Top Tips for Using AI in Your Business

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Please use the email address on the podcast description and we look forward to hearing from you. In this edition, we'll explore practical advice for businesses who are looking to use AI technology to streamline their operations and grow successfully. Finding reliable statistics to context exactly where we are in the UK with the number of businesses using AI throws up many conflicting numbers and in such a fast moving field, the numbers will almost certainly become out of date very quickly.

I'll ask our guests to give us their view on the state of play with AI in the UK shortly. What is clear though is that AI is here to stay and it's becoming more widespread across the business landscape. A growing number of organisations are wanting to explore using AI in the future too. Some sectors are using AI to great effect, notably telecoms, legal and finance, whereas others are yet to even begin looking at what difference this technology could bring.

A consultation published by the UK government in February 2024 said that the AI industry in the UK employs over 50, 000 people and contributes 3. 7 billion to the economy, adding that, and I quote, "Our universities produce some of the best AI research and talent, and the UK is home to the third largest number of AI unicorns and start ups in the world".

So many questions still swirl around the topic of AI, not least what it actually is and how it works, will it lead to mass job losses as technology makes many roles redundant, and crucially, is AI safe? With computers now being able to think for themselves and the slew of very negative press on the subject, has Pandora's box finally been opened? As a business leader, how can you use this technology most effectively to streamline or grow my organisation?

With so much to explore on the topic, we opted not to speak to ChatGPT to get the answers, but rather to two great leaders in the field of AI in the OxTalks studio. I'm delighted to welcome Grae Laws, Managing Director of Beyond Touch, and Guy Gadney, CEO of Charisma AI based in Oxford. Can we start with the basics to ensure that everyone listening or watching to this episode is completely across this? In everyday language, if you would, give us your personal definition on what AI actually is.

Maybe that's overly simple, but I think if you look at it in terms of, I don't know, let's take an example like ChatGPT. Actually, in its simplest sense, what you might be putting into that or a high school student or something might be putting in, write me an essay on this particular piece and what's happening there is that ChatGPT is sort of understanding what that question is, which is using a combination of technologies like natural language processing and machine learning.

It's understanding what that student has said and then it is sort of thinking about that in the sense of wanting to understand what the student is then saying and then kicking out the essay that the student wants at the end and through that, in the middle of that process is a little bit of magic that sits on the computers. But that is the data that I said that sits behind the whole piece.

If you imagine that language models of this day and age have scraped the entire internet, have taken databases and sources of information that are so vast and have simply compressed all of that down and used an algorithm, started to understand and sort, sift it, understand what it means to use an NLP to actually process that and it takes a period of time for these language models to actually get to a point where they're ready.

This foundation model, whether it's very narrow and it might be specialised in something like biology or science or videography, or it could be very broad and general.

But once those models are in place, then we build applications and those applications draw from those language models, they make inferences and they present something back to you, whether it's a video, a piece of audio, whether it's text, any one of those things and you know, the future generations of artificial intelligence will see lots of language models being used and agents coming and dipping in and saying, I need a little bit of information from that one and more

from that one and it builds up a bigger picture and then presents that back to you in a mode that you've asked for it.

It's very human, but in essence what's happening is that there is a computer programme which is taking a bunch of data in the instance of the things we know about like ChatGPT or those sorts of things. It is broadly information that is available on the internet and probably other areas as well that we can get into later and the ethics around that.

That is then parsed, in other words, the software sort of is categorising it and it's categorising it by meaning, by sentiment, by topic and pattern matching that and one of the things, the key things that AI is very good at is this sense of pattern matching, of identifying a pattern of language, a pattern of mathematics, a pattern of sort of anything that we know as information and in essence, what it then does is it then predicts what's going to happen next when it is prompted by a user.

So it sort of predicts the next step of a sentence, it predicts that a verb follows a subject.

So there's this whole process called training where these AI models are trained on large amounts of data and then that model is, it goes through a process of fine tuning, which is then, I suppose, narrowing it down, whittling it to the point that it needs to focus on, and that again may be a subject matter fine tuning around a particular topic like mathematics, or indeed in the creative industries it might be around a particular book or a

particular brand, to make sure that what the output is remains specific to that. So in other words, you don't want Batman talking like the Princess Bride, you know, you've got to have Batman talking like Batman and understanding the world of Batman and keeping on topic in that space because otherwise it breaks the storyline and that's what the fine tuning process does.

You would have been using it with YouTube with its predictions as to what you should look at next, when you went shopping on Amazon, when you used your SatNav, when you used your Fitbit, your smartwatch, your iPad, your average smartphone today has probably got 10, 15 different small AI tools that are running in the background that are totally invisible and as we see the next gen of the Samsung phone and the next gen of the iPhone bringing out their AI tools, they've

actually already been in there for years. So for businesses, the uptake has been significant and it's certainly the case that it required an innovation trigger in the public eye for it really to be taken seriously and I think that was obviously ChatGPT.

