It was an eye-catching announcement, worthy of the showmanship of Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Bristol will be the home of the new £900 million artificial intelligence supercomputer. For Bristol to host the world's most potent supercomputer, designed to supercharge the UK's AI discovery, is certainly a great accolade for the partnership of our four universities. But will it open up new opportunities for local businesses, like the coming of the railway did in the 1840s, or is this just a new toy for PhDs to enjoy?
At its heart, AI is all about finding patterns hidden in large amounts of data and using those patterns to predict, personalise and automate. This new monumental computing marvel will make a difference to scientists and researchers who will have the firepower to create and apply new algorithms that crunch more data, finding more of these elusive patterns and uncovering them faster. It will certainly cement the position of Bristol's research institutions and universities at the heart of the AI revolution.
If Brunel was here today, with his engineering genius, I imagine he would bowl in to the University's hallways, demanding access to the supercomputer to test his ideas for using this machine that can out-calculate all the brains in Bristol combined.
The reality is less exciting - Isambard-AI won't impact our businesses straight away. Despite the media furore this year, the advent of ChatGPT and other foundation models did not happen overnight. The algorithms behind them have been evolving over many years. The recent breakthroughs came when computing power and storage became available at a price that meant it was possible to train AI models on such large amounts of data that they could find and use patterns that previously were unknown.
AI certainly is changing our world. It is revolutionising patient care and diagnostics. It's enabling financial services businesses to understand customers better and personalise their offerings to them. It's being used in logistics to make the workplace safer and to automate many boring, repetitive tasks.
Unfortunately, however, most businesses are ill-equipped to take advantage of AI in any creative way. Research by AI Governance showed that 58% of organisations have no one on the Board who understands what AI is, let alone having ideas for how to use it.
To match the investment in Isambard-AI we need a programme to hone the minds of people already in the workforce. Sure, over time our universities will create a new wave of AI-savvy researchers, many of whom will be keen to stay in the Bristol and Bath area. But we also need our leaders of today - and aspiring leaders - to be much more confident in dealing with data and interpreting the outputs from AI models. Without this basic understanding of the possibilities AI offers, leaders in private, public and not-for-profit sectors won't know how to harness the power of these evolving technologies.
The workforce of the future is the workforce of AI and data. Career paths will evolve, and new opportunities will emerge as AI becomes an integral part of everyday life. But, just as Brunel faced engineering challenges in bringing the Great Western Railway here, Bristol's businesses must navigate the risks that AI brings.
In the absence of AI regulation, leaders need to make ethical choices about when they will - and will not - use AI. I'm hopeful that Bristol's third sector will be given a seat at the table to help bolster the social conscience so leaders see the wider consequences of their decisions.
One example of the choices leaders will have to make is how they change their workforces in the new age of AI. It is inevitable that some job roles will change, or even disappear. Employers will need to choose how much to reskill their existing workforce for the digital age and how much to discard people who no longer fit. The reality is that there are too few people with higher-level data and AI skills, so joining the war for talent is expensive and very difficult. It is far better to capitalise on your people's knowledge of how your organisation works, and add on the missing digital skills, rather than trying to poach talent from elsewhere.
It would be a sensational - and truly impactful - result if our universities created an ecosystem of talent development orbiting around Isambard-AI. The impact of this high-level science should be the development of the data and AI-related skills of people in disadvantaged communities, retraining of many in the existing workforce and inspiration for a new generation of leaders to be confident in this data and AI-powered world.
In the end, Bristol and Bath's AI transformation is a journey much like Brunel's iconic projects - bold, ambitious and filled with potential and peril. Our history and legacy are a testament to our ability to navigate uncharted waters and emerge triumphant. In the past, only the strongest and most fortunate could gain advantage from opportunities to harness new technology. With the world's most powerful supercomputer in our midst, our region can do better than simply providing the best tools for the elite - we can shift power and spread the benefits to all.
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