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Artificial intelligence has become increasingly present in people’s lives, ranging from the ability to create a generative image in a messages with simple prompts, to using data to reduce workplace injuries.
So how is AI being used in Saskatchewan?
That was a question on Alex Fallon’s mind some months back when he searched “artificial intelligence Saskatchewan” online in hopes of finding an organization, event or more information.
He found nothing.
About 10 months ago, Fallon founded AiSK in Saskatoon. The goal: Spur discussion about artificial intelligence, learn how it might be used in different industries, and develop a community around it in the province.
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“If we could get those different kind of groups and sectors together it would help spur discussion on AI in Saskatchewan,” he told Leisha Grebinski, host of CBC’s Blue Sky.
LISTEN | How artificial intelligence is being used in Saskatchewan:
In one case, Fallon said, he spoke with a company that uses AI for mine sites, drawing on data from health and safety reports and previous accidents to try to predict potential accidents.
In others, he says, he learned that artificial intelligence has already been used in agriculture to determine how much fertilizer to spread on crops by analyzing weather patterns. In another, the technology helped write a play.
However, artificial intelligence has been criticized for ripping off artists and threatening their livelihoods.
“There are pros and cons,” Fallon said, “and I think it’s all about how you, as an individual, as an entrepreneur or in the workplace, adapt and how you can use AI tools to provide a service and do things that maybe are more creative or faster, serve more people.”
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There have also been concerns about the risk of artificial intelligence to the jobs of everyday workers.
In September, Statistics Canada released a report about the jobs that could be most affected by artificial intelligence in Canada. While jobs with higher exposure to artificial intelligence did not necessarily mean workers were at risk of losing their position, it did suggest AI could transform the work.
Unlike previous technological advances, the report found artificial intelligence is more likely to transform jobs of highly educated workers.
Administrative jobs, business and finance roles and computer and information system workers were all highly exposed to AI-related job transformation and tasks that could be replaced by AI in the future, the study found.
“There’s lots of different definitions of [artificial intelligence] from a technical aspect, but from a human aspect it’s just things that a human can do that a machine can do for you,” said Brendan King, CEO and co-founder of Vendasta in Saskatoon.
Vendasta CEO Brendan King says most of the businesses the company works are outside of Canada. (Vendasta)
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King says his company helps small businesses.
“We build these AI employees to help small businesses have job functions they couldn’t otherwise have,” he said.
“We’re focused in areas where AI can be better or as good as a person, or where it would do something that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to have a person do.”
Those jobs range from answering phone calls to responding to business reviews and creating marketing blog posts, he says.
King says such AI employees are not replacing workers, and doesn’t believe these are jobs that people would enjoy. It also reduces burnout for business owners, he says.
Most of the companies Vendasta works with are not in Canada, he says.
Kaitlyn Hebert, the privacy director in Regina for INQ Consulting, is acutely aware of the positive and negative effects of artificial intelligence.
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On one hand, transcription tools are being used to reduce the amount of time physicians spend typing up notes, or aiding surgeons tracing the anatomy of a patient ahead of a surgery. Both allow for more time with other patients.
On the other hand, she doesn’t fully trust the new technology because of its design: to gather and learn from the information it’s given.
“I, personally, am not going to put in my specific health symptoms into that ChatGPT or say my name and all these different identifiers,” she said.
“I know that it goes to an open source and then the algorithm is trained on my data, and if someone can prompt it in a certain way they can actually surface personal information.”
Hebert says while there is a lack of AI-specific laws regulating the technology, it does fall within privacy laws, which do provide some safeguards.