AI Beyond Automation

Ben Lorica

The Data Exchange Podcast: Jerry Overton on building an Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence to incubate serious AI talent.


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In this episode of the Data Exchange, our special correspondent and managing editor Jenn Webb organized a mini-panel composed of myself and Jerry Overton, who previously served as a DXC Fellow, Head of AI at DXC Technology.  We discussed Jerry’s experience helping companies across many industries adopt data science and machine learning. We spoke about Centers of Excellence for AI, automation in the workforce, human-centered and responsible AI, and cyborgs!

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Jerry is passionate about data science, both applying it to real-world problems, as well as training the next-generation of data scientists. One of the things we discussed was his leadership role in helping establish a Center of Excellence within DXC:

    ❛ I personally have for the last two years, been working on what me and a colleague, refer to as the AI aristocracy problem. And what that really means is we need a corpus of talent. But there’s the notion that goes around and which is pretty prevalent and unchallenged, that AI talent is centralized in a small number of places. So if you want that AI talent, you’re going to have to be prevalent in those places and compete for that talent. You know, I’ve even heard things like, “Well, you know, there’s only 10,000 people in the world capable of serious artificial intelligence.”  That creates a problem for us to do the types of automation that we need to do, since we need access to that talent. So for the last two years, I’ve been working on building the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence for the company, and really challenging this notion of an AI aristocracy. With this program, we recruit inside of our company, we build up talent, we create a little incubator, where we are launching these cool, compassionate applications of AI beyond just automation.

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