More than one thousand people attended the first edition of CONVERGE in Latin America, held last Thursday, March 22nd, at Centro Cultural Kirchner in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Renowned local and international speakers discussed the future of Augmented Intelligence, which was the focus of Globant’s event. During the event, the different talks showed that AI offers a powerful value proposition to enhance our capabilities: Instead of replacing humans, AI is synergizing with existing apps and humans, opening up amazing new paths along the road. That’s why rather than talking about Artificial Intelligence, we talk about Augmented Intelligence and that was the focus of CONVERGE.
Check out the pictures:
Augmented Intelligence and AI’s impacts are not solely on the technology side but also in the business arena. To spark this conversation many experts and enthusiasts assisted to a a full day event with more than 20 international speakers from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Telefonica and AIVA, among others, who gathered to chat about how they are facing digital transformation and how to be part of the Augmented Intelligence revolution.
What are the keys takeaways of CONVERGE to understand this revolution?
1- To Stay Relevant
“In the current world, the most important thing is to stay relevant,” said Guibert Englebienne, co-founder and CTO of Globant, during the opening of CONVERGE. In this sense, he highlighted the importance of being up to date with technology’s rapid pace.
2- Artificial intelligence to optimize processes
“Artificial intelligence is the biggest revolution in the past 10 years,” said Martín Migoya, co-founder and CEO at Globant. He also outlined the central value of the user. “because of the power of users, today those companies that provide services have to transform themselves to be able to adapt to users’ desires”, he added.
3- Algorithms can also be creative
Pierre Barreau, creator of AIVA, the first intelligent system to be recognized officially as a composer, talked about its creation. Pierre explained that he fed the system more than 30 thousand productions of different classical composers.
Chema Alonso, Telefonica’s Chief Data Officer, talked about Telefonica’s fourth platform, a space in which the company managed to concentrate the information of all its users.
Cindy Soo, a leader in strategy and innovation, spoke about the important role of generating creative and significant experiences for the users of connected devices, wearables, houses, and intelligent vehicles. To be able to stay relevant, the user has to be at the center.
4- The challenge of natural language
Dan Rozenfarb, co-founder of Keepcon, highlighted what’s needed to train a system that will be able to understand natural language, as we need to consider irony, context, and orthographic errors, among others.
5- Bots to talk with people
Richard Boyd, creator of Tanjo.ai, explained to attendees how he was able to get his father’s memories back through text, archives, and old photos after he died. “It was difficult to restore all that information because he didn’t have social media accounts, but today, all our information is on the web”, he explained. With all that data we would be able to build a digital copy of any persona to virtually interact with them. So, through bots, we could potentially talk with people who are no longer alive.
6- Data is the new oil
Mat Travizano, founder and CEO of Grandata, emphasized the importance of users’ data. “The most important commodity in the world is not oil, but data,” as that information is useful for understanding customers’ needs and anticipating them.
Sebastien Le calvez, Director of App Innovation at Microsoft, also outlined the value of information and said that “the future is led by artificial intelligence.”
Valliappa Lakshmanan, leader of big data and professional services of Machine Learning at Google Cloud Platforms, reaffirmed this notion. “Once you have significant data,” he said, “you don’t need to write rules anymore, because the Machine Learning system itself will work them out.”*
Enjoy the videos of the event here:
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*Some of this information is based on a pr article published on Infobae (in Spanish).
