Aboitiz’s Dr. David Hardoon: ‘The Philippines is at the stage to start leveraging AI’

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Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is currently the biggest buzzword in the digital world, thanks to the boom of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a language model-based chatbot that enables human-like conversations.

With the rapid technological advancement of this technology, many organizations are tackling how they can leverage it, and among them was the Aboitiz Group, which recently hosted the first AI Summit PH 2023 at the Grand Marriott Ballroom in Pasay City on May 10 and 11.

The event turned out to be a huge success. During the sidelines of the AI Summit PH 2023, CoinGeek Backstage reporter Claire Celdran had a chance to interview the chief executive officer of Aboitiz Data Innovation, Dr. David Hardoon.

Dr. Hardoon says the Philippines is ripe to start using AI—and it’s why they arranged for the inaugural event to happen to see the possibilities of the buzzing scene.

“Next events, we’re actually having more stories of how the government, corporations, companies, SMEs, individuals are leveraging on these underlying possibilities [of AI], which are absolutely phenomenal,” Dr. Hardoon says.

Dr. Hardoon sees AI as having more to offer than using it as a chatbot. Some examples he can think of are creating economic and financial access, using it for power maintenance, and manufacturing essential products like cement.

Delving into mitigating the risks in AI, Dr. Hardoon acknowledges that everything comes with great dangers. Still, he notes that the way to approach it is to start using the technology, seek out the risks, and solve them.

“The way we approach it is head-on. We understand what we’re doing. We understand the context associated. We have an open mind to [and] we learn and identify potential risks, and we mitigate them. That’s the only way,” he remarks.

When asked about blockchain and AI integration, Dr. Hardoon said that blockchain and AI go hand in hand.

“Blockchain is data. It’s a form of data that provides auditability, governance, speaking about risk management, and so forth. And AI is an extraordinary capability to leverage, use and extract knowledge out of information, out of data. The two go hand in hand in terms of yield maximization from four fields,” the Aboitiz Data Innovation CEO explained.

“Now imagine you apply that together with the blockchain. So now you’re not only maximizing yield, but now you also have a knowledge of which farming it came from, how it went down the supply chain. Who is buying it? You see, it’s combining the possibilities together.”

 Watch AI Summit PH 2023: Philippines is ripe to start using artificial intelligence