If people are just working in business, then they don't even realise they're using it, but they are and I guess the readiness part of this, and in terms of preparing applications that are practicable and have use cases in business, well, that grows every single day and there are certain measures of enablement that some of these reports use to say, what's the government interest and investment into AI and funding? What does that landscape look like?

Who are the most innovative organisations in AI and where do they, you know, kind of operate from? What is the capacity for human capital and access to data and energy that will drive this innovation in the industry? And I think all of those measures play their part in that ranking, and there's a certain amount of subjectivity that goes with it as well.

You know, it's really struck a chord somewhere and I think in some ways what people are thinking is that they're thinking that AI is somehow related to the movies, the sci fi movies that they've seen in the past and for the sense of drama, those movies have often had a punch to them, whether that's Terminator or Robocop or, you know, AI taking over the world.

It's a good story, there's got to be a protagonist and antagonist and it's easy to cast that antagonist as AI because it's a sense of attacking, you know. Also, I think there is a sense, especially in the press at the moment of AI replacing the journalists, and writing articles and so forth. So naturally, the people who are covering that are worried for their own jobs that they may be replaced and I think that is skewing the argument a little bit.

The more, I suppose doomsday scenario that folks like Elon Musk have said, you know, that it, there needs to be a kill switch in this sense, and that it could wipe out humanity. I think it is a strand of logic that people go down and it's a little bit fanciful to be able to do that. AI still is a piece of software in a machine.

The other way to look at it is, we control our own future and if we are building this, and we're responsible for it, and ultimately, at the end of the day, this code that you see and often in the presentations I do about AI, I show code on screen and say, look, this is AI, you know, look, it's numbers and it's letters and everything, this has been created by people. So people, we are in control of this, and we can control our own future and how we chart the next steps for the future.

I'm sure we'll come on to things like regulation, which is one way to do it. But there is a sense that, you know, in an increasingly automated set of societies where banking systems and indeed infrastructure is controlled by computers and is controlled by computers that are connected to the internet, there could be some form of negative impact on it. I mean, like serious negative impact. Actually, probably it's more likely to be someone, you know, as a human actor who's done that, in my opinion.

It's a subjective scale, but in actual fact, lots of those people who were part of that open letter sat on more than 50 percent in terms of their PDoom.

So their belief that there is a higher probability of it not being for good, but actually in actual fact being exploited, by bad actors and they could be individuals, but they could also be state actors as well who actually use this technology for suppression, for manipulation, as indeed as well as the environmental impacts that come with it and you know, some of these people were big players and it is still are.

Geoffrey Hinton, arguably the godfather of AI at Google and Mo Gawdat as well, another huge figure, both of those genuinely felt and indeed still feel the same as Elon Musk that we need to be really careful with this. That in actual fact, if we don't have guardrails, we could be in trouble and so that was a premise for the security summit in Bletchley.

The problem is with the introduction of AI, that process was automated and that meant that it could go faster, wider, deeper and so as we start to look at that sort of interference and political interference, social interference that we're getting, at least we can then identify where the problem is and start to do something about it.

Clearly there are, as in any new technology, there are people who use it for good and there are people who use it for bad and the counter to all of this, to my mind, is education and it sounds, again, very simple, but if we understand the landscape that we're stepping into, we've got the map for what it looks like, then we can react to it properly.

The danger comes where we've got, you know, no map and we're running sort of Silicon Valley speed primed by unbelievable amounts of money as fast as we possibly can into a space that we don't understand and we don't know and there I think there are dangers as there would be in any other fast moving environment.

So they've got a huge language model that's built upon records of treatments and think of pharmaceutical companies have been spending decades, literally decades researching and doing clinical trials on cures for seemingly incurable diseases and one of the great things about artificial intelligence, particularly the deep learning aspects of it, is that it can bring together unconnected points that a human being might not necessarily be able to do.

AI can just do that and not only does it do it well, but because it's part of a larger language model, it can be happening simultaneously in lots of different research centers and all of that is informing that initial foundation model and therefore they all learn from that. So there's exponential opportunities for health care, a longevity of life, reducing infant mortality and that's just healthcare, that's before we go into everything else. Manufacturing, industry, leisure, education.

This is an area I've worked in now for almost a couple of decades in terms of using technology for storytelling and creative purposes and to Grae's point around the different sectors that people use it in. For me, there's a wonderful space within the creative industries, which is two sides of the coin. So the first one is the one that people talk around productivity, you know, can you do the same thing faster?

Could you get your idea that you've got for a great story that you want and you just want to tell that story, can you get it out to your audience faster? And the short answer is yes and that's the sort of systems that we're working. The other side to the coin, which is even more exciting to me is, okay, what new can it do that we couldn't do before?

