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Harnessing Tech for Economic Transformation: Sani Abdul-Jabbar on AI Innovations, Blockchain, and the Future of Work
3 Plays3 months ago
Can emerging technology truly transform traditional industries while creating new economic opportunities? This week's episode features Sani Abdul-Jabbar, the visionary founder of Vestec, who takes us on a fascinating journey from his humble beginnings in Pakistan to becoming a tech entrepreneur. Sani shares his remarkable story of identifying inefficiencies in sales operations, teaching himself to code, and leveraging his skills at major corporations like Toyota and Warner Brothers to streamline processes. His insights underscore the ever-changing landscape of technology, emphasizing the need for adaptability and continuous learning, especially within the realms of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain.
Curious about how AI will reshape the job market in the next decade? We'll walk you through the International Monetary Fund's predictions about job transformations and the emergence of roles like prompt engineering. Despite the clear competitive edge AI provides, many businesses hesitate to invest due to uncertainties and potential disruptions. By drawing parallels to historical shifts like the move from horses to cars, we discuss how industries evolve rather than disappear. Sani emphasizes the critical role of expert consultation in navigating these transformative changes and preparing for the future.
How can blockchain technology help track carbon footprints and create economic benefits? We'll explore a groundbreaking AI-powered platform designed to monitor the environmental impact of clothing items throughout their lifecycle. This innovation not only promotes sustainability but also introduces new economic opportunities, including the use of cryptocurrency for data contributions. Sani concludes by highlighting the invaluable role of mentors and ethical considerations in AI development, urging leaders to weave human values into technology. Tune in for an episode packed with insights on thriving in the fast-paced tech industry, the importance of mentorship, and the future of AI-driven transformations.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:00
Speaker
All right. How's it going, everyone? All right. So today we have another special guest. We have Sunny Abdul-Jabbar. Yeah. How are you today? Excellent. It's a great day. How are you? Excellent. Excellent. So to kind of get this started off, can you tell me a bit about who you are, what you're about and kind of what your overall message is? OK, so I'm the founder of
00:00:29
Speaker
I'm hearing a lot of echo. Can something be done about it? Okay, so as you fix the sound, as James introduced me, my name is Sany Abdul Jabbar, the founder of Vestek. That's an emerging tech company here in Los Angeles, about 17 years young. And what we do is we provide technology services, advisory and hands-on development in the emerging tech space.
00:00:54
Speaker
And as you can imagine, emerging tech changes. The definition of that changes very frequently because of the constantly shifting tech landscape. Currently, emerging tech means artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and everything that falls in that sphere. On average,
00:01:13
Speaker
The definition of emerging tech changes these days about 14 months, every 14 months, which means we are constantly going through this transformation every 14 to 16 months.
Career Motivation and Automation Journey
00:01:25
Speaker
So what motivated you to get into this industry? They say, and I was advised by one of my mentors a long time ago, that when you're looking to do something in your life, that profession, for example, that you're going to keep doing for an extended period,
00:01:40
Speaker
There are a couple of things that you have to look for. One is what will get you paid that someone will be willing to pay for that service or skill or whatever it is. And the second is what skills do you have, something that excites you when you're comfortable with it. And the third is something that's bigger than you.
00:02:04
Speaker
And that's your legacy, something that makes change in the world. So when I set out to find what I wanted to do after my corporate career many, many years ago, I was looking for something that fit that criteria, something that will pay my bills, something that excites me, and something that's bigger than me.
00:02:23
Speaker
And technology was the answer. I knew technology. I had been in that industry in the corporate world. It excited me. It was not too long after the 2000.com bubble burst in the US. And there was still need in the market. Money was tight at that time. Companies needed tech but didn't have a lot of funding to support that.
00:02:47
Speaker
So there was a space for us to sort of build ourselves in. So we started providing services that were lower cost at that time, general IT consulting. And something that's bigger than me is that market needed tech, money was tied. And so we addressed that need of the market to support the US industry.
00:03:12
Speaker
So that's kind of how I ended up in this space. So how did you know about this specific need in the market? And what sort of gave you this confidence that you needed that you could be relevant in this market and you could bring the skill sets or the specific skills that were required to do well in that market. You know, again, maybe later we could ask the question, how did you acquire these skills?
