Augmenting Artificial Intelligence Through Cross-Functional Perspectives with Varun Grover
This week on the Be Epic podcast, Brent sits down with Varun Grover, Distinguished Professor of Information Systems and George & Boyce Billingsley Endowed Chair in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. They explore the profound effects of AI on individuals, businesses, and society. Varun highlights areas where AI can enhance lives through applications in healthcare, education, and more. However, he cautions that without understanding how AI reaches conclusions, trust remains elusive. Brent and Varun discuss improving AI through specialized models, explainability, richer inputs and contexts. Varun asserts that augmenting human skills rather than automation ensures AI uplifts roles and fuels innovation. Listeners gain insight into AI's trajectory and its role partnering with instead of replacing humans.
Transcript
You never have innovation through automation,
Varun Grover:you will only have innovation if there are ways in which the AI
Varun Grover:and the technology can work together.
Brent Williams:Welcome to the Be Epic Podcast brought to you
Brent Williams:by the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of
Brent Williams:Arkansas. I'm your host, Brent Williams. Together, we'll
Brent Williams:explore the dynamic landscape of business and uncover the
Brent Williams:strategies, insights and stories that drive business today. Well,
Brent Williams:today, I'm lucky to have with me Dr. Varun Grover, and Dr.
Brent Williams:Grover's the George and Boyce Billingsley Endowed Chair and
Brent Williams:Distinguished Professor of Information Systems in the
Brent Williams:Walton College. Varun, thank you for joining me today.
Varun Grover:I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.
Brent Williams:Well, I think we're going to touch on some
Brent Williams:interesting topics today. But maybe before we do that, I would
Brent Williams:love for our audience to get to know you better. I've gotten to
Brent Williams:know you over the last five years, I think you've been at
Brent Williams:the Walton College since 2017. But tell us a little bit about
Brent Williams:you your background, and before coming to the Walton College.
Varun Grover:Sure. So. So I'm a techie at heart in the sense
Varun Grover:that I did my undergraduate degree in engineering,
Varun Grover:electrical engineering, and, and that's where my interest in
Varun Grover:technology started coming about. And I had the good fortune of
Varun Grover:getting into a very competitive engineering school that allowed
Varun Grover:me to think systematically about technology. So when I, when I
Varun Grover:graduated, I kind of felt that I was in a very narrow silo, I
Varun Grover:understood technology gyrations I understood, you know,
Varun Grover:technical concepts, but I didn't really understand the world, the
Varun Grover:broader context. And so I decided to do an MBA and then go
Varun Grover:into my PhD in information systems. And then after that,
Varun Grover:I've been basically in academic jobs, I was at USC, and then I
Varun Grover:was at Clemson. And my primary goal or responsibility in those
Varun Grover:jobs was to, to build the PhD program, and conduct research
Varun Grover:and set up centers, and have some outreach, dealing with
Varun Grover:important problems in the Information Systems domain. So
Varun Grover:I've been integrally involved in this in this field, and the
Varun Grover:field has evolved, because the technology catalyst is kind of
Varun Grover:driving changes. So if you think of technology in the 1960s, and
Varun Grover:70s, and 80s 90s, and now, now we're in this digital world,
Varun Grover:that is a lot of people really don't know how to deal with it,
Varun Grover:and companies are still struggling. And now we've got AI
Varun Grover:coming in, that's adding a new wrinkle. And so what I like
Varun Grover:about the field in general, is that we don't have a dearth of
Varun Grover:problems to study, there are lots of challenges faced by by
Varun Grover:companies faced by individuals, and now the impacts transcend to
Varun Grover:society. So there's a lot of really, really interesting
Varun Grover:issues. And that keeps me excited about the field.
Brent Williams:Yeah. Well, you know, Varun, you're, you are a
Brent Williams:researcher, you're a teacher, you know, you serve the
Brent Williams:University and the College through the normal mechanisms.
Brent Williams:But you have spent the majority of your career really focused on
Brent Williams:research. And as you say, the your work and PhD programs are
Brent Williams:really advancing the research of these institutions. Just when
Brent Williams:you think about business research, maybe more generally,
Brent Williams:how, how does it impact the world? How does it impact
Brent Williams:others? And how have you viewed that over time?