So, you know, much in the same way that any form of technology that has been involved in the creative industries and by the way, the creative industries have always used technology, you know, back to the ponds in amphitheatres in Greek theatre to reflect the audio and bounce it out and amplify it, always used technology up through Lucas and Spielberg and VFX.

So actually there's no change here and it enables new forms of storytelling and for us, those forms of storytelling, I can articulate it very simply, creatively, which is that you as an audience member, rather than just sitting at home, watching your TV series of Sherlock or whatever it may be, we can bring you into that TV series to influence the story.

You might have Benedict Cumberbatch turn to you and say, okay, Howard, you know, you're now part of my gang and I want you to prove yourself as a detective alongside me. Did you spot anything in the last scene that was relevant? And suddenly you're speaking to the main characters involved in it.

So creatively, it's like a new form of storytelling that is like a hybrid version of Hollywood and games, actually and that's very much the technology that we've been building is to enable writers to write this sort of thing and innovate it.

we did a sort of interactive version of that going into the future a while back, and with OxLEPs support around lockdown period. We were fortunate enough to buy the rights to John Wyndham's classic sci fi novel, The Kraken Wakes, you know, of these wonderful 1950s classics, which are very organic, actually, they're not technically focused.

So we adapted that into a video game environment where you are cast as a journalist in inside the story, chronicling, I won't spoil it for people, but, the alien invasion and how they can influence the story. what I love about what we do is that it is a completely seamless hybrid of technology and storytelling.

The writers who most were drawn to this were theatre and immersive theatre writers, because of their proximity to audience. So, you know, if you go to a theatre show or any live show, there's the bit at the end where they say, thank you very much, you've been a great audience. Well that means something. It means that they've felt there's an energy, there's a proximity to it.

So as writers are writing, you know, what they want to do, they're thinking about the audience, maybe much more than say a movie writer or a TV writer who's thinking more around what it looks like on screen. So for them, I think it was this way to explore, you know, different forms of telling the same story and thinking, Oh gosh, I can do this now. I can now actually bring this character to life and play with them in different ways.

So actually, I sometimes say there's an irony in the further we look ahead to the future of technology and storytelling, actually, the more we are influenced and inspired by the older, further back media like theatre and immersive theatre.

I think that there's been this sort of break between the two industries and the technology companies are sort of running ahead without understanding the values of the creative industries. They're also not understanding the value of the work that is being produced and the people who produce it. So there is work that we need to do there. Our view is that we are, you know, really strongly trying to bridge these two industries.

We're trying to create the bridge and funnily enough, I sit on an advisory group run by Innovate UK, called Bridge AI, representing the creative industries so that our voice is heard, so that people do not rip off copyright or real people's work and that the influence of the creative industries, as humans, as practitioners and creatives, is heard and is felt as we move forward.

You know, let's not make any mistake about it, the creative industry is responsible for huge amounts of GDP within the UK, and that's not to say that we don't have a lot of and worldwide. Without it, ChatGPT simply would not exist. A lot of the AI that we see has been trained on creative work.

So there needs to be that value equation that is more balanced than it is now and my sense is that, you know, we've seen this writer strikes, we've seen the passion coming out of it and now there needs to be, as Greg was talking about guardrails, there needs to be a set of rules, but also the creative industries needs to engage and I don't think that the answer is to block AI and tried to block things that generally over the last few decades has not worked in technology advancements.

It's very difficult and is not a strategy, but to engage and to engage in the creation of these new technologies from the creative industries is the way that we see the world and we hope that message is going to expand over the coming years.

So we work with OxLEP, other growth hub organisations, universities, government agencies, to help people with their business challenges. We do that through sessions that involve artificial intelligence, as well as project management and operations process management, and really getting into the detail of it. So when we do mentoring, and when we sit down with individuals, it's an unpacking exercise, we're a trusted friend, we're probing into the real challenge that sits behind it.

We're asking why and get into the root cause of it and then we're helping them to build action plans for change. So it's all very action oriented and so for some business owners, one of the biggest challenges can be, I don't have anybody that I can talk to. I can't admit that it's not going right, or I can't admit that I don't have the answer. I can't talk to my family about it, I don't want to talk to my colleagues about it, I most certainly can't mention it to my employees, where do I go?

That's the value of a good business mentor and through organisations like OxLEP who provide those access to those mentors, it can provide a sense of relief to those business owners and more importantly, an opportunity to refocus them, energise them and send them off in the right direction for them to achieve their goals.

It comes into my meetings, it takes notes, it records the meeting, it builds action plans, it has an AI tool built into the back end of it, so when the meeting's finished, we can unpack more information, gain insight from that, develop a plan, all of that information goes on to the organisation that I've been working with, so they get a copy of it, when we meet up a second time, we'll go back to that tool and say, okay, let's go back to our previous meeting.