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a very good question, especially for someone who might be considering entering this industry. Success doesn't have a straight path from point A to point Z. It's a very zigzag path. You go up, you go down, you get up again. I started out my very first job after business school was actually in sales operations.
00:03:58
Speaker
But in a company that sold hardware, software to commercial and government clients at that time, a billion dollars company. So started with sales ops and very quickly I realized that there was redundancy in the way that business was run, especially in the sales division where I was part of.
00:04:19
Speaker
And what was happening, just to give you one example, is that there were three individuals, including myself, who were running same types of reports for different sales channels. So good old days before automation, before there wasn't even a proper ERP system in place. We were using spreadsheets, Microsoft Excel. And these three individuals, including me, we would run sales reports daily. That was our job all day long, running sales reports.
00:04:47
Speaker
for three different channels, one for stores, other for catalog sales, and other for something else, online sales, I guess. And a few weeks into that job, I started asking myself, why do we have three individuals doing the same job all day long? I went to my boss at that time, a really smart gentleman, and I asked him this question. He said, well, because that's how we do it. That's how we've always been doing it. And I have no IT background, by the way. My training is all in business.
00:05:15
Speaker
I knew intuitively that automation was the answer. I asked my boss to pay for some training in coding, simple basic coding, Visual Basic, so that I could program Microsoft Excel sheets. He's like, well, I can't send you for training, but I can buy you a book. I said, okay, buy me a book. You bought me a book. I taught myself Visual Basic, started automating those reports. Once I was done with all that,
00:05:43
Speaker
I could run reports for the three of us, three different channels, every day of the week, and then go for late lunch, every day, or late breakfast rather. That's how I kind of realized that there's need for automation, there's need for technology, and companies aren't willing to spend a lot of money on it. Then I was asked, and that notion was reinforced when I was asked to go from department to department within the same company, do the same thing essentially. Automate processes and
00:06:14
Speaker
make things more efficient. Then I left that company. I was asked to do the same thing at Toyota, at Warner Brothers, at Direct TV, at a bunch of other corporations. And so that's the answer to the question you asked. How did I realize
Impact of AI on Jobs and Economy
00:06:30
Speaker
there was a need? How did I realize I had the skill? And how did I develop the skill? So that was the entry into that space. And then, of course, over time,
00:06:38
Speaker
kept learning and kept observing. I do want to mention here an unintended byproduct of this activity, a negative consequence. What happens to people when things get automated? Right? They let go. They become redundant.
00:06:58
Speaker
That was the question that my grandmother raised at that time. I was quite successful in doing that process optimization and automation and taking people out of their jobs. Single guy flying around the country making money, life was good. And I visited my grandmother during that time. She asked me what I do, what did I do for work? I explained to her and she said, oh, so you take away people's bread and butter.
00:07:26
Speaker
And that was a gut punch. Sometimes in the pursuit of shiny new objects, we forget the human cost, the social cost, how it impacts everybody around it.
00:07:38
Speaker
So that was the time when I realized I needed to stop doing that and start creating opportunities, economic opportunities. And that's when I started the company. That's when I created a policy for the company from the get-go that we're always going to work on projects that create economic opportunities instead of just blind automation and making people redundant. So that's like a short version of my story of origin.
00:08:05
Speaker
Well, the first thing that came to mind was this aspect of artificial intelligence. You know, what you're saying right now sort of reminds me of that, because you have AI now that can automate a lot of processes now, robotics now.
00:08:22
Speaker
It makes me wonder now, you know, yes, it does help to automate things, but it does lead to problems like you suggested to now. What you're saying, I'm assuming it's a bit different, but what does VesTech USA? VesTech, I do want to answer your question, but quickly, what does VesTech do? VesTech provides advisory and hands-on software development services.
00:08:49
Speaker
These are the two things we do. But the first part of your question that my aspiration to create economic opportunities doesn't seem in line with the promise of AI, that's automation, take people out. I have struggled with that thought. And I've been asked that question many, many times because I built my career on this idea of creating economic opportunities.
00:09:13
Speaker
But you notice I didn't say creating jobs. I said creating economic opportunities. These are slightly different things. Recently, I was interviewed by a very successful psychologist and he asked me this interesting question, Dr. Mark Goldstein. His question was, does AI make us more human or less human? And my response to that was, what takes our humanity away? Let's clarify that first. Fight over resources.
