Interview
The Gist
- AI evolution. Frank Palermo emphasizes the long history of generative AI, dispelling the notion that it's a new, overnight phenomenon.
- Assistive tech. Palermo sees generative AI as a tool that assists rather than replaces human roles, especially in creative fields like content creation.
- Future focus. The AI series tackles governance, training, and IP protection, as crucial areas for AI development.
In an era where artificial intelligence is rapidly shaping industries and personal lives alike, understanding its trajectory becomes imperative. While AI often feels like a technological marvel of the present, it has roots stretching back decades, challenging the notion that it is solely a contemporary phenomenon.
Today's AI capabilities from chatbots to data analytics owe their existence to years of development, fits and starts and nuanced evolutions. Yet, as organizations increasingly integrate AI to optimize customer experience and operational efficiency, questions about its governance, limitations and societal impact remain.
For those seeking expert insights, look no further than our discussion with Frank Palermo, Virtusa global technical consulting leader, who delves deep into AI's historical context and its future applications. Palmero is a CMSWire Contributor.
Dom Nicastro: Hey, everybody, Dom Nicastro, CMSWire managing editor, here with our latest contributor video interview. We're going to have Frank Palermo, Virtusa global technical consulting leader. Frank, how's it going?
Frank Palermo: Going good, Dom. Thanks for having me.
Nicastro: Yeah, it's a pleasure having you on and, you know, quite the little, kids will call you like an OG of CMSWire contributors. You've been here quite a bit.
Palermo: Yeah, you guys have been kind to my work. So I appreciate the publishing on a lot of good topics, especially on the customer experience side and the audience management side for sure.
Nicastro: Yeah. And we're totally, you know, doubling down on customer experience. It's like our number one engagement, you know, in terms of articles, it gets the eyeballs. So I'm super happy to talk to you about today's topic. We have a four-part series on AI. But before we get into that, let's give a little sense of who Frank Palermo is, and you know, your company and kind of how you landed there?
Palermo: Sure, sure. So I worked for Virtusa. So we're a global IT services firm, about 35,000 people, 2 billion in revenue, but really specialized in a lot of the, you know, hardcore software development engineering services. And we made a lot of investments in the areas of cloud in the areas of artificial intelligence, and really, very smart domain, orientation to the market. So in industries like banking, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, as well as our telco media, and technology businesses. So yeah, it's been a great run here. And I look forward to the discussion today.
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Decades in the Making: A Deep Dive into Generative AI History
Nicastro: Yeah. And great. Well, thanks for the recap of the company and what you do. It's obviously a perfect time to be talking about AI. And I think you kind of hit on something a lot of people haven't been in terms of talking about AI, everyone's hyped up on what generative ai is doing, what ChatGPT is doing. And it's like, "Hey, this is brand new, this has never been out there before." You kind of bring the reality back and say this is decades in the making. What was the inspiration behind this given this big historical sort of step back?
Palermo: Yeah, you know, this is a space I have followed for quite some time. You know, even back in my days with IBM, I just feel like artificial intelligence has been something of a goal for the industry for many organizations. And we've seen various aspects of it. Simple things, like the auto completion on your email is actually using elements of what some of the, you know, large language models are doing today to some of what we've seen with, with the Watson platform. And so I do think it is powering more than people realize today.
But it's also this technology that doesn't exactly, you know, invent itself overnight. And I think I didn't really see this kind of lineage analysis that said, Hey, this is seven decades now in the making. And there's been a lot of fits and starts that have happened along the way. And a lot of the elements of what we see in Gen AI in these large language models are things that were really rooted in, you know, you know, literally decades ago. So I wanted to make that connection.
And you know, because I think the future holds a lot of that similar evolution, that's going to be required as things do evolve over time. And in the big scheme of things, this technology is still very much in the early innings, there's still a lot we have to figure out around governance, around the training, the protection of intellectual property. So there's a lot to cover in this series. And I kind of felt like it was a good, let's get under the hood and tackle some of these difficult topics.
Related Article: Looking Under the Hood at Generative AI History
How ChatGPT Captured the World: The Perfect Storm of AI
Nicastro: November of 2022, ChatGPT debuts from OpenAI? Like, what was the difference? Why did it get over the hump, and just capture the world? Because we've been talking about AI, but not at this level. We really haven’t in terms of what it can actually do for changing the world of work?
Palermo: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's really, I would say, two major dimensions. First dimension is this perfect storm of what I call the technology landscape, right? I think the cloud, I think specifically what NVIDIA is doing with the GPU compute power, which is the foundation of how these models are actually, you know, computed, as well as the, you know, algorithms and things like a transformer architecture, which got publicized back in 2017. Really all came together at a perfect time. And I think that's what made the technology platform work.
But then I think the simple thing that happened was, you know, AI has always been something of not easy for an end consumer to actually integrate with and experience, right, it was something that you saw on Jeopardy with with Watson or something. How do I, as a consumer actually touch and leverage, you know, AI in the simple idea of this, like chatbot, you know, initially ChatGPT. And then Bard, is made it so accessible and so easy to actually interoperate. It felt more like a conversation, you know, when you think about the strings and the prompts that you can string along, it really feels like there's somebody in the room with you, as an adviser providing you, you know, answers and content.
And I think that was a big aha moment for many that, you know, this is this thing became the fastest growing app ever. It surpassed TikTok, which is just quite amazing in weeks, not even months and years, right. So it certainly hit a chord. And now, I think people are really looking around saying, "OK, how do we apply this? You know, how do I apply this in the context of the consumer world and in the business world?" And I think that's the real excitement that's ahead of us.