Let's look at the actions that we agree. Let's gain some more insight. Let's talk, let's use the AI tool from our previous session to help drive it forward and the other tool that I use in all of my sessions, which again is a way to a soft entry point, really, for many people who want to give it a go, but just don't understand the relevance of it and why that would make any difference and that's a tool called Perplexity.

Which is quite similar to ChatGPT or Claude and all the other ones that are out there. My preference for using Perplexity is that it feels more reliable, it's more fact based, it has less hallucinations, which is a tendency of some AI models to come up with an answer if it can't actually retrieve something that statistically is accurate, it will just make something up. So Perplexity tends not to do that. It always provides you with reliable links.

But anyway, coming back to perplexity, why I love this tool is that, you know, I'll give you a really good example. I was doing a one to one session with an organisation recently and this was to develop a matchmaking application for B2B, business to business and this person had two challenges that they brought to that session. The first challenge was, I've done, I've written a website, but I just don't think it's any good.

I think it might be a bit rubbish, I just don't know and the other one was, I've got an app, I've got a whole lot of processes, I've got a design, I feel like there's IP here and I just don't know what IP. I've had a look online, you know, at the IP office and I just don't know what to do. So I said, I'll tell you what, let's jump into Perplexity and we'll nail both of those. So we did, we jumped into Perplexity, we did the IP one.

In actual fact, because Perplexity has its own language model, but most importantly, it seeks to find live examples, real world sources of information, reliable sources of information. The natural factor becomes an extremely useful tool for analysis and because you're having a dialogue and I do encourage people, by demonstration, to start the conversation and keep that conversation going.

We were able to identify which clauses within which types of IP were appropriate and the reasons why, we're able to then say, condense all of this into a table, give me the links to the IP office so I can do more reading about that and then we repeated that same process for the website. Which was, who is best in class? Who are your competitors? Well, there are quite a few, I don't really know who The most obvious competitors are, okay, let's ask perplexity.

Give me the top 10 UK companies that do this, this and this. It provided them. So now we need to understand more the value proposition of each of these organisations and how that will be of benefit to this person, this user group, put it into a table and it did. So there you go, there's your first bit of competitive analysis.

So now, and it's got the links to their websites, why don't you, maybe as an action out the end of this, go away and just have a look at some of these websites and then reflect on what you've put across in your website and let's use best practice to actually make sure that we can give you a fighting chance to be a comparator or exceed expectation when people are looking for you and may have found another one to compare with.

I mean, Grey's example was brilliant, which is the big power struggle at the moment is around search engines. So Google has its own AI and then ChatGPT has SearchGPT. Now the reason for doing that is that if you think about how you search or have done to date, you get a list of responses on that first page. What AI is going to do is going to do exactly as Grae said, which is synthesise all of that, work out what actually the key insights you want out of that and then write it up for you.

So suddenly you're saving shed loads of time of moving between different pages, pages one, two, three, and all of that and you're getting that information in a heartbeat.

So I think to know what your own strengths are as a business owner, what you are in business to do is the core and then use this as a way to provide further insights into that and the pattern matching piece, I cannot overemphasise enough, this is the core of AI, the ability to spot patterns and if you can spot patterns, you can start to see where opportunities are in the future and where issues may be arising and if you can do that, then you're going to de risk

your business and that's a good thing.

per month, whatever it is, but there's always a free trial version of it and there's usually a lite version of it, so the classic ones of Claude and Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT and Perplexity, all of those have a free version, a lite version, but you can pay and I wouldn't want to go on camera because my business partners listening, I'm sure and they would say, you're spending that much on your AI tools, are you Grae?

Okay. But I do subscribe and have paid for accounts because I see the value in them, I really do. But we're talking tens of pounds per month.

I believe it's something like five billion a year that they are spending and not getting back in revenue, but they can afford to do it because they have the venture capital backing to do it and in fact, you know, recently Apple came in alongside Microsoft to help out with that cash burn because it was looking wobbly for a moment, which is interesting, given, you know, how much we're starting to rely on these tools and for the UK, because we don't have that level of

financial support, we don't have that gearing in our venture capital, it means we struggle as a nation to create our own Open AI, or our own perplexity, or our own Anthropic, or whatever it may be.

So, I think as we start to look at how the government looks at AI, what its strategies should be, we need to be able to create an environment where we can form a company that can give away their software, because they've got the cash runway to do it and, you know, remember that every time you put something into ChatGPT and you're not paying for it, it's doing two things. One, it's costing OpenAI and the other one is that it's using your data that you put into it.

So there's a risk reward piece here. But I think as a country for us to be able to compete on that level, internationally and create those sorts of competing companies, we need to slightly reframe, I think, our investment to enable that sort of user acquisition, which is what it's doing. The reason that these things are being given away for free is to acquire users that you can then flip over into paying customers and at the moment, we don't have that environment in this country to do that.

