On May 24th, Entefy CEO Alston Ghafourifar spoke at the 2018 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the topic of: “Building the Intelligent Enterprise using AI, ML, Mobility, and Cloud Services.” The annual event attracts more than 800 CIOs and other senior executives from global organizations of all sizes.
During a wide-ranging discussion about digital transformation strategies, Alston presented his views on the importance of a multi-modal approach when implementing AI solutions to build intelligence into enterprise systems. While unimodal AI can deliver promising results when applied to direct use cases, Alston argued, they often fail to capture much of the overall value that multi-modal AI systems can harness and apply to a broader set of business processes. Alston shared an analogy with cloud technologies. An enterprise that transitions only its CRM platform to the cloud can capture some business value; but that value may be a fraction of what can be harnessed when applying digital transformation to a broader spectrum of systems. Alston argued that, when it comes to extracting optimal value out of an organization’s lake of data, multi-modal AI systems that leverage multiple domains of AI such as computer vision, natural language, audio, and other data intelligence can significantly outperform unimodal systems. It truly is a case of “greater than the sum of its parts.”
Over the course of the program, multiple speakers presented their thoughts on the broad trends impacting digital transformation, including AI and machine learning, cybersecurity and data privacy in the post-GDPR world, infrastructure and interconnection strategies, and workload-to-cloud projects using multiple IoT and mobile interfaces.
On behalf of Alston and everyone here at Entefy, we offer our sincere thanks to the event organizers, symposium attendees, and Ryan Mallory of Equinix, who moderated the discussion.