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Generative AI Customer Experience: The Game-Changing Impact
Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. And it's like, for me, as a journalist, it's so exciting. Because, you know, the the big use case for me right now is not asking it, "Hey, write me an article on customer experience." It's like, "Hey, take this podcast transcription that I did with my source and give me the details of it. You know, give me the takeaways, give me the high level, takeaways."
Palermo: Yeah, the summarization capabilities.
Nicastro: The summarization is outstanding, because man, how many hours of brainpower did I use to try to transcribe a 9,000-word podcast before? Right, you know, a lot. So you know, and then not to mention, there's an AI tool that helps transcribe it to begin with. And then you come in with the analysis and the takeaways. It's just fascinating. It's helped us greatly.
But if you could, you know, I don't know predict or kind of give a sense of what you think a customer experience leader will find the most useful as we go forward with generative AI, like where are the big wins going to be because you've seen a lot of reports that customer support agents are going to be replaced by generative AI, but I like to look at it as how generative AI is going to infuse into customer experience, leadership and support and service. You know, where do you see the big wins coming?
Palermo: Yeah, no, great question. And and I think it's a first thing is a mental leap. I think with every new technology, age and advancement, there's always this, fear that settles in around, "Hey, is this gonna take away my job? And, you know, is the end of my domain as I know it?" And, you know, listen, there's no question that there's a set of jobs and roles that can get automated over time, but that's happened historically, as well. So I don't think anything different here.
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But I think the way you're thinking about it as a kind of assistive technology, right, even in a creative context, right? I mean, you know, I don't think that, you know, we're gonna lose that creative touch, I actually think it's gonna raise the game on on a lot of the content creators, right, because now you're gonna have to really think about the positioning of an article the way; you want to bring different topics and analogies in something that is not necessarily going to come out of a gen AI application, that's going to be very much factual in nature. And, you know, not necessarily creative in nature, you know, and again, there's shades between this, but I think that, you know, content creation is still very safe.
And even as you look at some of what's happening on the imaging, and even some of the user experience design automation that's happening again, I look at it's all instead of starting with a blank sheet of paper, you actually get a canvas with some color on it. And I think that can be stimulating of thought? Because how many times does that page stay empty for for too long, right. So yeah, right, is a catalyst for, for thinking about new ideas and where AI leaves off the creator can now take off, if you will, so in some ways, it can be an interesting launchpad for the future.
And then, you know, I think there's a lot of connections that need to be made, you know, in the future, when I think about experiences to the current paradigm; we went from a very textual experience in mobile and web to more video experiences; we're just talking about apps like TikTok that really went viral as well, because of that video experience.
And you know, I think AI will now power in three to five years, a lot of the experiences we were used to will now be more conversational, and I think this has always been an aspiration and this is now I think the foundation or the tipping point of where we'll start to see that in practice. And that's pretty exciting.
There's still a lot of mechanics you need to do even when you're shopping. Even when you're making reservations. Wouldn't it be much better to have a conversation with a travel website to say, "Here's where I want to go. Here's the flight times I'm looking for, here's the cost I want to play. I love these types of hotels." And have the Gen AI expert, travel bot go and plan this for you. It just feels much more engaging, enriching experience.
Related Article: Generative AI Technologies: Now and in the Future
From Google to TikTok: The Evolution of Content Consumption in the AI Era
Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah, it feels like Google is a lot of work now. It used to be Google made work easier for you to find this stuff. And now we're like, because back in the day, we were like, I had to go to the library and look up and encyclopedia. Now I go to Google. Oh, wait a minute, I don't go to Google anymore. I'll go to AI oh, wait a minute, go to TikTok.
I’ll tell you what, TikTok, I mean, a couple kind of getting off topic. But, you know, give you an imperfect example. We're changing the way we consume content. My wife I told her, "Hey, Google, that drive-in that we're going to. I want to get the lay of the land, how to drive up, when to come in. And she just sent me a link to a TikTok video. That was like one minute. And I'm like, I know everything I need to know now, you know?
Frank, final thing for me is, give our readers a little preview of what we've got coming in the AI series?
Palermo: Yeah, so I think in, in part three, we really kind of looked at ... just quick refresher, one was really linking that history back and two was kind of going under the hood, from a really understanding the how with LLM and how Gen AI works. And then three was really looking at this now what I call the New Cold War, the new global race around AI and how important it is not just for businesses, for countries. And, you know, we're fortunate here in the US, we still have a dominance here.
But I think that this is a point in time, you know, China and other countries are investing heavily in this area. So we take a look at the changing landscape, and you know, who the players are that are emerging globally. Google was really one of the pioneers back to the DeepMind days, and then, you know, Microsoft really kind of came out of the blue with its partnership with OpenAI, all the investments they've made in Azure.
So I think we're gonna continue to see this leapfrogging of the players here as this evolves. And my hope is a rising tide raises all boats here in terms of the innovation capacity here.
And then the last part of this series kind of looks now at what's ahead, what are the things we need to consider? Like governance. How do we deal with bias? How do we deal with transparency around model training? How do we deal with intellectual property, there's so much you had to, to think about in terms of how this technology is applied.
It is powerful, but, you know, on the other side of power becomes danger if it's used improperly, and there's probably nefarious actors out there that are just thinking about ways how to use this in not very good ways. So, yeah, there's work to do there that, you know, fourth part of this series kind of looks at that dimension.
Check out Frank Palermo's full, four-part series on the history of artificial intelligence.