We've got some excellent speakers, some incredible minds, you know, some of the greatest innovation that's actually come out and certainly in terms of where education crosses over with industry and AI has come out of Oxfordshire and, you know, really we build on experience and you know, in a way we are all language models as human beings and we build and we soak up through us osmosis our understanding of the industry that we're in and it moves so quickly that you need

to speak to people who have their finger on the pulse, because I can recall the very first OxLEP workshop that I did on Artificial Intelligence coincided with Sam Altman being kicked out of OpenAI and then being brought back in and then leaving and then coming back and it was literally days before I was doing a workshop and I had the whole thing set up, all of my slide deck ready, everything was there, they had the whole history of AI, where the investment was, who the big players were,

and I had to keep going back into it. So right, okay, he's out. No, I got back into it, he's back in again, but it moves that quickly and it's certainly the case that I would say to any business that, you know, if you want to do your research into this, maybe go to YouTube. That is one of the biggest sources of information that I use.

I follow people like Peter Diomedes and Matt Vidpro, Matt Wolf, to name but three organisers or individuals who really have their finger on the pulse and as you were saying, you know, a little earlier about how people consume podcasts, you know, I listen, I don't necessarily watch, but I actually play along because they actually say that the next five business applications that have just been released, it's this, this, and this.

I'm going to go through each one in turn and I am there with a browser open and I am following along and trying it out for myself and there's always a free version of it and some of them I just bash them up and say, nah, rubbish, don't want to use that one, others I think, ooh, actually that could be a keeper and then I can bring that information then in to conversations that we're having with business leaders, you never stare into infinity when somebody says, which AI tool should I use.

But it's certainly based on very, very recent information.

In terms of AI as a individual topic, we don't tend to have a great deal of people coming forward saying, you know, we wish to understand AI, more efficiently per se. But I think some of the topics that we mentioned earlier on, things like growing customer base, things like managing finance, things like developing better marketing communication strategies. AI is very much embedded in all of those desires for small businesses to achieve those goals.

So I think people are asking about AI and asking how they can implement it in their business, not necessarily coming forward and saying, we need to find out more about what artificial intelligence can offer our business.

But in the context of growing customer base, managing our finance better in the context of that and implementing AI from that point of view, I think there's a huge amount of interest and Grae is very much sort of delivering that support from our perspective on the ground and I think probably the information that you're receiving from small businesses is perhaps positioned in that sense.

certainly is that you can recraft the tone of a marketing piece very, very quickly with AI to match communications into a very specific demographic. So let me give you an example, with OxLEP support, we produced this wonderful game, for The Kraken Wakes and as we are marketing that, we are marketing it, not only as a game in its own right, but we have videos of the game that go up on YouTube.

So, to do that, when you upload a piece of video to YouTube, you have a bit of text that describes the video. Now, normally what I would write is something like, this is a wonderful adaptation of John Wyndham's novel, The Kraken Wakes. Okay, so that's me saying that. However, the YouTube algorithm, reads it in a different way. It reads it in a way that is either going to be a way that puts it up the rankings or knocks it down.

So now what I do is I go over to ChatGPT and I say, here's my description of this game. Now rewrite that in such a way that it's going to be more attractive to YouTube's algorithm. It then gives me another piece of text that I put into the comments field and that increases the viewers tangibly, we noticed an almost immediate difference, when we recraft that in a particular way. Now what's slightly scary is that we're now getting the machine to write text so that another machine can read it.

But acknowledging, as in any good piece of marketing, who our audience is and that our audience actually is the YouTube algorithm to increase the visibility of that, was a key part of that campaign. So that to me is streamlining. It's the ability to reduce the barriers to reach certain markets, be more flexible, more agile and that an individual marketeer within our team can now do a lot more and reach a broader audience.

You know, as a specific example, I think there are many ways that processes can be made easier in this, but we're at the beginning, you know, we're at the beginning of a long journey with AI and I think part of the things that we're hearing today and part of the problem actually and to viewers and listeners of this podcast is, you know, the question is, but what is it? And the problem is that it's like a tsunami, it's really broad and really deep.

There's not one nice little wave that you can go, Oh, look, there it is. It's not like a metaverse or text messaging or websites, this is really broad. So trying to say, How does it actually fit for my business? It's a challenging question to answer, and I go back to it. I think Grae was saying similar, which is first understand your business and where your barriers are to that business and then look at what the solution may be.

Chances are there's an AI for that, but that's probably the first step.

So in actual fact, in the future, there will be less people and in actual fact, you'll still have the same infrastructure that needs to be supported. So how do you keep the systems running? How do you do all those mundane tasks that nobody wants to do because there aren't enough people to actually take those roles?

Now, because we, this is something that plays out over decades, it was hoped by some of the great leaders who were driving forward with Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and also embodied artificial intelligence.