00:09:40
Speaker
Resources means money, time, space. Having to do things that we don't want to do, such as being stuck in a cubicle all day long, working on a job that you don't find inspiring. Having to do things that we find risky and threatening, those are jobs that are perceived unsafe or dirty. Things that we don't find
00:10:04
Speaker
inspiring, such as having to do redundant things, redundant work. I once worked during my school days at an assembly line in a paper factory, and my job was to pick up stacks of paper from here, put them here, pick from here, put them here. And that was the most difficult work I have ever done in my entire life.
00:10:27
Speaker
Why? Because there is no inspiration, there is no joy, it's just blind, mindless, redundant, repetitive motion. What AI does, AI takes away, takes on rather, these things which are redundant, which are uninspiring, which are unsafe, and allows you to do things that inspire you, things that bring joy to your life.
00:10:54
Speaker
things that make your life easier, safer, more comfortable. So does it make us less human or more human? I would argue that it makes us more human because now we are allowed to, we are enabled to experience more as human.
00:11:09
Speaker
Now, the question, how is it gonna impact our economic opportunities, our job markets, that's a valid question. A lot of people are thinking about it. IMF issued a report, I think late last year, and they said, without going into the numbers, I think they said majority of the jobs that exist today, they will disappear by the end of the decade, six years from today. Then they said, a lot of new jobs that don't exist today, that will be created.
00:11:39
Speaker
new job categories, new job types. An example of that is prompt engineering, for example, until two years ago. It wasn't a word that was part of common conversation. I mean, we nerds knew it, but it wasn't part of the common conversation, prompt writing, prompt engineering. Like, you know, when you use chat GPT, you say, you know, do this, write me that, that's prompt engineering. And new jobs are also being created as we speak.
00:12:04
Speaker
You could argue that are the new jobs gonna offset the losses of the new jobs at the same magnitude, at the same level, the same level of wages. That's yet to be seen. But the good news is that a lot of companies, a lot of smart people are looking into it. I just saw in news this morning that Google and Microsoft, traditionally, competitors, they teamed up to study the impact of AI on the job market.
00:12:32
Speaker
So when you hear people saying, oh, your jobs are going away, your jobs are going away, yes, jobs are going away. It doesn't mean that new jobs aren't being created, new opportunities aren't being created. And I'm not going to candy code it and say some people aren't going to lose. In every paradigm shift, there are winners and there are losers. Some people will lose, especially people who insist on staying in their comfort zone, insist of keep doing what they want to do.
00:12:59
Speaker
An interesting tidbit, we got a study done. So every year we invest a bunch of money in getting market surveys done, market research done to get a sense of what's going on because change is very rapid in our industry. So every about 14 to 16 months, you have to reinvent yourself because new technologies are coming down the pike and the definition of emerging tech is changing. So we do that every year. When we did that last year, we found out that
00:13:26
Speaker
very high number, I think 78% of business leaders who are surveyed, they said they understand that AI is a competitive advantage, which if they don't adopt, their businesses will be impacted within this decade. And within the next 10 years, if they don't adopt these new emerging tech tools, they will lose. They won't be able to actually exist, forget about compete, exist.
00:13:54
Speaker
So it's not just a competitive edge, it's a question of survival.
00:13:58
Speaker
Then we found out that less than 4% of these leaders are actually investing in those emerging technologies in any significant, tangible manner.
Hesitancy in Adopting Emerging Technologies
00:14:08
Speaker
Not just saying that, yeah, we have a guy who kind of keeps an eye on what's going on in the industry and we'll see some time in the future. That's also a trend just to appease the board or stakeholders. But people who are leaders who are actually in a tangible manner investing in this technology are less than 4%.
00:14:29
Speaker
So why the discrepancy? 78% know and understand that this is a competitive edge and a question of survival, less than 4% are investing. And the answer to that is a lot of fear. There's a lot of fear in the marketplace, fear of the new, fear of the unknown, fear of, oh, what's going to happen to my current business processes that have been working for so many years? All of a sudden you're going to take them away or change them somehow, they're going to get disrupted. My business goes down the drain.
00:14:56
Speaker
So the fear of the new, fear of the different. And to that, my advice is talk to people who do this all day long, people who live and breathe emerging technologies. There are people who specialize in this stuff. Some of the advisors in my company, Vestac, they're like top of their game. These are the people who've been doing it, not since 2022 when chat GPT was released, but since many years before that.