Varun Grover:Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
Varun Grover:Because even business research has has evolved. If you think
Varun Grover:about in the 1950s, business research was not much of
Varun Grover:anything, it was more, you know, go out maybe some outreach and
Varun Grover:case studies that you did with with businesses, but then the
Varun Grover:scientific aspect of business research came in the 1960s,
Varun Grover:1970s. And we kind of went overboard with the concepts,
Varun Grover:scientific concepts of theory and became somewhat
Varun Grover:disassociated with practice. So my thinking is that in in a, in
Varun Grover:an applied business discipline, it's really important that we
Varun Grover:create interventions to practice. Any research that we
Varun Grover:do, should not be esoteric and isolated from the real world.
Varun Grover:And so when we talk about when we think about research
Varun Grover:projects, traditionally our approach would be, you know,
Varun Grover:look for research gaps in the literature and then try and fill
Varun Grover:those gaps. I think the more productive approach is to To
Varun Grover:identify real problems faced by practice, and then to convert
Varun Grover:those practical problems into research problems. So it's more
Varun Grover:like engaged scholarship, you engage with practice at a deeper
Varun Grover:level, and try and look at their problems, and then translate
Varun Grover:those problems into research problems so that you can create
Varun Grover:interventions, as a result of your research that actually make
Varun Grover:a difference in practice.
Brent Williams:That's right, what a good way to explain that
Brent Williams:I just couldn't agree more about at least in my own research that
Brent Williams:that's where the research questions that I've been most
Brent Williams:interested in then that ultimately, I think the research
Brent Williams:that has the biggest impact for my own career comes from same
Brent Williams:for you.
Varun Grover:Absolutely
Brent Williams:Well, I'll, I'll brag on you a minute, because I
Brent Williams:don't think you would brag on yourself in this way. A couple
Brent Williams:of the interesting statistics about you as a researcher, I
Brent Williams:think you've published more than 400 articles in your career,
Brent Williams:over 100 in the top journals, and you are listed as one of the
Brent Williams:100 most cited, not just information systems, but
Brent Williams:business researchers in the world, what an accomplishment.
Brent Williams:And so you have truly over a career made a real impact in the
Brent Williams:academy and in practice.
Varun Grover:Thank you. Thank you Brent.
Brent Williams:Well your research, yeah, I told you this
Brent Williams:before, I'm kind of borrowing from your bio here. But you
Brent Williams:know, at a real broad level, you know, as I saw it described
Brent Williams:focuses on the effects of digitization on individuals on
Brent Williams:businesses and organizations and even society, tell us a little
Brent Williams:more of a high level before we get into some of the more
Brent Williams:detailed questions.
Varun Grover:So I've always been interested in how
Varun Grover:technology creates value. And information technology is
Varun Grover:particularly of interest to me. So when we look at computing
Varun Grover:technologies, in a business context, what are the aspects of
Varun Grover:these technologies? And the and the context around them, that
Varun Grover:lead to value value at the individual level? So how can
Varun Grover:technology enhance individual productivity? How the value at
Varun Grover:the group level, value at the organizational level? How do you
Varun Grover:actually create competitive advantage through these
Varun Grover:technologies? How do you create greater profitability, more
Varun Grover:revenues? And then at the market level? And that is how do you
Varun Grover:make markets more efficient through technology. And then now
Varun Grover:even more so at the societal level. So with technology, and
Varun Grover:particularly digital technologies, penetrating every
Varun Grover:aspect of what we do, there are issues of value, and the value
Varun Grover:could be positive or negative. So now we are seeing you know,
Varun Grover:this, there's two phases of technology, you have the
Varun Grover:intended consequences to create positive value for companies.
Varun Grover:And then you have sometimes unintended consequences that
Varun Grover:create problems for society. So I like to study at every one of
Varun Grover:these levels, I like to study different questions regarding
Varun Grover:the value proposition of digital technologies.