I put it into robotics was that it will be a gradual transfer, whereas there were less people to do the jobs, suddenly our robots who were, you know, had their artificial intelligence built in would replace them and it would be a nice, smooth transition and actually, that's not what really what's happening. Actually, it's an exponential curve in terms of the growth of AI and also the implementation of AI within robotics, so it is a threat. PDoom. Yes, I get that.

But, you know, I always encourage people to embrace things and have a lived experience of it. You know, when I was back in the 1990s, I was a printer running printing presses and I remember a Mac operator coming through to me saying, Grae, when you finish that print run, come through and I'm going to show you something. I stopped the press, went through, pointed at his screen and said, what's that? And I said, it looks like a bit of artwork. Because. It's not.

It's called a PDF, and it's been sent to me down a telephone line on something called email, and I looked at him like he'd just used words I'd never ever heard of, but when he actually explained the significance of that and how it would change the way I did my job, it gave me food for thought, and I thought, actually, if you were to suspend disbelief that this PDF technology that means I don't need to print things anymore will happen and that everybody will have

emails and can send them things between them, then hey, I might be out of a job. So when I went home to my wife, first thing I said was, I think I need to buy a computer. I think I need to understand what this is all about and I would say, you know, that is just an example, I would encourage everybody today to be thinking about how could I learn something about AI? How can I use some of those simple tools to augment what I do?

How can I demonstrate through the application of artificial intelligence in my day to day that I can create additional value for the organisation that I work for? And embrace some of those things that will remove those boring, repetitive tasks that you don't like doing, I don't like doing, but AI loves and in doing so, allow you to maybe get a better sense of self worth, improve the value that you create for the organisation and give you that longevity in your career that you deserve.

Again, speaking to businesses in Oxfordshire, there's an attitude that people look to embrace AI and perhaps approach it from a positive perspective and not be fearful as to what it might do to you personally. I think if you approach it from that perspective, come at it from a position of strength, come at it from a position of knowledge, which Grae has just emphasised then I think you're in a much better position to understand the potential benefits of AI.

I think there's no doubting that it will change our working culture and the way in which businesses operate, perhaps do things differently, but you're better approaching it from a position of being informed and understanding rather than a pessimistic position where actually if you bring that negative approach to it, you're probably not going to see the best of AI and certainly from the cohort of businesses that we speak to on a day to day basis, I think the majority of them

are approaching it from that position. I think the danger with small businesses in particular, so those with staff numbers sort of 10 and below is having the thinking space. Greg reiterated that right at the start in terms of how small business owners find the headspace to think about AI and understand it. So I think coming at it from a position of positivity is always a good thing.

Perhaps you run a company or organisation that's looking for some specific help or simply need a steer to the most appropriate business advice available. Why not try the OxLEP Business Support Tool? OxLEP Business Support Tool: OxLEP's Business Support Tool is here to help your company. Whether you're just starting out, growing, or ready to take on a new business challenge.

If you're looking for the latest advice and support, complete our business support tool today and get set to receive a bespoke action plan for your organisation. Head to OxLEPbusiness. co. uk to find out more. Let's speak more with Grae Laws, Managing Director of Beyond Touch, and Guy Gadney from Charisma AI based in Oxford. Guy, I want to delve into the ethics of AI and the safeguards that exist, or perhaps should exist. Are there ethical issues around AI in your thoughts?

There is so much that can be done with AI and we do need to have a little bit of restraint to say, should we do this? Now, that's all nice and easy to say, but then from a practical perspective, what does that mean? Well, I think there are two examples from my side. One is when we started building Charisma AI back in 2016, 2017. Actually, one of the first things we did was we wrote a white paper about bias in AI data sets. Now, at that point, it was like, why are you thinking about that?

But we were thinking about it because we knew that as we were bringing the character, these virtual characters to life that you were going to talk to, they may have biases and we wanted to know what those biases were, so we wrote the white paper for that and that, I think, was the start of a bit of a journey around ethics, around, you know, where you source your data from, you know, is it someone's copyright, is it angry data, like on social media, on some social media

platforms, is it, academic data, whatever.

So I think we've always kept that and then in fact, we're working on a big Innovate UK funded project at the moment, which we're halfway through and in the original bid application, we costed in a full time digital ethicist and what I love about what she's doing, she calls it consequence scanning, which is that she's involved in all of our meetings, you know, exec meetings, production meetings, just got full access to everything that we do and she just scans for intended and unintended

consequences of what we're doing. She's always said, that doesn't mean that I'm going to block you, but it means I'm going to raise it and then you can then do the risk analysis to think about whether or not you're doing something which is going to impact someone's job or whatever it may be. So the ethics are, I think, something that people should think about, and it doesn't mean you have to move away from your strategy, it just means you need to think about it.

