have never been able to tap into before. We will present a point of view for a policy environment that is open and transparent, with organisational data and insights remaining firmly within their control, and share a practical framework for adopting AI systems in organisations which take into account not only technology but also process and people.