Trust key to safe expansion of use of AI solutions, says PwC Middle East’s AI lead

Jeddah - Yasmine El Tohamy - RIYADH: Trust is key to the safe expansion of the use of AI solutions around the world, Dr. Scott Nowson, PwC Middle East’s artificial intelligence lead, has told Arab News.

As the debate ensues over human capabilities compared to artificial intelligence solutions, Nowson said that while there are “some skills and some tasks that are better suited to automation with technology” the use of AI is “still contingent upon human intelligence and awareness.”

Through his work in AI over the past 27 years, Nowson has examined the evolving relationship between AI and humans.

“There’s as much optimism as there is pessimism over AI,” he told Arab News during the second edition of the LEAP technology conference.

“People believe AI will completely replace us when I really don’t think it will. I think we’re many generations away from when AI becomes greater than human capabilities,” he added.

However, we must acknowledge that AI can perform some tasks better than humans, Nowson said, using the evolution of AI-assisted unmanned aerial vehicles as an example.

Recent research has also shown that self-driving cars can employ a more accurate view of roads than humans, making them safer and more functional than traditional vehicles.

According to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, human error accounts for 94 percent of all road accidents.

Nowson began studying AI 27 years ago at the University of Edinburgh, which opened one of the first dedicated undergraduate programs for AI in the world.

After studying cognitive science and completing a Ph.D. in natural language processing, Nowson has spent the past 16 years exploring the constantly evolving relationship between humans and technology across four continents. He has worked at PwC since 2019.

AI and its development, said Nowson, is not as new as most people think. “AI has been around for 60-80 years now,” says Nowson. “But it is only now that the rise of technology is pushing it into the published consciousness with ChatGPT and DALL-E.”

The latter is a model developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called “prompts.”

Nowson added: “People are now thinking about AI and its implications on daily life more. We already witnessed technological change with the industrial revolution through robotic process automation. AI is just the next step in that.”

Undeniably, the development of AI technology is moving fast. For many people, there are psychological hurdles to overcome in order to grasp the influence of AI on daily life.

Nowson said: “We need governments and leaders to be able to understand the capabilities of AI and understand the economic, political and societal implications, and handle them with good governance and responsibility.”

Building trust is the most important factor in expanding AI, he said, adding: “Trust is paramount among clients of PwC.”

Nowson said that PwC internally tests AI before taking new solutions to clients.

“This way, we have confidence in any solution, any approach, any strategy that we use because we’ve done it internally first,” he added.

“To that end, we have upskilled hundreds, if not thousands, across the Middle East region from our teams on the different AI technologies. This broadens the conversation to enable finding the best solutions through AI for problem solving.”