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‘We need humans to be in the loop for a long time to come’: Dropbox CEO says AI is not replacing people yet

Tech firms like Dropbox, Adobe and Snap Inc are pushing ahead with innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) given its potential benefits.

‘We need humans to be in the loop for a long time to come’: Dropbox CEO says AI is not replacing people yet

Tech firms like Adobe, Dropbox and Snap Inc are pushing AI innovations. (Photo: iStock/Poca Wander Stock)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is “clearly the next big platform” and will be good at “certain things”, but it cannot replace humans yet, said Dropbox CEO Drew Houston.

“It gives computers all kinds of new capabilities and allows us to offload a lot of our more mechanical tasks or busy work to machines, which then frees humans up to do all the things that only we can do well,” he told CNA’s Asia First on Thursday (Jun 22). 

“There's still a lot of work for humans to do. No matter how much of an AI optimist you are … we need humans to be in the loop for a long time to come.”

He added that AI will automate several tasks but not replace jobs.

“We focus on how we leverage AI to make your life simpler or more efficient at work, but we're not focused on replacing people,” he said.

“The best use of AI is giving existing users new superpowers, so I think AI will certainly make people more productive,” he added.

Adobe Asia Pacific (APAC) president Simon Tate similarly said that studies show that AI will increase overall productivity.

He noted that a report by global management consulting firm McKinsey on the economic potential of generative AI showed that the technology could increase overall productivity by 3 to 5 per cent in the banking industry.

That will be worth “trillions and trillions of dollars to the global economy”, said Mr Tate.

“Instead of adopting the sort of doomsday view of ‘AI is gonna kill all of our jobs’ and think more from the perspective of this moving people up the value chain, then I think (there is) opportunity for generative AI to be truly accretive to the global economy,” he said.

AI DEVELOPMENT

The firms are pushing innovations in the AI space. Dropbox’s big potential is to make AI personalised, which is a current market gap, said Mr Houston.

“When you start using these tools, one thing you realise pretty quickly is they're not personalised. So if you ask ChatGPT a question like ‘what's my passport number?’ or ‘where's that presentation I did last year on a product launch’, ChatGPT doesn't know how to answer them because it's not connected to your information,” he noted.

Through Dash, the company is building AI that knows about an individual’s company and other personal information

It is also launching Dropbox AI for files.

“You have a large PDF or document, you just have a quick question like ‘when does this contract expire?’ or you just want a summary, you can get that with one click,” he said.

Snap Inc is also moving in the same direction, with the company’s APAC president Ajit Mohan calling AI “an enormous opportunity for the world and especially for the younger communities who particularly gravitate towards Snapchat”.

He noted that in about four months, 150 million people around the world have engaged with “My AI”, the chatbot within Snapchat, sending 10 billion messages.

“This is an easy way to take the power of AI to young people all over the world,” he said.

Adobe AI art generator Firefly has also done well since its launch, said Mr Tate. In two weeks, the beta version attracted a million users and over 100 million generative images were created on the Firefly site and in products like Adobe Photoshop, he said.

HOW AI CAN BE USED

His firm believes that there are “absolutely real tangible use cases” of AI, adding that companies will not adopt new technology that will not give them tangible benefits, said Mr Tate.

He gave two examples of firms enjoying more productivity using AI – halving the time it takes to create content and monetising it and insurance firms handling some claims more efficiently using AI art generators like Firefly.

“If you think of an insurance company wanting to, for example, reduce the time that it takes to pay motor vehicle accident claims and the ability for something like Firefly to train their image-based assets to know what's real and what's not real, that would reduce premiums for consumers and it would obviously uplift productivity with every insurance company,” he said.

He noted however that the uptake of generative AI by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is “lagging”.

“That worries me a little bit, especially when I look across our Asian customers in many economies,” he said.

SMEs account for a  huge proportion of a country’s gross domestic product, he noted.

“There's something in this for us to really make sure that those SMEs are benefiting from the same innovative power of generative AI like some of the bigger counterparts,” he said.

Source: CNA/ja(fk)
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