Artificial Intelligence as a driver of innovation and sustainable change
By Alberto Granados
President of Forética | President of Microsoft Spain
History offers an important and repeated lesson about the promise and challenge of new technologies. Since the invention of the printing press around 1450 by the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, societies have been faced with the need to decide whether to accept or reject new inventions. From the second half of the 14th century, Europe adopted printing on a massive scale, while the Ottoman Empire banned it from its territory. Barely half a century later, around 1500, the citizens of the Netherlands read more books per capita than anyone else in the world. It is no coincidence that the small nation was soon at the forefront of economic innovation on a global scale, enjoying a unique competitive advantage in spreading knowledge and culture across our continent.
As in 1450, we are in a "Gutenberg moment". Artificial intelligence is transforming business, the work model and people's lives in general, eliminating repetitive tasks, helping to find information, promoting creativity, increasing productivity and driving economic growth. According to a recent McKinsey analysis, the economic potential of Artificial Intelligence could be between $17 trillion and $26.6 trillion; the widespread adoption of Generative AI alone could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy, thanks to the productivity gains that businesses could realize. In fact, this increase could reach 3.3 percentage points.
Generative AI, and what we call large-scale language models or foundational languages such as GPT-4, represent a significant leap in the capabilities and impact of Artificial Intelligence, and open up dilemmas in areas as relevant as the sciences in general, medicine in particular, or education. The development and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence is fundamental because these technologies have an enormous impact on environmental sustainability, society and the governance of organizations.
Therefore, it is critical to define a responsible AI model that guarantees six fundamental principles in its development: equity, reliability, inclusion, security and privacy, transparency and accountability.
The impact of AI
There are already numerous examples in Spain of the application of AI by companies and public administrations to optimize internal processes, improve customer experience and citizen services, empower workers and develop new digital services, but Artificial Intelligence is also being applied in areas that are bringing significant improvements to people's lives.
A clear example of the impact of Artificial Intelligence is the collaboration agreement between the Community of Madrid, Fundación 29 and Microsoft, the initial result of which - the first of its kind in Spain and worldwide - is a web application that, as a pilot project, is already accessible from Primary Care centers in the Community of Madrid. Thanks to it, physicians will be able to improve their capabilities and diagnose patients with rare diseases more accurately and quickly, speeding up their referral to the appropriate specialists for correct treatment. This solution is based on OpenAI's Artificial Intelligence language model, GPT-4, on Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service and meets all security and ethical development standards.
It is very interesting the application of Artificial Intelligence technologies being developed by Quibim, a Valencian startup that uses AI algorithms in Azure to perform diagnostic test images in oncology, managing to reduce up to 80% the time of interpretation by the doctor and detecting users who will respond better to a particular therapy. The company's goal is to create a digital human twin to aid in the prevention and diagnosis of cancer.
Artificial Intelligence is also being used to improve the inclusion of people with disabilities. In this sense, the ONCE Social Group has collaborated with Microsoft in the Spanish translation and evaluation of Seeing AI, a free app that facilitates the recognition and description of the environment for blind people through the audio-description of people, objects and texts.
In the field of environmental sustainability, Microsoft collaborates with the startup Mitiga Solutions in the development of technological solutions for the prediction and management of the effects caused by climate change through the use of HPC (High Performance Computing) and Artificial Intelligence solutions. Its projects include the monitoring of forest fires and the analysis of their effects, taking into account the impact of real-time factors such as topography and wind direction, as well as climate variability.
And we continue to advance the application of AI in fields such as chemistry and materials science research, with solutions such as Azure Quantum Elements, to enable researchers to accurately model the most complex molecules through Azure's high-performance computing (HPC) and AI speed-a task that larger classical computers could not solve. This quantum supercomputing and AI technology could be used in the future by companies to run simulations with unprecedented accuracy.
The development of Responsible AI
There are many scenarios for the use of AI related to ESG and there will be an infinite number of them. However, there are still many questions that arise around the use of these technologies. Issues such as the protection of intellectual property, the future of artistic creation, the impact on employment and the work model, or the transformation of education are just some of the changes brought about by the use of AI that we must reflect on as a society.
At Microsoft, we are creating an AI assurance program to ensure that AI applications deployed on our platforms meet the legal and regulatory requirements for responsible AI. We are committed to helping our customers implement their own AI systems, following the standard, and also developing programs for our partner ecosystem to achieve this goal.
It is also important to highlight, from an ethical point of view, two fundamental issues: that the data used by Azure cloud customers is exclusively theirs and is not used to train other AI models; and that it is protected following the strictest privacy and copyright protection regulations.
The analysis of the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on environmental, social and governance criteria is not an area in which we can work in isolation. Therefore, from Microsoft, as a driving company, we are collaborating with customers, partners, governmental and non-governmental institutions - such as, for example, with UNESCO, and, of course, from Forética -to ensure the application of Responsible AI.
As I noted at the beginning, we are at a time of disruption that will profoundly transform the economy and society. We must not forget the lesson of history and, as in 1450, we must take advantage of this "Gutenberg moment" to ensure that Artificial Intelligence develops responsibly and generates a positive impact on the progress of humanity.
Alberto Granados, Chairman of Forética and Chairman of Microsoft Spain
As president of Microsoft Spain since July 2021, he leads a team of more than a thousand professionals focused on helping Spanish companies and public bodies in their digital transformation and sustainable innovation projects. In addition, he is also currently president of Forética, the leading organization in corporate sustainability in Spain.
