Within the framework of the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Labexperts in the area of Artificial intelligence of the companies Microsoft and dLocal They reflected on the various uses of this technological tool, especially for the business world. They also highlighted the good positioning of the Uruguay in the sector, thanks to the fact that this type of development has been promoted as a State policy.
Robert Icazuriaga, director for Latin America and the Caribbean of small, medium-sized businesses and digital native companies of Microsoft said in an interview with Ambit that “artificial intelligence is not a topic that was born on November 30, 2022, but rather it is an evolutionary process that takes 20 or 30 years to reach the moment we are in today.” “Experience tells us that with every technological advance that there is, there is a moment of wave and moment that is created and this happened with the artificial intelligence; and then, at a certain point, you start to see the case of specific use. I think that when smartphones came out it was a bit like that, when the internet came out too, we thought that it was going to change humanity overnight and in reality it didn’t happen that way. We in the technical world are seeing a lot more cases of technology being used for good things,” he commented.
The regional executive added that, in the case of Microsoft, it is “first and foremost a supplier of cloud platform on which artificial intelligence models run, including that of OpenAI and some other models.” The opportunity for us is to be able to develop these platforms in a secure way so that they can be used by the different companies that use artificial intelligence.”
“Today AI has four main types of use: first, companies use it to give more productivity to their own employees. Secondly, they use it to improve their operations. We also saw a case today with fraud management. And then, new use cases, which is trying to create new lines of business of companies. I think that is something very interesting, that my company used to provide a certain service and now with artificial intelligence it can expand that service and get into a business area that perhaps it didn’t have before. These cases are rarer today, but we are going to see more and more of them start to happen,” explained Icazuriaga.
Along those lines, and regarding the use of AI to increase productivity and improve operations, he pointed out that “it applies to all types of industries, as long as the data is available.” “I said earlier that for there to be an AI project, artificial intelligence, Around that project there must be a business data management project or what we call data governance and a project of cybersecurity. Because without those two projects, if you don’t have good data, it’s difficult for artificial intelligence to draw conclusions about the data. So, behind an artificial intelligence project there is an important data management project,” analyzed the Microsoft executive.
Icazuriaga also highly valued the country’s current position in the international technology industry.
“The technology industry in Uruguay It is a very interesting industry for Latin America for several reasons. First, because there has been a innovation process which has been going on for 20 years, during which the actors in the government have changed, different governments, and a State policy has been maintained around the development of this industry. And secondly, since the Uruguayan market is small, every time a company is created, as may be the case of dLocal and others that have been created, these companies, from the beginning, think about the international market. And therefore, they quickly integrate as a export service. So, Uruguay It is very well positioned, this government has given a lot of importance to the issue of Innovation Hub, The previous government gave a lot of importance to the internal digitalization of the government. It is another State policy that the country has and that gives it a country brand around innovation, which I believe will continue to take advantage of,” he concluded.
AI as a tool
For its part, Mauricio Clausen, Head of Payments Engineering and Intelligence at dLocal He said, along the same lines, that “Uruguay In technology, it has always been quite at the forefront. I think that the growth in the software industry and software exports stands out from the service companies.” “We have highly trained and talented professionals who are quickly incorporating this type of technology in all sectors and that is where lots of new technologies appear.” startups and local companies that are already incorporating all these technologies,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say that artificial intelligence per se is the solution, but it is one more tool for teams to reach the solution, either by incorporating it into the systems or by using people as individual contributors. The most natural thing is always to think of chat assistants, telephone assistants, but beyond those use cases that are perhaps the most common, it has a lot of potential more oriented to what we are doing of generating tools to contribute with people as individual contributors, to enhance them and then use them to create business processes where, above all, we have processing of unstructured information, which comes in images, documents, of all kinds, if applicable audios, videos, etc.,” he explained.
The event was also attended by the director of dLocal, Sergio Fogel, which presented the uses that the company has given to the development of tools with AI, highlighting the control of financial fraud, the fight against money laundering and the improvement of internal processes. In addition, he highlighted that the artificial intelligence It helps improve programmer productivity by 30%.
Source: Ambito
