This is the tenth time that the ADEA Forum moves to the city of Huesca to talk about one of the major issues of current interest for companies.
This event has counted with the interventions of Felix Gil, CEO of Integra, and Aleix Valls, CEO and founder of Liquid Lab, in addition to the institutional opening by Lorena Orduna, mayor of the city, and the welcome of Fernando Rodrigo, president of ADEA.
Artificial intelligence has been the focus of a new edition of the ADEA Forum, which has addressed the challenges and uncertainties that will generate the industrial and digital revolution that is coming in the economy. A whole new era that is going to have a total impact on society, from companies to public institutions, and that will also force to face changes in society, with a multitude of workers who will have to be trained to optimize applications.
This is the tenth time that the ADEA Forum has moved to the city of Huesca to talk, on this occasion, about one of the major issues currently of interest to companies, as the president of ADEA, Fernando Rodrigo, has assessed. “The IMF says that 40% of jobs will be affected, or even 60%. It means that we are going to have to change the tasks we are doing. We are all going to have to open up to AI without fear, reconvert some jobs and tasks we are doing,” he pointed out.
In this regard, Fernando Rodrigo lamented the “low level of penetration” of artificial intelligence in companies – 5% of Spanish SMEs, according to the INE – despite the “infinity” of new applications it offers, such as cybersecurity, office automation, predictive marketing, maintenance, intelligent logistics, virtual assistance or on-demand services. “I haven’t found answers, only excuses, such as that we are exhausted of changes or that we are too old. We are the generation that brought the Internet to the world, so how can we be too old? This is a process that never stops, we cannot stop pedaling”, encouraged the president of ADEA.
The mayoress of Huesca, Lorena Orduna, welcomed the more than 100 attendees to this ADEA Forum, where she emphasized that this future “is no longer so distant”, and that public administrations must also adapt so as not to slow down the progress of companies. “Our society cannot be paralyzed. We must accept all these challenges. Institutions have the obligation to speed up all bureaucratic processes. This is one of the great challenges of the future, not to paralyze and to know how to adapt. Either we adapt to the future or we will not be able to move forward,” he said.
PEOPLE, AT THE HEART OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The first presentation was given by Félix Gil, CEO of Integra, a company with 800 employees that seeks to inspire companies to “integrate” themselves into the “new era” of artificial intelligence, which is going to “change the world” more than the appearance of the Internet. “We hear and talk a lot about AI revolution, but it is true that it is not entering companies. It has arrived to impact businesses. It is going to create many more opportunities,” he guaranteed.
However, on this path, Félix Gil sees it as transcendental that it not only reaches managers and senior executives, but that all workers must also be trained to act properly with artificial intelligence. “People are the fundamental part of this revolution. We must invest heavily in them. To transform, you have to train. If we don’t train all our people in AI tools and knowledge, we are not going to transform our organizations. The integration of AI throughout the value chain is the biggest challenge to grow and remain competitive,” he remarked.
ECONOMIC GROWTH NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN HISTORY
For his part, the CEO and founder of Liquid Lab, Aleix Val, detailed the potential economic growth that the emergence of artificial intelligence could bring, which, he advanced, could have an impact on GDP of 125% and will even force the reformulation of social contracts. “The global GDP is at 100 trillion American. We estimate that AI will lead us to visualize impacts that can exceed 6 or 7% compound annual growth in the coming years. A country doing well grows between 3 or 4%. We have never seen this before. If we do well, if society adopts technology and we know how to govern it, we will be able to build a better world”, he suggested.
In addition, Aleix Val has been critical of the regulation that has been carried out on artificial intelligence, which, in his opinion, will cause barriers to its development. “They have tried to do something that cannot be done, which is to regulate a general purpose technology a priori, and not a posteriori, when we have understood its impact on society. Premature regulation will only deform the technology to comply with regulation, which will make it neither free market nor free competition. Chat-GPT can be used for whatever you want, from writing emails to counter-programming in election campaigns on social networks. We are not regulating a knife, but its uses,” he added.