Brent Williams:Well, this has to bring probably to anyone's
Brent Williams:mind, you know, when you talk about the enter the the
Brent Williams:intersection of society and digital technology, as we sit
Brent Williams:here today, the conversation around artificial intelligence,
Brent Williams:AI, is everywhere. All right, you know when chat GPT popped on
Brent Williams:the scene, it really just brought it to the consciousness,
Brent Williams:even though this has been developing for years, if not
Brent Williams:decades, it really brought it to the consciousness. You're not an
Brent Williams:AI researcher, I know. But but I do think that you're probably in
Brent Williams:a unique position to think about this intersection between this
Brent Williams:technology, and people, businesses and society. So maybe
Brent Williams:just I'll just I'll stop right there and kind of say, all
Brent Williams:right, as you're observing this phenomenon of AI, what's kind of
Brent Williams:going through your mind and what are the observations and
Brent Williams:questions that that are becoming apparent to you?
Varun Grover:Yeah. As many people are fascinated by AI, so
Varun Grover:am I, as it's not, it's not my primary area of research, but
Varun Grover:clearly it falls within the domain of digital technologies.
Varun Grover:And like you said, ChatGPT came on the scene and it blew away
Varun Grover:people because not because it wasn't necessarily the most
Varun Grover:accurate or more most interesting output, but it gave
Varun Grover:people the sense of the possible if this is the starting point,
Varun Grover:and it can generate such interesting outputs, then where
Varun Grover:is the world going. And I remember the first time I played
Varun Grover:around with GPT, I asked it to write a story, I said, you know,
Varun Grover:here's a little girl walking up a hill, and there's a, there's a
Varun Grover:big rock at the top of the hill, write a story for a five year
Varun Grover:old. And it wrote a pretty compelling story that I actually
Varun Grover:read to a five year old. And then I said, okay, redo the
Varun Grover:story for a 10 year old and it reformulated the story, change
Varun Grover:the language, and again, fairly compelling story for a 10 year
Varun Grover:old, then I asked her to do one for an adult, and it did it. And
Varun Grover:then I pushed it to be more creative, in the ending, make it
Varun Grover:more interesting, make it more controversial, make it more
Varun Grover:enigmatic. And every time I did it, it came up with interesting
Varun Grover:changes. And I said, wow, you know, this is actually doing it
Varun Grover:from the corpus of data it's been trained on, and yet, it has
Varun Grover:this layer of creativity that we don't quite understand how it's
Varun Grover:getting there. And this was the early version of ChatGPT. More
Varun Grover:recently, I was playing around with now there's many, many of
Varun Grover:these chatbots, AI based chatbots. And I noticed one of
Varun Grover:the differences. So I was playing around with a chatbot
Varun Grover:called Pie, which now I believe has been acquired by Microsoft.
Varun Grover:And it I found it to be extremely conversational. And
Varun Grover:what was different about the earlier versions in this version
Varun Grover:is that it had empathy. It actually could relate to me, and
Varun Grover:it was taking cues from my text, and putting that emotional
Varun Grover:response back to me.
Varun Grover:And that was very interesting. So it's like, it's
Brent Williams:Interesting.
Brent Williams:Interesting. Well, you mentioned profound and scary. You also,
Brent Williams:almost like we're coding emotions into these training
Brent Williams:sets. Now, to provide far more conversational far more personal
Brent Williams:AI, personal intelligence reactions. And I stopped
Brent Williams:thinking about this, it is absolutely fascinating where
Brent Williams:this can go. Because if you can have that level of
Brent Williams:you talked about a wide potential set of potential
Brent Williams:interactivity, and conversational and empathy with
Brent Williams:with individuals, you can put this front end on pretty much
Brent Williams:any intelligence, and you can access the world. So customer
Brent Williams:interfaces, so providing excellent customer service, that
Brent Williams:impacts on people business society at large. I'll, I'll
Brent Williams:make it make it conversational, so you can align with what the
Brent Williams:customer wants. Personal learning it for in the education
Brent Williams:sphere, companionship for old people, you know, if you
Brent Williams:actually put a physical manifestation, like a robot, and
Brent Williams:kind of dive into two and ask you a question. So you mentioned
Brent Williams:then you have this AI back back end, you can you can maybe
Brent Williams:alleviate some loneliness in the world. And then so clearly,
Brent Williams:there's this tremendous implications. And then you see
Brent Williams:the applications of AI. Some of the things that we've often
Brent Williams:wealth management, and you mentioned health care. And as I
Brent Williams:talked about is in the medical field, in the medical field, you
Brent Williams:can feed in radiology reports, and it can find abnormalities,
Brent Williams:that's kind of low hanging fruit. But then when you have
Brent Williams:this kind of conversational AI, you can put that in front of
