What an exciting time to be the CTO of Inawisdom! The exponential rise in the value of data has created the latest progression in AI in the form of Generative AI. So what is it? Generative AI enables the creation of new outputs that resemble human-created content including ideas, conversations, stories, images, videos, and music. It has the power to fundamentally change the way the world works and for businesses, the way they operate.
Based on the rapidly growing interest and developments around Generative AI, I am convinced that this (and AI generally) is going to further propel business into a new phase of the AI & Data revolution over the next 5 years.
This revolution will be the main catalyst for innovation and growth post-COVID and coming out of the current economic pressures. The challenge we face, however, with recent news around Generative AI is that it has got a lot more people worried that soon AI will be indistinguishable from humans. In other words, will it pass the Turing test?
Generative AI also further opens the Pandora’s Box of ethics and the safe use of AI. With so much data needed, there are complexities over ownership regarding things like copyright, bias of results and the potential toxicity of some content. Then there are issues like social impact and sustainability concerns around the energy required to power these models. Finally, but most importantly, there’s the question of how “truthful” something generated is or whether it is a Hallucination. My view is that this is likely to spark further regulation and more safeguards being placed on AI use.
Therefore, it is my mission as CTO to keep Inawisdom at the forefront of the innovation that AI brings and the value it can drive for businesses. It is also equally important that Inawisdom can be trusted to help advise businesses in how to deal with the issues and concerns around Generative AI.
So here’s how Inawisdom, along with AWS, is helping businesses get on the front foot with the AI & Data revolution and make best use of Generative AI.
Our DNA: Making AI Accessible
Inawisdom has been at the forefront of the use of AI and ML in business for the last 7 years. We have helped grow AI from something that a few big or well-funded companies could afford – both in terms of the creation of new algorithms and the resources need to train and predict results – into something that every company can use to create value for their operation.
The adoption has been rapid. AI use cases span industries from Manufacturing to Finance and include everything from fraud prediction and consumer sales behaviour to supply chain optimisation and customer service improvement.
This drive to make AI accessible and affordable started at our founding, when we decided that cloud computing – leveraging our strong partnership with AWS – gave us the opportunity to show the world what was possible with their data. A lot has happened in the 7 years since, but that key genius of an idea, our DNA, is still central today.
In fact, that DNA is even more important now with rise of Generative AI. Our philosophy on how to get started still holds true as well: think big, start small, and accelerate fast. This is why we believe that we can help your business unlock the potential in Generative AI to use the best parts of it to drive tangible change and improvement.
Inawisdom & AWS: The Perfect Pairing
For Inawisdom, AWS has always been more than a cloud provider. They are our strategic partner, and we have both been investing in our joint relationship over the past 7 years. Inawisdom has been a Premier Services Partner since 2019 (at the time we were the fastest partner in the UK to get to the top tier) and have all the relevant AWS competencies and certifications for AI and ML success. We’ve also previously been awarded Partner of the Year in the UK for Machine Learning and Differentiation.
This strong joint relationship benefits our clients in the following ways:
- Access to experts (our team holds over 180 AWS certifications) in the fields of Data, Analytics, AI, and AWS – including myself, who has been AWS’s #1 Ambassador in EMEA for two years in a row
- Help leveraging the latest AWS announcements and early access to new services
- Trust that Inawisdom will advise on the advances in AI
- Access to AWS funding for exploring what’s possible and investing in innovative use cases
Therefore, for me, the Inawisdom relationship with AWS is uniquely positioned to help businesses use Generative AI to drive innovation.
The Tech: RAMP & Foundational Models
Technology-wise, I am also pleased to announce that our RAMP (Rapid Analytics and Machine learning Platform) now supports Generative AI.
In 2017, AWS launched Amazon SageMaker and we quickly incorporated it into Inawisdom’s core offering. We put it at the centre of RAMP, and we use it every day. This means that as the capabilities of SageMaker and the compute power on AWS grow and evolve, so does RAMP.
For Generative AI on AWS then, the only choice for Inawisdom is doing it in RAMP via Amazon SageMaker. To support this, we have already doubled down on our relationship, RAMP capabilities and use of Amazon SageMaker. Examples of this are:
LLM Training on SageMaker
Our teams (AWS and Inawisdom) have done collaborative workshops with experts on both sides, exploring how to train Large Language Models (LLMs) using data and model parallelism on SageMaker.
Foundational Models & Services
Inawisdom is one of the first teams in Europe to get access to AWS Foundational Models and has actively started exploring them in RAMP via SageMaker (more on some of that shortly). Foundational Models are pretrained on an extremely large data set, and can then be further trained on your own unique dataset to refine their predictions and accuracy for your business or industry. This recent blog post explains a bit more about this technique, which is also used by AWS Comprehend.
