Being Adaptable and Rethinking Every Process in the New Era of AI

Rama Akkiraju, VP of AI & ML for IT, NVidia
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Episode Summary

In this episode, Rama Akkiraju and Markus Zirn discuss how generative AI is changing business processes, and uncover dozens of use cases. They consider its impact on democratization, organizations, and specific roles. Rama explains why unstructured data is the new gold mine, and they discuss why governance and guardrails are key for containing the superpowers granted by AI. Rama advises listeners to re-evaluate their processes in this new world. In her final advice, she suggests that adaptability is key, and flexible architectures are becoming more important than ever.

  • Episode Key Takeaways

    Episode Key Takeaways

    • Generative AI opens the floodgates for democratization and citizen development: The rapid state of advancement of AI means that citizen development is here to stay, and democratization will move much farther ahead than ever before.
    • Endless use cases are emerging with generative AI: Rama and Markus list dozens of use cases, from IT operations to security, knowledge management, change management, and more.
    • The need for governance and guardrails is more crucial than ever: As generative AI has the potential to expose new data that was previously inaccessible, we need to make sure we are disciplined in how we protect our teams and unstructured data.
    • The heightened need for agility and flexibility: In the new rapidly changing environment, the need for flexible systems and organizations is greater than ever. Flexible architectures, nimble teams, and adaptability are paramount.
  • About Rama

    About Rama

    Rama Akkiraju is a VP of Enterprise AI & Automation at NVIDIA. Prior to this, Rama held various leadership roles at IBM in her two decades-plus career. Most recently, Rama was an IBM Fellow, and a Master Inventor at IBM where she was the CTO of IBM Watson AI Operations product, a product to optimize IT operations management with AI. Prior to this role, Rama led the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized, and compassionate conversations between computers and humans where she and her team developed and delivered several differentiating AI Services such as Personality Insights, Tone Analyzer, Emotion Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis services to the IBM Watson platform. Rama also led the effort to scale IBM Watson’s AI services including Automatic Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, and Chatbot services to dozens of languages. Before this, Rama led various projects and Research teams at IBM Watson Research Center and IBM Almaden Research Center in the areas of agent-based decision support systems, business process management, electronic marketplaces, and semantic Web services, for which she led a World-Wide-Web (W3C) standard. Rama has co-authored 100+ papers, holds 50+ patents, and received multiple awards, including Forbes' 'Top 20 Women in AI Research' (2017) and UC Berkeley's Athena Award (2020).

  • Top Quotes

    Top Quotes

    “Have an open mind. Go with the idea that everything could potentially be transformed. You have to rethink all the business processes, and everything that's been done before.”

    “The technology is changing so fast, you have to have flexible architectures that will allow you to adapt and change.”

    “When you harness them responsibly and strategically with the proper guardrails, AI and automation technologies can empower organizations to achieve their business goals with high levels of efficiency, productivity, and more.”