Brent Williams:was sitting here listening, I was thinking, oh, those are two
Brent Williams:medical knowledge and you have a doc in a box. And when you are
Brent Williams:considered the shortage of primary care physicians, this
Brent Williams:would be a very interesting way to layer our medical
Brent Williams:interactions, where you have the first layer of interaction where
Brent Williams:pretty personal topics to me, like, one, you know, how am I
Brent Williams:you can feel comfortable talking, even though it's not a
Brent Williams:person, you can talk talk to the box, and that can do a diagnosis
Brent Williams:and write up a report. And then it can go to the next level for
Brent Williams:verification with a human and then go to the next level for a
Brent Williams:managing my money and two managing my health? And I know
Brent Williams:referral to a specialization. It can change the medical field
Brent Williams:quite quite significantly. And we've seen applications of AI in
Brent Williams:supply chain and manufacturing with robotics, in the financial
Brent Williams:sector with wealth planning. And so when you have these
Brent Williams:that I think that a lot of your research in digitization and how
Brent Williams:interfaces, you basically can interact and get it more aligned
Brent Williams:with what you want in terms of your wealth goals. And, and
Brent Williams:recently, I was reading an article that described IBM's
Brent Williams:Watson that was working with a fashion house, and they actually
Brent Williams:trained the AI on videos of models walking down runways, and
Brent Williams:it affects people in organizations and society looked
Brent Williams:social media included, and the AI was quite adept at
Brent Williams:identifying fashion trends, and new fashion clothing designs,
Brent Williams:based on what they observed through this corpus of data. So
Brent Williams:at least at trust at some level. So what have you learned about
Brent Williams:it's remarkable at the diversity of areas that AI can have have
Brent Williams:an impact, which is why it's so profound. And in some sense,
Brent Williams:also a little scary.
Brent Williams:the way that trust, I don't know, I don't know if it
Brent Williams:mediates those two. Tell me what you've learned and how you think
Brent Williams:that that's going to play out with AI?
Brent Williams:Yeah, this is a really interesting question of trust.
Brent Williams:Because historically, when we looked at information systems,
Brent Williams:we programmed these systems, we could actually code them, we
Brent Williams:said, so if we had a, we had to make a computer play chess, we'd
Brent Williams:say, okay, this is the way the queen moves. This is the way the
Brent Williams:bishop moves. These are the rules of chess, we put it into a
Brent Williams:program, and then it will play chess. So the earlier AI systems
Brent Williams:were actually programmed systems, they will rule based
Brent Williams:systems. So there was AI in the 1970s. But it was usually
Brent Williams:referred to as a snake oil of the 1970s and 80s. Because it
Brent Williams:over promised and under delivered, you could only have
Brent Williams:some gaming applications. So yes, you had medical diagnostic
Brent Williams:systems, but they were based on rules, the rules were coded in.
Brent Williams:So if a patient had temperature over 98.6, the patient had
Brent Williams:fever, if their white blood cell was over a certain level they
Brent Williams:had an infection, and it would, you'd kind of give it the
Brent Williams:symptoms, and it will pull out the rules and come up with the
Brent Williams:diagnosis. What's changed now is we have had the perfect storm of
Brent Williams:processing power. With these GPUs, graphic processing units,
Brent Williams:Navidia is the big player there, we have massive amounts of data,
Brent Williams:and low cost of data storage. And we have with this process of
Brent Williams:processing power and data, we can kind of look for patterns in
Brent Williams:the data that are and, and identify these patterns and make
Brent Williams:predictions based on these patterns. So the large language
Brent Williams:models that we see of today, are really next word predictors, if
Brent Williams:they although now, we can actually feed them videos and
Brent Williams:images. So they're multimodal models. But the language models
Brent Williams:are, really next word predictor, so they don't have any raw
Brent Williams:intelligence of their own. But they're kind of looking for
Brent Williams:these patterns in the data. And so while the old systems were
Brent Williams:programmed, the newer systems are digging out these patterns,
Brent Williams:almost like your neurological connections in the brain. It's
Brent Williams:actually creating these connections. But we don't really
Brent Williams:understand how they're creating these connections. It's almost
Brent Williams:like asking a person, say, How did you come up with that
Brent Williams:decision? Yeah, and what what neurons were connected in your
Brent Williams:brain to come up with that decision. So we don't really
Brent Williams:understand it. And so if we don't fully understand it, it's
Brent Williams:like Warren Buffett says, Never invest in anything you don't
Brent Williams:understand. So here, we are relying on the outputs. And we
Brent Williams:don't really understand how the outputs came to into existence.
