Generative AI: the new industrial revolution that will change society

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The Chair for Smart Industry (CIC) organised a conference to discuss one of the digital tools of the moment: generative Artificial Intelligence. Some AI experts from the chair’s patron companies gave presentations.

The conference started with an introduction by Mariano Ventosa, Vice-Rector for Research and Teaching Staff, who stated that "we are facing a much more profound change than the industrial revolution", and it is expected that up to 25% of the tasks we perform today will be replaced by artificial intelligence technology.

Additionally, Álvaro López, coordinator of the chair for Smart Industry and moderator of the event, pointed out that generative Artificial Intelligence has a disruptive potential unlike other technologies we have seen.
In this round table participated María Borbonés, Client Engineering Manager & Solutions Architect at IBM, Nera González, Innovation & Product Development Manager at Prosegur, Diego Mallada, ITD Digital Tech director at Gestamp, and Francisco Barragán, student of the combined Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering and Smart Industry.

María Borbonés was in charge of explaining how large language models work, which help in many different ways, such as text generation. Generative AI presents many opportunities, but it also has many obstacles associated with it from an ethical point of view.

Nera González explained how they are applying generative AI in the security field. In the medium term, generative AI will change the rules of the game, but, most of all, it will change the way we interact with machines. At Prosegur, they apply it in their video surveillance, in the development of new services and to improve internal procedures.

Diego Mallada’s presentation revolved around the projects and challenges related to AI that they are observing, insisting on the creation of software communities, to digitise the internal knowledge that employees have and extend it throughout the organisation at a global level.

The last participant in the round table was Francisco Barragán, who recently received an award for his project, “Implementation of navigation algorithms in a Turtlebot3”. His talk focused on language models, which can focus on data processing or new data generation, like the ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot tools.

The conference ended with an extensive debate with the attendees on the talent that will be necessary in organisations, and how working professionals can be trained throughout their professional careers in these new technologies, because, as Mariano Ventosa said at the beginning of the event, "we are facing the first 10 centimetres of a wave that will be 10 metres high and that will pass over us, which is why it is so difficult to understand how it will impact us".