00:15:23
Speaker
people like that in our company, in other companies, these are the people that can help demystify all the complexities and separate hype from reality, which happens every time there's a new tech that's in the market. So I'll stop at that if you have any comment or question. I think it's really interesting how you mentioned
00:15:47
Speaker
new jobs coming up and old jobs dying out because I think a lot of people in the general mainstream media they only talk about the jobs that are lost. So could you maybe potentially give an example like me personally when I think about this it reminds me a lot of
00:16:06
Speaker
idea of horses you know horses used to be a means transportation from point A to point B but when cars came about what happened to horses did that industry die out entirely not exactly but horses became more of a hobby a novelty and something a bit different now this is obviously completely different from what we're discussing here about
00:16:28
Speaker
if you could give maybe a more in-depth, top, more in-depth example, that's more attuned to what you were talking about. Yeah. So that's a comparison that's often made in these kind of conversations. Nothing happened when we started driving cars. Horses are still there. The horses industry, it's actually a higher paying industry now. Like if you are in that industry, you make more money than you did when horses were more common.
00:16:57
Speaker
or horses-based transportation. The difference is that in the analogy of horses, what you replace more than horses, you replace the industry around horses. Horses breeding, horses racing, horses in the wild, they all still exist. It's the industry around horses.
00:17:19
Speaker
who builds the buggies and who are the trainers and everything else, the tools needed to ride a horse or to ride a buggy.
AI in Creative and Professional Development
00:17:29
Speaker
All those things, they mostly disappear because they're not needed anymore. In the analogy of AI, who is the horse? I think it's you and I. Right?
00:17:44
Speaker
do we wanna end up being a, what's the word you use? Horses became what? Novelty. Do humans wanna become novelty? Probably not. So that's one. The other thing is the scale and speed. When we moved from horses to buggies, that took some time and that gave, and in parts of the world, horses are still being used as primary means of transportation.
00:18:09
Speaker
till this day. I grew up in Pakistan. My family owned horses as means of transportation till I was probably in third or fifth grade. Not in the city, but countryside. We had some farms that we owned in the countryside.
00:18:26
Speaker
So point being, even though cars were invented early 1900s, right? In parts of the world, horses are still being used as primary means of transportation. Not widespread, obviously, but some parts. The scale and speed that AI brings with it has never been seen before. It's not giving us time to adapt to the shifting landscape. That's the challenge.
00:18:54
Speaker
Until 2022, October and November, majority of the people in the world, they didn't know AI beyond what's being portrayed in Hollywood movies. Like, you talk to people till this day. There are spaces where I go and I talk, I bring up AI, and the very next thing is robotics. Tell us about robotics. Because in people's minds, AI means terminator, robot.
00:19:16
Speaker
Until Chad GPT, every time I brought up AI in my conversations, the very next question was, so terminators are coming, they're going to take over the world, right? I actually wrote a whole book about it that you see on my shoulder. Makers, can you see it? I can see it.
00:19:33
Speaker
Yeah, we'll talk about it a little bit later, but people did not think of the kid did not separate AI and robotics until late 2022. And after that within months, everyone was talking about chat GPT. November late November is when chat GPT was released. So that's that's that was the turning point.
00:19:51
Speaker
And then all of a sudden, it became a household name. Everyone is talking about it from little kids to grownups. Everyone is worried about it. Then next came the fear, the threat, jobs are going away. These are tools. But now, for near future, near to midterm future, these are tools. So the question is not that AI is stealing your job. The question is, one, can you use AI as a tool? And by the way, James, you're using AI right now in our conversation.
00:20:22
Speaker
The mic that you're using, I think I have the same kind of mic. It has EI built into it. I'm using a RodeCaster Pro, which you might have too, something like that. It's a sound mixer. EI is built into it.
00:20:36
Speaker
you're probably going to use some sort of AI tool to create clips and whatnot afterwards. Sorry, I'm giving away podcasting secrets. So you're not going to sit there and manually cut and paste. You're probably going to use something like Descript or Opus or something along those lines that can automatically create those clips and whatnot. That's AI. These are tools. Now imagine
00:20:55
Speaker
You are using those tools and within minutes after this conversation ends, you're able to publish this episode with clips cut out and everything. And then there's another guy who is not using any of those tools. He needs two weeks to get that work done. Who is going to win? Are you going to blame the AI or me who is not using the tools?