Brent Williams:It's massive amounts of data, millions of parameters in the
Brent Williams:model. And so without understanding it, why should we
Brent Williams:trust it? And if we can't trust it, then why should we use it?
Brent Williams:And so I think it's a fundamental question of
Brent Williams:technology and value, which is my major stream, that we need to
Brent Williams:be able to trust these systems. Because another way to think
Brent Williams:about this is typically, if you look at scientific research, the
Brent Williams:idea of actually looking at patterns from data was
Brent Williams:considered voodoo science for many years.
Brent Williams:Yeah
Varun Grover:This induction you don't look for patterns.
Brent Williams:Yeah
Varun Grover:You come up with a theory or a statement and then
Varun Grover:you go on to get data and test it.
Brent Williams:Yeah, that's right.
Varun Grover:But what are large language models doing? What is
Varun Grover:Yeah. So it's just thinking exactly the same question.
Varun Grover:AI doing? It is really creating and testing theory
Varun Grover:simultaneously without any scientific underlay. So when I
Varun Grover:think about this, I think, you know, I've always grown up
Varun Grover:through my information systems career, thinking about data,
Varun Grover:information and knowledge as a trichotomy. So you have data,
Varun Grover:which are raw facts. And then you put the data together, and
Varun Grover:you get information which informs you. So you get
Varun Grover:interesting reports that reduce uncertainty or informs you. And
Varun Grover:then when you apply it, and you use organize the information,
Varun Grover:with experience, you get knowledge. What we've done with
Varun Grover:AI, is we've removed the middle layer, we've gone data is
Varun Grover:knowledge. And so we're basically taking massive amounts
Varun Grover:of data about the world. And we are proclaiming that this is
Varun Grover:actually creating knowledge. So we don't really need to
Varun Grover:understand the world to know it. It's like we're just take, so
Varun Grover:that layer has gone. So that's why this idea of trust is so
Varun Grover:fundamental, because we don't really understand how these
Varun Grover:connections are made. And so I I was thinking about, you know, as
Varun Grover:you why do people trust other people?
Varun Grover:And so so and do the others elements actually translate to
Brent Williams:Well, that's what I was gonna ask you, you
Brent Williams:AI. And I think people trust other people, because they may
Brent Williams:have a connection with them, they actually relate to them,
Brent Williams:they have empathy, or they relate at some subliminal level.
Brent Williams:know, how do you see that changing and evolving? The one
Brent Williams:So they say I trust you. People may trust people, because they
Brent Williams:understand where they're coming from. So if they make a
Brent Williams:decision, if you talk to someone, they make a decision,
Brent Williams:that I could see that you just mentioned. Well, the model is
Brent Williams:you can ask them. Okay, what's the basis of this decision? And
Brent Williams:do I trust you to explain to me how you came up with this
Brent Williams:decision. People trust people, because they are predictable,
Brent Williams:getting more reliable, let's say less erratic. That one may
Brent Williams:they are reliable, they may give accurate outputs. So if someone
Brent Williams:is erratic, we probably won't trust them. But if someone is
Brent Williams:more stable and predictable, and comes up with good, good
Brent Williams:change, you know, but and you even mentioned the ability of,
Brent Williams:outputs, we tend to trust them. And people trust people because
Brent Williams:we might share the same social experiences. So I think these
Brent Williams:elements of we trust people, because we can connect with them
Brent Williams:or relate to them. We trust people because we can understand
Brent Williams:of maybe I don't think you said it this way. I think you were
Brent Williams:where they're coming from, we can ask them, we trust people
Brent Williams:because they're reliable and not erratic. And we trust people,
Brent Williams:because we have a shared social world, is generally why people
Brent Williams:mentioning Pie, the the product you were working with, that it
Brent Williams:trust people. These elements are not very prominent in AI. And
Brent Williams:so, so I think that's why trust is a kind of an important issue.
Brent Williams:Although they're changing.
