Griffin on Tech: BYO AI won’t cut it, tech tycoon’s horror holiday

Another week, another tech vendor-sponsored report pointing to the huge productivity gains we’ll enjoy as a nation if we only improved our “digital maturity” and employed more artificial intelligence.

The latest report, undertaken by Accenture on behalf of Microsoft, suggests the widespread use of generative AI could save each worker using it an average of 275 hours per year and grow GDP by 1% per year, adding $76 billion to the economy by 2038.

That’s largely in line with the Spark-commissioned report from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research released in February. It found that with a “20% uplift, the use of advanced digital technologies is predicted to increase industry output by up to $26 billion over the next decade, and GDP by as much as 2.08% per year”.

Do you believe these studies? Setting aside the fact that they are sponsored by the vendors that want to sell you the products and services that will improve your digital maturity, do they gel with your experiences of AI to date?

I estimate my own use of AI probably saves we 20 - 30 minutes a day, chiefly through using Perplexity and other tools for research as an alternative to Googling things. The areas that would really save me time and free me up to do more productive work would be to use AI to manage my inbox, calendar, invoicing and accounting. 

Source: Accenture New Zealand’s Generative AI opportunity

But AI doesn’t really work for those things yet. I’ve tried using Gemini to help generate emails in Gmail and had a go with Microsoft’s Copilot equivalent. Gemini does a reasonable job summarising email threads and finding relevant documents for me in Google Drive, but I find its email drafting and suggested responses clunky. 

Still, Kiwi workers are apparently among the highest adopters of generative AI in the world, with 84% of knowledge workers using it. That puts us in the company of a handful of countries including China, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia that have really taken to the technology.

With generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot 18 months to two years old now, what I’d really like to see is some quality research analysing how GenAI is being used, where the productivity gains are being achieved, and showing the rest of us how we can apply these productivity hacks to our own work. Too much of the research is still forward-looking, aspirational, pointing to the big wins we can achieve. 

Anecdotally, I get widely varying answers when I talk to people who are using the likes of Copilot when I ask them how it is changing how they work. 

One thing Accenture highlights, which I agree with, is that we are still in the “BYO AI” phase where a lot of users are leaning on a subset of GenAI tools to help us with tasks. The real game-changing developments will come when organisations invest time and money in developing their own AI systems.

As Microsoft New Zealand’s managing director Vanessa Sorenson said this week: “For many organisations, the focus to date has been ‘how can AI reduce costs’, which is understandable in the current environment,” she said.

“But we can’t just be looking at generative AI as an opportunity to save money – it’s our chance to do more than we ever dreamed was possible, experiment and take risks, to take our whole economy to the next level.”

At an organisational level, that requires a strategic approach to identifying how AI can add value, then investing in governance, development and ongoing maintenance of AI systems. That’s when the real productivity gains and potential to produce new AI-augmented products and services will be realised. 

We now need to hear a lot more about how we get there.

There’s always a Kiwi (or two) involved!

There was a steady flow of news this week about the tragic sinking of the superyacht Bayesian off the coast of Sicily with the deaths of six of the 22 passengers and crew onboard.

Among the dead was British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, who had gathered friends, family, and his Kiwi lawyer, Ayla Ronald, onboard Bayesian to celebrate his recent acquittal on fraud charges in the US.

Thankfully, Ronald got off the boat safely, as did the captain, James Cutfield, who is also a Kiwi! Wherever there’s big news gonig down somewhere in the world, you can usually find a Kiwi somehow involved.

So you can see why this story captured our media’s attention this week. The story took an even more incredible twist when it emerged that Lynch’s fellow defendant in the case, Stephen Chamberlain, was killed a few days before the sinking, after being hit by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire in the UK. That has got conspiracy theorists worked up into a lather.

But what about Lynch and the allegations that were levelled against him after the spectacular sale of his software company Autonomy to HP for US$11 billion in 2011? It’s not a company that had any sort of profile in this part of the world. The Financial Times has a good primer on Lynch, his rise to fame and subsequent battle with HP’s former CEO Meg Whitman. 

As the Financial Times explains: “[Lynch] founded Autonomy in 1996 just as an explosion of digital data was starting to engulf companies and other large organisations, presenting huge challenges in sorting through unstructured data, or information not held in easily searchable databases.

“The sale to HP confirmed Lynch’s success at carving out a globally recognised position in one of the most strategically important technologies of the time.”

It was the biggest acquisition of a European tech company at the time. But within a year HP claimed it had been sold a dud, with Lynch and fellow Autonomy leaders accused of inflating the value of the acquisition by US$5 billion.

“Lynch lost a long battle against extradition to the US on fraud charges and spent more than a year under house arrest in San Francisco ahead of a trial. He was eventually cleared by a jury on all charges in June this year,” the FT reported.

Along the way, Autonomy’s former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain was convicted of fraud over the Autonomy sale in the US in 2019. HP also won a civil fraud claim against Lynch in the UK in 2022.

A messy, bitter tale of corporate intrigue ends with a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.