00:21:12
Speaker
So for now, for the foreseeable future, think of these things as tools. And if I can leave your audience with one advice, that is learn the tools, regardless what industry you are in, regardless what you do. There was a notion until a few years ago, and even I believed in it, that was the manual labor tasks will be impacted by AI later.
00:21:36
Speaker
creative tasks will be impacted by AI later. Analytical tasks, accounting, finance, data analytics, that kind of stuff will be impacted first. Now, guess what? AI is creating art. AI is creating full-scale movies. AI is creating all sorts of work. Now, add robotics to that. And by the way, the next big thing that's coming down the pike is robotics.
00:22:00
Speaker
Because now we have the thinking part, to a degree, taken care of. The next thing is doing part, and that is the robotics part, where you'll see more and more robotics. I live in Los Angeles, and down the street, like 10 minutes drive from where I live, there is a restaurant completely run by robots. Completely. 10 minutes drive. This is a restaurant called? I don't remember the name. Yeah, I can look it up later for you.
00:22:27
Speaker
So that's what's happening and you'll see more and more of that. So saying that these technologies aren't going to impact whatever we do or there's still time or I'm not retired in a few years anyway, all those things are risky, very high risk to every profession. So thinking of these tools as tools, adding them to your tool chest, developing skills, that's the way to do it.
00:22:55
Speaker
Now, there are going to be some jobs that are not going to be, jobs will probably still exist, but the demand will go down significantly. Imagine something simple as copywriters. The speed at which a person who is using AI tools to write copy for anything is much higher now. So you need one person to do the job of five people or 10 people.
00:23:23
Speaker
compared to the manually writing something, right? So who is going to survive? The few jobs that are going to survive, they're going to be left for people who develop skills and learn these tools. Not for those who are going to say, no, no, no, I'm going to stick with my, you know, traditional. I'm a Puritan, so I'm going to stick with my old ways. I'm not going to change anything. I hear that quite a bit.
00:23:48
Speaker
I hear that, and I brought a copywriting example because recently a gentleman argued with me who has built his career in writing copy for marketing. And he's like, no, no, no, a copy written by humans that machines can never beat that. So I'm always going to write by hand. I was like, okay, keep writing. You can't force these individuals, but they got to learn and they got to change.
00:24:15
Speaker
No, you raise a very interesting point because I think out of most industries, I think the authorship and writing industry.
00:24:22
Speaker
that is being assaulted very heavily with the rise of AI. There's a lot of software right now such as, I don't wanna give any plugins, but there's a lot of high-end software now that not only can sound like chat GPT, but can imitate other pieces of software right now. Because actually I actually did a study on this, but chat GPT actually writes very similarly to kids who have autism.
00:24:50
Speaker
and that's something that i found very interesting but now there's new software coming out such as you know text cortex for example it could imitate eight different people and it could even learn how you write so now you could create new stories now with very unique forms of writing styles now so in a way you know i could maybe if you know who stephen king is i could maybe
00:25:17
Speaker
tell an AI piece of software to write like Stephen King and I could write a Stephen King-like story without any of the skills needed. So what you raise is a very good point and it's going to be dangerous. This is when I'm beginning to ask now, where do you come in? How do you begin to now develop systems where
00:25:43
Speaker
I can't quite remember what you said, but it wasn't create new jobs, but opportunities, economic opportunities. So how do you begin to create new economic opportunities? Could you give us some examples of this, please?
Innovations and Industry Partnerships
00:25:56
Speaker
Yeah, no, I have to think which. OK, so here's an example.
00:26:00
Speaker
Because I can't talk about projects of our clients openly. But there's an example from recent past that I can share. So there's a parallel company for which we created a platform. The idea was carbon footprint tracking in the apparel industry. Apparel industry, arguably, is the largest environmental polluter in the world.
00:26:25
Speaker
If we talk about pollution, most people will think about the oil and gas industry probably. So apparel is up there for different reasons. It's either the first or the second largest.
00:26:35
Speaker
polluter. And then the fashion these days has become disposable and it's very short-lived. So that's why the apparel industry has to constantly keep producing this disposable fashion and that's resulting in pollution. So what this company wanted to do, they wanted to track their carbon footprint from the cotton fields in Colombia where they were picking up their raw material to production in Mexico, to their retail stores in Europe and UK.