Brent Williams:had a feel of empathy, which might mean you could emotionally
Brent Williams:connect to it more easily. So some of these things seem to be evolving,
Varun Grover:I think so I think that from whatever little
Varun Grover:observation I've had over the last year and a half, it's not
Varun Grover:been that long since ChatGPT was removed, released. But this
Varun Grover:idea, I can see improvement in empathy, I think that element is
Varun Grover:there. So we are starting in on that trajectory in terms of
Varun Grover:understandability, there is a whole field or subfield of AI.
Varun Grover:That is called Explainable AI. How do you get take this neural
Varun Grover:connections? And how do you actually convert it into a
Varun Grover:language that humans can understand so they can explain
Varun Grover:the rationale for their decisions? Now, it may not be
Varun Grover:that important for radiology reports. But if we're dealing
Varun Grover:with a business discipline, you know, often you want to
Varun Grover:understand the rationale for the decision. So Explainable AI is
Varun Grover:actually being worked on. And and it's important, and it's
Varun Grover:it's particularly important because AI is all about data and
Varun Grover:connections and patterns. AI is not particularly good at
Varun Grover:reasoning. So if we tell an AI that Look, if they're looking at
Varun Grover:a pattern, x is the parent of y, it will not naturally infer from
Varun Grover:there or deduce from there, that y is the child of x. That
Varun Grover:reasoning ability will only come about if it's in the corpus of
Varun Grover:data. So the question then becomes, you know, how do you
Varun Grover:get this reasoning out of the AI, and that's where a lot of
Varun Grover:the research on Explainable AI is, give you another example. We
Varun Grover:can put millions of chess games played by world chess champions
Varun Grover:and feed it into the AI and it'll figure out the rules of
Varun Grover:chess and what works and what doesn't work. So that it will
Varun Grover:basically be a really good chess player. But if we change the
Varun Grover:board from an eight by eight board to a nine by nine board,
Varun Grover:then the training doesn't really help because it needs more than
Varun Grover:that it needs some kind of reasoning ability to play chess
Varun Grover:well on a nine by nine input. So I think that that idea of how do
Varun Grover:you get that reasoning to come into you know, the box or the
Varun Grover:corpus of intelligence of AI is is something that is being
Varun Grover:worked on through Explainable AI. So empathy? Yes, we're
Varun Grover:seeing improvement there. Explainable AI, we're not quite
Varun Grover:there. But there's certainly a direction there. And like you
Varun Grover:said, absolutely the corpus of training data. So most of the
Varun Grover:models, we had an AI foundational models, like from
Varun Grover:open AI. And from Google and Microsoft, these models are
Varun Grover:trained on massive corpus of data from the internet, the
Varun Grover:internet data is noisy. And it is, you know, it has a lot of a
Varun Grover:lot of problems, which means it can be a pretty good general, it
Varun Grover:can provide general advice on a lot of things. But if you're
Varun Grover:looking for very specialized advice, sometimes these models
Varun Grover:hallucinate and create these arbitrary outcomes, because
Varun Grover:they're not fully trained in those specialized areas. So I
Varun Grover:think one of the trends is how do you actually curate data for
Varun Grover:training and make these models more accurate and better? And
Varun Grover:how do you move away from the big tech companies which have
Varun Grover:the resources to train these large foundational models, to
Varun Grover:smaller models that are done through open source where you
Varun Grover:can, individual companies may not have to invest millions of
Varun Grover:dollars in training these models, but they can train them
Varun Grover:on their own data,
Brent Williams:Right.
Varun Grover:And, and become, it can become more more
Varun Grover:personalized and more accurate within that domain. So I think
Varun Grover:that's the third component of trust, where these models are
Varun Grover:being trained on better data. And sometimes even instead of
Varun Grover:the large models, we're getting smaller and more specialized
Varun Grover:models that are more accurate. And I think that's a trajectory
Varun Grover:that will improve trust. And finally, in terms of context. So
Varun Grover:I think that context is also improving, because the earlier
Varun Grover:models had very little that you could put into the model in
Varun Grover:terms of input. Now, some of the newer models, you can put entire
Varun Grover:books and and say, you know, so your context window, the number
Varun Grover:of tokens that go into the context is becoming larger and
Varun Grover:larger, which means you can provide a richer context to your
Varun Grover:decision making. And then you can have conversations to get
Varun Grover:the alignment of get what you want from the AI. And so that
Varun Grover:alignment can continue by probing and interacting with the
Varun Grover:AI. So I think on the third aspect, the context aspect,
Varun Grover:we're also seeing improvements. So I will trust the box, because
Varun Grover:I can connect with it. I can trust the box, because I know
Varun Grover:where it's coming from. It can explain its reasoning to me, I
Varun Grover:can trust the box. Because it gives me good outputs, accurate
Varun Grover:outputs, and I can trust the box because it's grounded in my
Varun Grover:world. And so all those aspects are advancing. And so I think
Varun Grover:that on the technological front, we are seeing a trajectory
Varun Grover:that's positive for trust.
