Here at Public Digital we’re often asked what we think about Artificial Intelligence. Dave Rogers recently published a wonderfully thoughtful post on the topic. This is my short version.

We think AI is likely to have a societal, economic and political impact on the same scale as the arrival of the Internet, or the ubiquity of smartphones.

That impact will be both for good, and for ill. As technologists, we have a particular civic responsibility to push towards the former and steer away from the latter.

AI is definitely changing both what can be created, and how things are created.

But right now there’s heaps of worthless AI hype, paired with equally overwrought doomerism.

Plus, there are many AI opportunities that, while vital to explore, will end up not being valuable. At this phase in AI’s maturity, it is impossible to predict what will prove valuable and what won’t - you just have to experiment.

So, to thrive in the AI era, your organisation must:

1. Develop situational awareness about these technologies in order to make sense of the AI hype.

2. Become highly adaptive, so it can quickly discover where any true value lies as these technologies evolve to be ever more capable.

Public Digital can help with both.

Finally, we encourage our clients to spend less time debating AI, and more time experimenting with how it might solve real problems. Getting your hands dirty is by far the best way to learn where AI can help your organisation, and where it cannot.

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