You were a moderator at some of the morning roundtables during the FEI conference. These roundtables touched on a lot of different insights and innovation topics such as interdisciplinary activity, artificial intelligence, and human centricity. What are your thoughts on the roundtables that you moderated as far as key takeaways?
“I think there are a few takeaways, because the tables I moderated, they came from different industries with different backgrounds,” says Kuo. “Take the conversation on AI, for example. There was a gentleman from the design industry. He was discussing how he used AI for some design purposes, but then in the meantime, the clients raised some questions about the copyright and who owns the ideas. The lesson is that there are a lot of opportunities, but there are certain things we still need to further validate.”
Kuo adds, “Another example is an executive who said they use AI in part to leverage their past data to create synthetic data. That’s something I’m very interested in learning more about. I’m sure once I bring those findings back to my team, they will ask how you validate that synthetic data and how do you compare with the current methodology?”
Synthetic data is an interesting topic to bring up because, obviously, you work for a financial company, and synthetic data is said to be useful in the finance field.
“Absolutely. I can see how it could be useful, especially in certain industries,” agrees Kuo. “I will imagine, for example, in the medical and healthcare fields there are certain data that’s difficult to obtain. There are certain diseases that are rare and so it will be hard to find a patient to get the data. But then again, there’s also the question about how much we can trust the data. In this whole area, it creates a lot of opportunities but also brings a lot of uncertainty in how we communicate and make the best use of it.”
She continues, “My background is insights. The question becomes how we can rely on AI for ideas and insights that it generates compared with what we have done from real human beings. There were a few good case studies at FEI, and I learned further from the roundtables. It’s well worth bringing back these findings to the team.”
Lessons Learned for the Next Generation
With the developments in AI, there’s a lot of questions about privacy and security, as well as accessibility. Do you feel that in today’s corporate world there’s a democratization of data and insights?
“I think it probably depends on your company, and your industry,” she says. “Because my company is in the financial industry, it might be stricter. We have a lot of transaction data. Usually, it’s only accessible for the data science team because they are trained to use it properly, because security is a top priority for our company. We have certain procedures to access the data.”
What about the journey of data and innovation together? Is there more of a growing connection today that relates to the data-innovation pipeline?
“I do see that,” says Kuo. “Because right now, people are thinking, OK, now we don’t have cookies and we also have more privacy regulations, how can we learn more about consumers given all these constraints. There are many new ideas coming up. But I feel that everybody’s looking for case studies. Who is doing what and how successful has it been or what’s the learning from failure?”
What do you think the future holds?
“For my personal and professional growth, I would like to see more in AI, data, and human, and how those three play together,” observes Kuo. “Because we all feel like AI is growing so fast. But at the end of the day, we are humans. What kind of role are we going to play in this? That’s critical, because now we have seen how perhaps a lot of jobs might be reduced or might be replaced because of AI, and so I feel this is really the time we think about what we can do as a human being. What kind of jobs will the next generation have? The job might not exist yet, but how are we going to educate the next generation? We must think about that to better prepare for the future.”
For more of the interview with Su-Feng Kuo, check out the video from FEI 2024.
