Building the AI future we want

Plus: The first in our Startup 101 video series.

Good afternoon Caffeinators,

It’s Friday and as a special treat we’re bringing you the first in our Startup 101 video series plus an exclusive chat with Aware Group co-founder and CEO, Brandon Hutcheson.

If you’ve got a story, press release, interview to pitch or just want to tell me I’m wrong about something - send it over to finn@caffeinedaily.co

If you’re interested in working with Caffeine as a partner, flick Georgia an email on: georgia@caffeinedaily.co

Have a great weekend, look after each other, and we’ll see you next week.

Finn and the CAFFEINE team

Startup 101: What is Compliance and why should you care?

For many founders, the word “compliance” conjures images of endless paperwork, bureaucratic red tape, and a drain on precious resources that could be better spent on innovation and growth.

But what if compliance, far from being a drag, was actually the unlock to your startup’s biggest ambitions? That’s the bet Vanta is making. They are on a mission to make compliance accessible and efficient for the next generation of disruptive startups.

To help break down the essentials, Caffeine sat down with GRC Subject Matter Expert Evan Rowse for a three part primer as part of our Startup 101 video series.

In this introductory episode we start in the obvious place: what exactly is compliance? And most importantly, why should a founder care?

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Building the AI future we want: A conversation with Aware Group’s Brandon Hutcheson

I have a lot of conversations about the future of emerging technology. This was one of my favourites.

Brandon Hutcheson, Aware Group co-founder and AI forum executive council member, is one of the most knowledgeable people in this space because he’s been thinking about its hard problems and creating solutions before anyone even heard of ChatGPT.

Since its founding Aware has helped hundreds of companies explore AI solutions and taken dozens of these experiments from prototype to production. They’ve worked on nearly 2,000 AI and data projects across the globe.

We recently sat down to discuss the pivotal moment we’re at in AI and why New Zealand should adopt a more proactive approach to emerging technologies.

We also got into the societal implications of advanced AI, job displacement, and unpacked my favourite hypothetical question - are we heading towards a sci dystopia or a sci fi utopia.

Or put the nerdiest way - is the future we’re building more Star Trek or more Star Wars?

Answers have been edited for clarity and length

Could you share a little about why you founded Aware Group?

We started the company ten years ago because we predicted that AI was going to become the next thing. The question ten years ago was, where is AI going to sit? Is it going to become what Chat GPT created? Which is the consumer based model. Is it going to be driven from enterprise, government, where will it go? We had no idea. Ten years ago we all we knew was that it was going to become something huge.

Our first ever client was Microsoft, which was quite fun. We got to build demos for Microsoft conferences globally. So we got to build demos, fly out and present them on the global stage. And we got to bring those learnings back to New Zealand. And then what we did from there was we used that to actually leverage into government, into enterprise. And we got to show people things with AI that they hadn’t even thought of yet.

The media often frames AI as a job killer. What do you see in practice?

What we see in the media, is replacement of people. It’s not. Like, look at the stats. We’ve worked on nearly 2,000 AI and data projects across New Zealand and globally. Majority of them are about enablement. They want to grow. They don’t want to reduce.

If the Government could do one thing tomorrow that would actually move the needle, what should it be?

Document automation. It’s the most boring thing, but it’s so important… you can get accuracy rates of well over 90%.

If you look at the main funnels of administration, documents come into a government agency. Or documents come out of the government agency to people. A simple AI use case would be just automating all of the external comms. The outcomes and decisions still needs to be done by humans as the final choice. But you can triage a lot quicker. We’ve created an environment in New Zealand where historically, we look at things based on a very primitive decision tree.

Why are we not creating agents to actually follow those things but using different points of AI? If we look at things like, what’s the purpose of government? It’s to provide the services that we, as a collective, need.

If you get foundational things right, you can build it’s so much on top of that and then see what that unlocks. So many of our issues with government being slow moving, too expensive, too bureaucratic. So many of those things come down to the delivery mechanisms that got the tools the government has, the delivery mechanisms it has for its services.

What about outside of paperwork — what’s a use case you’d want to see roll out?

There is so many technologies currently that we could reduce our reliance on GPs. Things like building up a dataset that’s owned by the individual not owned by the government. That can actually help do preventative health care, which could reduce the amount of time and the wait times.

Imagine if the government paid a couple dollars for software for everyone in New Zealand. Everyone got the chance to have an app on their phone which could collect basic health information daily. As long as we created the right protections around the ways this health information is collected. We could predict which health issues, which diseases, which things are likely to happen to a certain extent.

And then if we’re able to anonymize the information, which we can do, what’s the next step? It’s us going and protecting where the talent shortage will be in a certain amount of time. What campaigns or restrictions and legislation that we can run from a health care perspective to improve overall health outcomes for New Zealand.

Looking a little further ahead, what frontier technologies should New Zealand be preparing for?

We are playing catch up. Why are we not thinking three years ahead? Four, five years? Bringing some of those more experimental technologies into it. We should be ensuring that government — every solution we do — is quantum safe.

We also need to look at three things. Energy, security, and then material science. If we don’t fix energy, we throttle everything else. On security, if quantum computing came tomorrow, we’re screwed. And with material science, we should be thinking about composites, new ways of using wool, things New Zealand has natural advantages in. That’s where the frontier is.

Many founders I talk to about technology say they feel overwhelmed by the pace of change - how should we respond to that feeling?

There’s that great line ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in’. Honestly, I think that’s the right quote for this.

Every time that we make a delay on a decision to take the next step, we’re making our issues our kids’ or our grandkids’ issues. So for us to actually advance, we need to actually plant the seeds, need to start the stuff. Even if we don’t understand it, we need to take a leap of faith. It could be the collection of data. We may not know that the information is going to be used from AI in the future, but in the future, it could be. It’s about planting those seeds.

Finally, when you think about the future of AI, are you optimistic or pessimistic? Are we heading for a Star Wars Future or a Star Trek future?

I think it comes down to the speed of advancement. I think literally that choice will come down to how fast we acquire those technologies. If things go too quickly, I think we’ll end up in the Star Wars. I think if we do it at a certain pace and society allows itself to adjust, I think we end up in the Star Trek world. That’s the honest answer.

I actually see most countries in the world are quite center. You know, we shift a little left, we shift a little right, and then people panic, and then we come back. We’re naturally auto-correcting as a society. So, I think we will end up on the Star Trek side.

I do think that we’re going to make huge advancements. We’re going to end up in a situation where we’re going to be able to have that Star Trek style fabricator. We’ll have an infinite energy source. We’re going to have all of those things. But there is going to be a growing discrepancy and a growing shift between people in terms of qualifications and usefulness to society. And I don’t know how we deal with it but I also don’t think it’s up to me. I think it comes down to people that know specific areas. I think it’s a community and a societal thing.

But there is going to be areas where people feel left out we have to look at this collectively and go - how do we deal with that? I don’t want that to stop advancement but I’d rather our attention going to look at these issues and going ‘this is going to happen’. We need to solve issues in the short term but look to the long term.

Our entire reason for why we wanted to create the company was the future of our kids. So for me, I’ve got two kids. And I want them to grow up in a world where their future is fair, and they get a chance to actually be human as part of it going forward.