And our view is that if you're thinking about it, you've got that, you know, should we question running through your mind, you're probably about 60 percent of the way to doing good.

as people have started to realise the value of their own information. So I think that they have started to realise that this needs significant regulation around it, not least because of society and indeed, you know, military as a defense mechanism and attack mechanism as well.

So, I think they're going faster than they have done still, it's slower than the technology industries and there is a tension between innovation and regulation that I hear the whole time and the innovators don't want to be slowed down because they feel that they're going to lose a competitive commercial advantage because of regulation.

At the same time, we've also seen some pretty tragic examples where innovation has been, you know, the number one thing, that people have gone down that, that's the pathway and conforming to regulation has not happened, that tragic case of the submarine going down to the Titanic. Well, that was a conflict between innovation and safety and regulation. So there is an absolute, very clear reason why these things need to be in balance and my sense is that people are very focused on this.

You know, the first all party parliamentary group in the UK on AI, I think, started in 2016, 2017. I was a part of it and it was sidelined by Brexit because the parliamentarians were focusing on having to deal with that. There was a lot of work they needed to do and they acknowledged that was going to set us back on AI. But it's coming back into play again.

So I think it's naturally slower because the regulators aren't sci fi writers, they don't look too much into the future, they look into what's happening right now. But my sense is that it's being given responsibility and an airtime that it needs.

Now what they are trying to do is do synthetic data, which actually has already been pre sanitised to remove bias and think of it that it's one large language model using algorithms to train another large language model and in doing so iron out some of those creases and you've got like three different classes in a way. You have the closed language models that the likes of OpenAI have and Grok, Elon Musk's X model.

Then you have the Open models, such as Meta's Lama 3, which is available for anybody to use as a language model. But of course, nobody really knows what's inside those. They won't admit to what's in there other than just to have to accept that, yes we scraped the internet. Yes, there is copyright issues, probably, you know, yeah, we have to accept that.

But actually that fine tuning is actually quite often done by humans who have in their own innate biases, which creates this third requirement in a way, which is, and this is a national infrastructure level, and that is for governments to own their own language models and that's where we're going to is actually safe, reliable, sanitised language models that can be used freely or at minimal cost by businesses to build applications that will be used in the real world by individuals,

by businesses and most importantly, by people who work in government themselves.

So we ourselves are feeding the machine that creates the thing that we, some of us or some people may not want from an ethics point of view, I mean, just maybe you can scale it out in a slightly different way and ask people who have environmental concerns about industrialisation and say, so what do you think about the energy use of large language models? You know, does it bother you that every single day, ChatGPT alone requires 17, 000 homes worth of energy just to keep it ticking over?

Every time you put a prompt into a ChatGPT or Perplexity, it's using one whole bottle of drinkable water per prompt, think about that. Think about the sheer scale of the technology, the compute that's required, all of those processors, all of the electronic waste, all of the thermal pollution that's been created, all of these things are byproducts and they're still ethical concerns.

Now, are you willing to put them all to one side, because you believe that overall the net benefit to humanity through developing even greater language models than ones we already have can put us at ease in thinking actually, you know, we are using a whole lot of energy, you know, the US estimate that next year, 6 percent of their total energy will be used by artificial intelligence and it will keep growing. Just this morning, it was announced by OpenAI that ChatGPT 5 is coming out.

Okay, so this has 100x the compute of the current live chat GPT, 100 times the processing power. Now, in terms of an order of magnitude, our experience means it will feel like it's twice as good because it's not a direct correlation between compute and the order of magnitude, but we experienced, but this isn't slowing down, none of this is. We will keep consuming energy, we'll keep consuming water, there will be a greater demand on us to be able to do it and is that what you want?

Because that's what's going to happen.

So I think if you're looking at a business and you're looking at your own staff. The first question is to ask them, are they already using it? Are they using it at home? Are they using it in their day to day? Have it is in a safe space question. So if it's a hypothetical communications manager called Rob, who happens to be working for an enterprise partnership and his boss says, Rob, are you using ChatGPT to write press releases?

It's okay for Rob to say yes, because sort of everyone else is doing it. The education was fascinating, so from the work we've been doing with Oxford University and various schools, we know that within about two weeks of ChatGPT launching, pretty much every teacher and every student in the UK was using it, but no one would say it.

Now it's starting to evolve into curriculum in really lovely ways, which is here is a piece of prose text that was published and here's another one which was written by ChatGPT. Compare and contrast why these two pieces of text are different. So that's getting the student to think about it, acknowledging the existence of it.

So I think the first step is acknowledge that a lot of people are using AI, ask your staff, think about your own strategy with OxLEP's support in that space of course, and do a quick audit. You know, where are you already using it? Where have people got ideas? Where have the employees got ideas of, gosh, wouldn't it be cool if we had a corporate, you know, perplexity account? That would make my life easier and discuss it, it's an open conversation.