Part of the Cognizant family
One exciting change in the past 3 years is that Inawisdom are now part of Cognizant. This further extends our capabilities in helping companies embrace AI and offers access to new and niche skillsets including:
- Business Transformation: The ability to reshape and transform business processes to benefit from AI.
- Ethics and Regulation: Experts in Ethics and Regulation in UK&I and Europe in every field, such a FCA requirements or EU AI regulation.
- Deep Industry knowledge: Cognizant have subject matter experts across many industries that have worked for leading companies and have vast domain knowledge. This gives them unique and detailed insights into the opportunities and challenges specific industries face.
- Other specialists and scaling resources: As AI transforms a business, it may require additional elements like User Experiences and Application Modernisation. In these situations, we can call on other specialists from the Cognizant group such as Zone, Contino and DevBridge to deliver these aspects – all under one roof. Lastly, we can all use Cognizant near-shore and offshore resources to provide extra bandwidth when required, allowing Inawisdom to deliver rapidly and realise even more value for our customers.
Generative AI in Action
There is no question that Generative AI is an exciting area with several different styles of models, from text-2-image to drug creation. To give a flavour of where some of these models can be used today, here are some examples of where Inawisdom is fit them into our existing, leading solutions across multiple industries:
- Legal – Based around extending the use of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Inawisdom is working on using Generative AI to process the approval of invoices. Our approach uses Text Summarisation to extract key terms from lengthy legal documents, then runs another model to compare terms against line items.
- Insurance – For several customers in the retail and commercial insurance sector, we are building a way of automating the processing of their documents. The next step for this automation is finding previously agreed terms in insurance documents for similar peril, liabilities, limits, and deductibles. This gives insurance companies a knowledgebase to negotiate from. To do this, we are using private LLMs like BloombergGPT. This uses a Foundational Model and then trains a domain-specific model for the UK Market.
- Financial Services – Inawisdom is all about helping companies become data-driven. One of the main issues with this is data literacy in the wider business community and knowing which terms to use and search for. Even with low-code approaches there is still a technology/tool barrier to data and poor knowledge of what data exists. Inawisdom is working with customers in the Financial Services industry on a “No Code” approach where we use a Code Generator for SQL. This allows the user to ask domain questions in plain English; the model will then write the SQL based on the domain model to find the data and present the results.
- Construction – The Construction industry right now is heavily focused on the Metaverse, Digital Twins and Simulation. The limitation with these is that imperfections in the real-world are not explored or modelled. Therefore, we have been looking at how Generative AI can be used to take a satellite or drone image and help in generating a map or AR (Augmented Reality) experience of the whole construction site.
- Value Creation – For all our clients,Inawisdom focuses on delivering value. To do this we always look to remove any “undifferentiated heavy lifting” by building accelerators such as RAMP, MALEO (our Machine Learning Operations Framework) and our IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) solution. Therefore, when Amazon Code Whisper was announced in preview, our delivery team was able to trial it and we are now looking at adopting it more widely.
The most important thing with using a public service is to exclude your content from being captured. So, for Amazon Code Whisper, it is important to use the professional version where it does not capture your content by default and you can run more security scans (the individual version has limits and content capture is opt-out).
The Art of the Possible
It is my view that Generative AI is sparking a revolution that will have a positive effect on business and create incredible opportunities for innovation. Inawisdom, along with our partners at AWS, are in a leading position to enable our customers to exploit their data and use all aspects of AI to get the most value from the data assets they hold.
For me, right now, it’s about exploring ‘the art of the possible’ and Generative AI has made the possibilities even more far reaching.
Ready to get started?
To help you aim big, start small and accelerate fast in Generative AI, Inawisdom has made the following updates to our offerings:
- Extending our Discovery-as-a-Service methodology to cover Generative AI. This service includes ideation of use cases for all forms of AI and helps you to select your first use case. It’s fixed price and fixed term so you can be up and running in a matter of weeks.
- Adding Generative AI use cases as targets for fast Proof of Value projects with our clients. This allows you to prove the business impact of a Generative AI use case with minimal investment.
- Building an MVP that is product-ready and embedded in your business, to help realise the value of Generative AI.
- Running AWS Immersion days focused on Generative AI and how to train LLMs in SageMaker. Immersion Days help key people in your organisation to get a broad understanding of Generative AI and deep dive into the technical set-up and execution.
To find out more about Generative AI and how we can support your journey, email us at info@inawisdom.com.