00:27:03
Speaker
and then till the end of life of a clothing item. What happens after you're not using it anymore? So we created a platform that tracks carbon footprint or environmental impact of a piece of clothing. The first thing that AI needs is data. That's the lifeblood of AI. And this tool that I talked about, this platform that I talked about is a blockchain AI power tool. Without data, these tools don't do anything.
00:27:32
Speaker
But to bring data from cotton fields in Columbia, for example, you need humans to enter that data into the system, how the cotton is being produced or picked or things like that, because you don't have a lot of sensors over there or IoT devices installed in cotton fields, for example. So you need humans to collect that data.
00:27:49
Speaker
Now you create an economic opportunity for this person because no one is gonna do it for free, right? So whoever is entering that data, you are rewarding them somehow, you're paying them somehow. And in this case, we created a system of cryptocurrency within this platform and this cryptocurrency then is transferable across other crypto platforms. So you can actually get paid from the first platform, then take that cryptocurrency, either keep it within the system or take it to Ethereum or Bitcoin like more mainstream currencies.
00:28:18
Speaker
Are you a stt u stc is a tethered cryptos gathered against the u.s. dollars right so you're actually making money by providing that data so that's an economic opportunity for you this job did not exist until recently.
00:28:32
Speaker
So that's an example of how new jobs are being created, new economic opportunities are being created for people who traditionally you don't perceive, like a farmer working in Columbia in a cotton field, you don't perceive that person to be an IT expert or a blockchain expert, but that person is providing data and getting paid for it. So that's an example where we're creating opportunities for people. Now, I'm beginning to think now, what is sort of the future
00:28:57
Speaker
of this and your future, perhaps, as the CEO. Future of West Tech and future of me. So our work is very much made changes because, as I mentioned earlier, the definition of emerging tech changes every, you know, about a year. So today we are working on AI. Yesterday we were working on blockchain. Tomorrow we'll be working on something else.
00:29:22
Speaker
Technology is the industry that I understand. Now, what we are doing currently, we are bringing these emerging technologies into different industry verticals. One of my primary area where I'm focused right now is oil and gas. Oil and gas is a very traditional industry, especially midstream. Midstream means on the top you have the producers, at the bottom you have the users like yourself. You put fuel in your car.
00:29:45
Speaker
But in the middle, there are several entities involved that make fuel going from point A to point Z. And it's a very traditional business model. People still communicating via phone calls and WhatsApp. And WhatsApp is advanced. That's advanced technology. Very traditional.
00:30:02
Speaker
So what we're trying to do is bringing these emerging technologies into these traditional industries, right? I mentioned apparel, traditional industry, it's been around for a while. Healthcare is a big one, FinTech, and we have done a lot of work in FinTech, banking, finance sector, done a lot of work in healthcare, apparel, supply chain across different industries, that's a big one.
00:30:24
Speaker
currently oil and gas, that's a big one. Then services industries, legal, we have done work for legal, then governments trying to bring emerging tech for the governments. I mean, we have worked for TSA, we have worked for the Arizona court system. So traditional, where you see a lot of traditional way of doing things, how can we automate that and bring more smart tech into that?
00:30:52
Speaker
So there's a lot of that going on. My personal interest, big one, is finding ways to address the risk of fraud, AI-powered fraud.
00:31:04
Speaker
Uh, that's huge and it's, it's expanding and, you know, getting this information deep shapes. Yeah. All of that. All of them. So I'm part of a consortium of companies that, that is looking into it and trying to find ways on how, what we can do as, as industry players, um, in order to address those kinds of things.
00:31:25
Speaker
improved digital literacy. They're actually studying a lot of that now in research and top universities. What you're doing is very relevant.
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah, so we partnered with universities as well. You mentioned universities, so a lot of research that's being done in the academia. We partnered up with here, Caltech in Los Angeles. USC is not too far, UCLA. So scholars from there, we have worked with them. In the past, when we were working on healthcare, bringing emerging tech in healthcare, we partnered up with UCLA, brought in researchers, PhD level researchers in that space.
00:32:05
Speaker
So we try to bring in most cutting edge research and technology from whatever we find and then we try to match that with the industry need. Because science and technology sitting in those thesis and papers and books doesn't do a whole lot for the society until it comes and applied in different industry verticals and social verticals. So trying to be a bridge there too as well.