I think taking Guy's business approach in terms of embracing AI is the way to go and I think similar with us you know, there's a number of occasions where I've gone into work and perhaps I've been struggling a little bit to come up with the right words to try and portray a particular programme that we're launching or a particular fund that we're putting out and actually using the AI to help me to get off the page, you know, get my ideas off the page and to push me in the right direction as to

what's going to work best to allow me to communicate with our target markets has been massively helpful and like Grae says, the majority of this stuff is there for you to use, it's free to a certain point. You would be silly not to embrace it into your everyday operations, particularly I think from a comms and marketing perspective.

Certainly if we're an example of that, you know, we're using it to a relatively small level, I would say, but undoubtedly it's helped us to reach new audiences and probably in turn helped people like Grae to connect with businesses who need the support, it really starts from there.

So in essence, anything that you're typing into ChatGPT is going to be public and there was an example recently of a chief financial officer who was looking to summarise what the financial state of their business was and so they typed in all of the financials for the company and said, please summarise this, which then meant that all of the financial states of that company were then searchable in OpenAI and our view on this is that it is important for businesses ultimately

to have their own sovereign model, we'll get to that in the market at some point in the coming months and years. But just be aware that any personal or confidential information that goes into ChatGPT will then form part of its model and will likely be public.

That isn't going to inform the language models that those organisations use. But it's a point well made, the free versions are almost like you're the product and your data is helping that tool understand the relationship between numbers and the written word and your prompt and what that means. Why did that human ask that? That, you know, kind of natural language processing.

So go to YouTube, find some of those big organisations and individuals who actually do regular, kind of weekly or bi weekly shows introducing some new technologies. Talk to your peers, as a business leader about what tools they use and something that Guy said earlier, which is talk to your employees, find out what they're using. It's that person who is sitting in the cafeteria on their mobile phone is using the app that your, you know, head of operations should be doing.

Understand from best practice, join peer groups in your area, listen to what other people are using and just try these things, try before you buy, you could even go to something like poe. com, try all the language models for free, see which one you like. Go to something like huggingface. com, if you're really into this, you can find the language models. You can find, you know, lots of user examples of these types of things. Find out what works best for you and then give it a go.

So you're already doing it, do a quick audit, as you say, talk to OxLEP, talk to employees, that person who's in the cafe on the app could actually be using the app that could save your business. So, you know, find out what it is, you know, not that your business may be a problem, but it could be the one that elevates it suddenly as well. So I think people know more about AI than they think they do already, actually and a quick, I'd say quick audit, work out where you want to go.

And then as with saying the barrier to entry is low, so give it a go.

We will move into everyone having access to text to video, you know, very soon and I think that is then a qualitative standpoint. So we see the innovation and then the quality increase. That is going to change an enormous amount of people's work, people's lives. There will be issues around deepfakes that we already know, that we'll have to solve along the way. So I think the, to my mind, the one I'm watching right now is generative AI video, and I think that's going to be critical.

I think the other thing that we'll see is going to be the fragmentation of language models.

So we've got the ones that we mentioned around OpenAI, the big two or three around the world and these will then fragment into each business has its own, it'll be each country has its own sovereign LLM, then each business has its own LLM and then all of us as individuals will have our own ones that are the AI version of your answering machine message, you know, that responds on an individual basis and I think we will see that, in the next little bit. So I think those are the dead certs.

The other ones are, you know, are the new and sort of advancements and innovations that we'll see.

Every single living human being that would wish to do so ought to embrace the technology if they can, even in a light touch sense, because if they don't embrace it, it will embrace them and then maybe they're not in control and I think that what we'll see within 10 years is, you know, artificial general intelligence where we suddenly realise that there are technologies out there that most definitely exceed our capability at every level, in every discipline.

That's a given and I just hope that we don't move beyond that to anything else, I'm sure we won't.

Give it something challenging, which is an open-ended very complex pattern, like climate change, poverty, things that are for the betterment of human evolution, and you know, and give us the answer and it'll probably come out saying it's 42, and that's not going to help too many people, Douglas Adams fans, but let's give it a go.

Chas Bountra, the Pro Vice Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Oxford on how we can retain the best talent in Oxfordshire. An apposite to our discussion today, the changing face of the workplace with the MD of Legacy, an award winning sustainable events agency, Abena Fairweather. Every episode, is well worth a listen. Please spread the word, tell your friends or colleagues about us, and if you feel so inclined, leave us a review.

You can share your thoughts and suggestions on our social channels, and you can email your questions for inclusion in future editions too. The address is on the podcast description. Business support in Oxfordshire is just an email or a phone call away. OxLEP is at your service. The OxLEP business support tool can signpost you to expert help in a matter of minutes. Why not take a look? Find it on our website, oxfordshirelep. com.

But for now, from the whole OxLEP team, and from me, Howard Bentham, it's goodbye.