Ben, welcome.
How is GenAI
impacting the role of insight professionals?
Well, it's it's like another tool, and it's letting you do
things much faster.
It's letting you be more creative.
It's giving you new opportunities that simply didn't
exist before because you can mine huge amounts of data in a
few seconds in a way that was just not possible before it
arrived.
What is your approach to GenAI
at Ipsos?
So what we're doing is we see it as a combination of human
intelligence and artificial intelligence.
And so we're working on improving our speed and
productivity overall, but we're also building new products and
services for our clients, like, you know, Explorer, which lets
you look at innovations in a completely different way.
So it's both more creativity, but also just getting things
done faster.
Interesting
you're saying still human intelligence and lots of
creativity, some things that people don't normally associate
when we talk about
GenAI and AI and technological advance?
Well, I think there is a risk of sort of dulling down to the
average.
And you know, there are some signs,
for example, I mean, we're here in Cannes and looking at
advertising, for example.
One thing that we can see is that over the last six or seven
years, there's less and less use of humour in advertising, which
is a shame because actually it's one of the things that makes it
memorable.
And actually what we found is that AI isn't very good at
spotting people doing humor.
It can sort of tell that something's entertaining, but it
can't really tell how good, how funny something might be, yet.
Yet. Yet indeed, quite.
What are you most excited for then?
Talking about the future for AI, GenAI
at Ipsos? Well, I think it's, I mean, it's generally just
improving as a financial company, as a commercial
business, it's generally improving productivity and
letting people get things done faster, taking the slog away to
let them spend more time thinking about clients.
But I think we can see a future where actually we start to see
the use of synthetic data, and that's really exciting.
But you need to be very careful about that, and smoke, but not
always inhale.
How—interesting.
How are you,
how are you making sure that you don't fall into the potential
traps?
Well, we use three principles.
So, you know, we, we want truth, transparency, and justice.
So in other words, if you take justice, is it just reinforcing
existing biases?
You know, if you ask AI and many of the models now to tell you,
you know, what a chief executive looks like, it's probably going
to look more like me than like you. For example,
is it transparent?
We have to know how it works, because if it's just black box,
then there's some problems.
So we need to know exactly how it's working.
And finally, of course, we need to make sure that it's not
hallucinating, which again, can be a problem.
Ben, thank you so much for your time. Pleasure.