I recently attended the AI Summit in Auckland. I had been looking forward to it for quite some time, and I’m pleased to say that I was not disappointed in the slightest. It was an awesome day jam packed with incredible speakers, who have left me buzzing with excitement. In this post I’d like to share with you a bit about my favourite sessions. I gained so much from the experience, and would love to pass on some of what I learned.

John Galligan, Microsoft — Generative AI in NZ

As a student currently working towards my masters of AI, I was inspired and excited by John Galligan’s talk. Hailing from Microsoft, we heard from him how we can take steps to prime NZ, creating conditions for success. One condition that I found particularly memorable was community trust. There can be a lot of anxiety around AI and I enjoyed the focus he put on this, encouraging us to hold open debate with our communities. 

Tim Bradley, AWS — Unlocking productivity and innovation in AI

One quote that is particularly memorable for me was from Tim Bradley’s keynote. He ended with “it’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work”. Innovation requires experimentation, which is something that small businesses often don’t have the luxury of. AI is about giving small businesses the wiggle room they need to innovate. We can leverage AI to give back time and resources to small businesses, levelling the playing field and providing slack. 

Urs Hölzle, Google Fellow — The future of AI and insights from today

Just after morning tea we listened to a fireside chat between Urs Hölzle, a Google fellow and Stefan Korn, the CEO of Callaghan Innovation. It was awesome to hear Urs’ thoughts regarding AI, where it’s been, and where it’s heading. I knew from my studies that AI had been around for a long time, but struggled to understand why we have seen such an uptick in public interest over recent years. I learned from Urs that it’s because AI started speaking. The advent of publicly available large language models has made the technology suddenly very visible to us. That point was a real eye opener for me, and a perspective I had not considered previously. 

Round tables

In the afternoon the conference broke out into roundtables, with each group discussing a different topic. I thought this was an awesome session as it meant even attendees not speaking on stage were able to join in on the discussion. I joined table 6 where we discussed moving beyond proof of concept and into production with AI applications. It was great to have individuals with such a wide range of backgrounds coming together to talk over the obstacles preventing AI tools going to production. Being a student, I have not had involvement with production grade systems before and so it was really valuable to hear from others who are more experienced. The roundtable format created a space where I was able to ask others questions and clarify points I wasn’t sure about. 

I’d like to end with a huge thank you to everyone who worked to make this event happen, and to the speakers of course! I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and am already looking forward to next year.