Tom Edwards, managing director of AI for Ernst & Young LLP, will give a keynote address on the technical and human-resource implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on Nov. 12 at TRSA’s 7th Annual Marketing, Sales & Service Summit in Atlanta. Textile Services Weekly recently interviewed Edwards to give readers a preview on what they can expect from his 8 a.m. presentation.
A highly recognized speaker in this area, Edwards specializes in integrating emerging technologies, digital transformation and AI to drive business growth. Among other awards, Edwards recently was named as a 2024 Top 50 Tech Professional. He also was recognized as Marketer of the Year by The Dallas Fort Worth Interactive Marketing Association (DFWIMA) and as an OnCon Icon Top 10 Global Marketer. Edwards’ thought leadership and innovative approach have had a significant impact on marketing, advertising and technology. Excerpts of our interview follow.
How useful is AI to employ for writing proposals or promotional copy?
“I’ve met with about 90 different Fortune 500 companies over the last 12 months. And what I can tell you is that there’s been this kind of natural progression, and it started with education. How do we set up and govern this? What about privacy? How do we build trust? How do we upskill our employees? And then it got into the experimentation. Where I’ve seen the bigger impact is in a couple key functional areas. One is in the marketing side. It’s around content creation, whether that’s copywriting, image generation or whether that’s personalized content like email and social media.”
How great a risk is there that ChatGPT or similar programs won’t get things right?
“There are a couple ways you can build trust. One is if you’re using an open system like ChatGPT, there is a percentage that there’s going to be some of what’s called ‘hallucination.’ A hallucination is basically where a model makes up some type of information. To minimize that, companies are grounding the model with their data and their information and doing some additional kind of fine-tuning, which is basically aligning your information using the large-language model. A large model is like a pre-trained set of information. So you’re able to connect your data to get a better result out of it.”
Can taking these steps protect you from getting bad information from an AI program like Gemini?
“It does minimize the risk. The other thing I always recommend is having a human in the loop and reviewing the output. I would not just trust it to create and then take it and post it without verifying at this point in time.”
Well, I guess that means some of us will still have jobs as editors, right?
“It’s funny that you mentioned that because the biggest fear that people have is will AI replace them, and that’s not really the case. Those that use the tools are going to be the ones that are going to surpass the others that aren’t. But having that human in the loop is absolutely critical in terms of any type of deployment or AI integration within companies.”
How about using an AI platform to help with recruiting prospective employees?
“This is where you start running into more issues. What I would recommend is it’s fine to use the tool to craft the job description. I would be very careful in using it to screen applicants or to compare them in that way. Because there are certain inherent biases that are developed in the platforms.”
Click here for more information or to register for the 7th Annual TRSA Marketing, Sales & Service Summit in Atlanta.
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