Brent Williams:I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you about to human.
Brent Williams:Maybe let's start in the business context, right. So
Brent Williams:let's say the models are improving, they're becoming more
Brent Williams:trustworthy. They're certainly becoming more commonplace.
Brent Williams:They're still probably some of the like, there's the
Brent Williams:excitement. There's some of those some people who think it's
Brent Williams:scary. Probably each of us land somewhere on that continuum
Brent Williams:differently. But in the business world, you know, the role of the
Brent Williams:human in business, does it, change it slightly? Does it
Brent Williams:change? Fundamentally? You have any thoughts to share on that?
Varun Grover:Yeah I think that's, that's, that's a million
Varun Grover:dollar question, or maybe a billion dollar question. or now
Varun Grover:given, given the market of AI, maybe a trillion question.
Brent Williams:If you can answer this, we can raise a lot
Brent Williams:of money for the Walton College.
Varun Grover:But I think I so, how should AI, so if if we are
Varun Grover:using AI, to automate jobs, if we're using AI to, to automate
Varun Grover:and replace jobs, so you can, you know, you can do an
Varun Grover:accounting job better, or you can do a legal job better. Then
Varun Grover:what is essentially happening is we are devaluing labor. We're
Varun Grover:devaluing human skills and labor, because we're essentially
Varun Grover:replacing labor with the technology. And that's going to
Varun Grover:bring the cost of labor down. So substitution of jobs with
Varun Grover:technology is probably not the most innovative direction, it's
Varun Grover:probably appropriate. And probably the incentives for
Varun Grover:corporations to make money are in the cost cutting sphere. So
Varun Grover:we're certainly going to see a lot of that. But I think that
Varun Grover:where we're going to see the human and, and the technology
Varun Grover:work better is through augmentation. You never have
Varun Grover:innovation through automation, you will only have innovation,
Varun Grover:if there are ways in which the AI and the technology can work
Varun Grover:together. So if you automate a lot, you're basically devaluing
Varun Grover:the human if you augment you're up valuing the human, because
Varun Grover:when you when you automate, your competition is between the AI
Varun Grover:and the human, when you augment your competition is between the
Varun Grover:human with the AI, and the human without the AI.
Brent Williams:Right.
Varun Grover:And so you're upskilling. So I think that we
Varun Grover:are at a point of inflection, where we are making 1000s of
Varun Grover:decisions regarding AI. And it's really important that if
Varun Grover:corporations are going to invest in AI, they should consciously
Varun Grover:think about how to augment human skills through AI, rather than
Varun Grover:only automation. Because automation will probably give
Varun Grover:you the short term bang for the buck in terms of reduction in
Varun Grover:costs. But the longer term impact on innovation will only
Varun Grover:take place if you give people the discretion to leverage AI
Varun Grover:and become and use it innovatively. So if there's
Varun Grover:there's a series of tasks in your job, and there's a few that
Varun Grover:can be automated, that's fine. But then think about what are
Varun Grover:the tasks in your jobs that can be augmented. That's where the
Varun Grover:innovation comes in. And that's where the value is created.
Brent Williams:Well, Varun, thank you. Thank you for sharing
Brent Williams:your knowledge and that knowledge that comes from
Brent Williams:decades of work and research and I know I learned a lot and I'm
Brent Williams:sure our audience did as well. So thank you for joining me
Brent Williams:today.
Varun Grover:Thank you, Brent for having me.
Brent Williams:On behalf of the Walton College thank you for
Brent Williams:joining us for this captivating conversation. To stay connected
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