Over a period of several weeks, a group of technologists took an AI townhall event on the road, visiting Bergen, Oslo, Stavanger, Trondheim, Stjoerdal, and Harstad and reaching more than 3000 employees.
- A leader in corporate communications with a special interest in tech and AI
- A scientific programmer
- A data scientist specializing in NLP
- The Leading Advisor in data science
- A data scientist specializing in responsible AI
The presentation contains:
- Welcome and introduction to the event.
- Walk through many themes in AI (hype, reliability, ethics, etc) via the use of headlines; includes a quick Mentimeter poll on 'AI optimism'.
- Look at the historical development of AI, starting with old-but-familiar headlines about robots, via expert systems and the Dartmouth meeting, to deep learning and 'AI everywhere'.
- Segment on ChatGPT in particular and Equinor's chat tool, mentioning information security considerations and also a compelling use case; there is a spot prize in this segment.
- Survey of some real applications of 'domain AI' (mostly task-specific discriminative machine learning systems) vs 'workplace AI' (eg chat) in Equinor today.
- Turn to the risk and ethics of AI, especially generative AI, and a look at the EU AI Act and what it might mean for us as citizens and as employees; segue back to Communications.
- Quick wrap-up and an invitation to ask questions.
The presentation typically took 35 minutes or so, leaving about 15 minutes for a Q&A. There were always plenty of questions.
- We reached more than 3000 employees with the roadshow, starting conversations about AI all over the company.
- We were able to gather a large number of questions from the audience, which was the basis of producing a FAQ document.
- The event helped us reach out to other partners in Digital Norway, and the broader community through LinkedIn posts and an article in Digi (see below).
- The relationships and collaborations in the delivery team were valuable side-effects.