00:32:31
Speaker
Excellent. So this is another question I have for you. If you could go back in time and perhaps maybe speak to your younger self, what would you say to? That's a very good question. I think I would teach my younger self the value of mentors, mentors and guides in life. I did not see that value till much later in life.
00:32:57
Speaker
I grew up in Pakistan, it's a very masculine culture, where you don't ask for help, you have to find answers for yourself. And that's how you learn, by your own mistakes, from your own experiences. But that's not the most efficient way of doing things.
00:33:17
Speaker
go back in time and talk to my younger self.
Mentorship and Human Values in AI
00:33:20
Speaker
My advice would be like, go out and find advisors. And even when I started looking for advisors and mentors, I thought that I needed one mentor. You never say I have mentors. Most people say I have a mentor. So I thought, my younger self thought back in the day that I just needed one perfect teacher. That doesn't exist.
00:33:40
Speaker
And over time, I learned that we need guides and mentors and teachers. We need several of them, some at our level, some few years ahead of us, some many, many years ahead of us, so they can present to us different angles or different perspective to address the situation or to plan your life. That's actually one of my regrets in life. I didn't see that value till much later. So that would be my advice to my younger self. And that's what I tell to all the young people who come to me for advice.
00:34:10
Speaker
find teachers, don't look for one perfect teacher, find teachers in different areas of your life, whatever you want to achieve. And by the way, anything that I have achieved in my life, anything and everything, I give credit to my guides and mentors and teachers and sherpas. I couldn't have done that on my own. Excellent. So just to kind of close this off and this off, are there any
00:34:38
Speaker
Other things you would like to let the audience know, any ways we could reach out to you, maybe learn more about you and your business as well and your other features too? Yeah. So I would like to mention the book that we touched upon earlier. So what happened is that several years ago, I mentioned earlier in this conversation that every time we brought up AI, people would start talking about terminators, robots coming to take over the world.
00:35:08
Speaker
And that question was asked so many times that I started asking counter question, how can we avoid that? So I asked that question to many experts and scholars in different walks of life. The question was, how can we avoid AI to do dangerous things 20 years from today? And the reason behind 20 years was because based on all the formulas and all the forecasts at that time was that it would take about 20 years for AI to become smart enough. By the way, that timeline has shrunk after COVID.
00:35:37
Speaker
So when I started asking that question, one of the gentlemen that I asked the question, he said, what would you do today to prevent your kids from doing stupid things 20 years down the road? I said, well, we'll teach them some good human values and then hope that they will behave. He said, yeah, that's exactly what you need to do with AI. Because there is a resemblance between how you raise a child and how you train AI. You expose them to different situations, provide information, let them deal with
00:36:07
Speaker
Different situations come up with their own solutions all that kind of stuff so there's there's that resemblance so i thought that was a great idea. Human values and the compassion compassion kindness you know that kind of stuff if we can embed that in the evolution of i make it intentionally.
00:36:24
Speaker
make it a part of how you evolve AI. I think that would solve the problem. So I wrote a book about it. You'll have to read the book to see my five-point framework. It's a work of fiction. But written around those five human values that I believe, if we can bake that into AI, then future, more advanced pieces of AI and robotics will be more beneficial to human society than a threat. And we can coexist and thrive alongside AI.
00:36:53
Speaker
So that's that. So one thing that we talked about is data. Data is lifeblood of AI. Where does data come from? Data come from you and me. Every decision that we are making today in any organization, any leadership position, that decision, our decisions today, that becomes data, training data for AI for tomorrow. So when we are making that decision, now it puts more responsibility on our shoulders.
00:37:23
Speaker
So that would be my advice, be more mindful, learn these tools. I can be reached via LinkedIn. That's the best way to reach me, just my name's Sunny, S-A-N-I.
00:37:32
Speaker
And if you are in a leadership position in a company and you're looking to do, if you're wondering if AI's tools or other emerging tech tools are something that your organization can benefit from, but you don't know where to begin, talk to our people, reach out to me. I can connect you with people within our organization who can provide some guidance and insights on how to move forward. That would be my, I would like to leave your audience with. Happy to help.
00:37:59
Speaker
Well, thank you again for being on the show, Sani. This really has been a privilege. I definitely learned a lot and I think the audience here will learn a lot too. I would also like to thank everyone else here for watching the show and I will see you all next time. Thanks for having me.