Gilberto Rodrigues, who was a speaker this Thursday at the "Beyond Data" initiative, promoted by EY Angola and Microsoft, on how to leverage data in the AI era, highlighted the good and bad sides of artificial intelligence, highlighting that, "clearly, nowadays, somehow, the good side has to be ahead, it has to understand what the bad side is doing, so that it can then protect itself".
Speaking to the Lusa agency, the specialist in 'analytics' for more than 20 years highlighted that IoT sensorization (devices that collect data from the environment and transmit it over the Internet) is increasing, which "are gateways precisely to cyberattacks", considering that it is very important that security is also involved in the use of data.
According to Gilberto Rodrigues, the event aimed to show the Angolan market the partnership between EY and Microsoft and the innovative technology that allows avoiding duplication of information, "which often leads to misinformation".
The expert highlighted that AI "is a double-edged sword", because it brings advantages, such as filling the deficit in human resources, optimizing work, but also disadvantages, such as its use to commit fraud and crimes.
"There is a certain perception that artificial intelligence will steal jobs, in fact, we believe that this will not happen, what will happen is that jobs, people, their skills, will be modified", he highlighted.
"Nowadays, (...) 80 percent of (...) work [of analysts] is spent preparing data, when in fact it should be 80 percent of the time analyzing data and making decisions", he stated.
The new technology, highlighted Gilberto Rodrigues, requires skills that not everyone has yet acquired, with a lack of resources, not yet available on the market, and AI makes it possible to "automate, optimize processes, increase efficiencies".
"In some way, AI is used precisely to try to fill these gaps in people, and it is precisely using technology that helps people to have time," he said.
According to the director of AI & Data at EY, companies in the Angolan market are already entering the world of AI, highlighting that a prototype was created for setting up projects with EY clients in Angola, using 'generativ AI', in other words, the latest generation of AI.
"Today, more than 80 percent of information in companies is stored in documents in 'PowerPoint', Word, Excel, which are what we call unstructured information", said the expert, explaining that this information is valuable, but traditional AI or analytics processes had great difficulty extracting information from these sources.
"The 'generativ AI', (...) through natural language can begin, in some way, to categorize, classify, this information and make it available to end users so that they, in fact, extract value from this information that is stored in these documents", he stressed, emphasizing that "'generativ AI' is clearly also changing a lot of the operating models of companies, including in the Angolan market".
Gilberto Rodrigues highlighted the resistance of Angolan companies to 'clouds', but "less and less", for legal and trust reasons, adding that the closest 'data center' to Angola is in South Africa.
