This Week's Most Read: The Role of AI in Digital Transformation

This week's top stories:

1. The Role of AI in Digital Transformation

ServiceNow's Chief Digital Information Officer Chris Bedi writes in this opinion piece that in today’s economic landscape, it is crucial that business leaders are strategic about their investments and understand exactly where to prioritize their digital spending.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rocketed into the mainstream over the last year and its potential is huge. However, capitalizing on such technology requires seamless integration. If harnessed effectively, AI offers tangible benefits in areas such as customer and employee experience, and therefore companies must act now or risk getting left behind.

The last few years have paved the way for bigger, better digital transformation. The rise of generative AI and hyperautomation has potential to be a productivity game-changer for those who use it well.

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2. Author Admits to Using AI to Write Award-winning Novel

An author who won Japan’s most prestigious book award revealed that around 5% of the content in her novel came directly from generative AI.

Rie Kudan won the 170th Akutagawa Prize for emerging authors for her novel, Tokyo-to Dojo-to (meaning, Sympathy Tower Tokyo), according to Kyodo (Japan) News.

Her novel is set in a futuristic Tokyo in which generative AI is being used everywhere. One of the characters is ‘AI-built,’ which is similar to ChatGPT.

Besides Kudan, journalism professor Shen Yang of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, also used AI to write a book. It took him 66 prompts and about three hours to generate a Chinese-language novel, complete with title, illustrations and pen name, according to China Daily. The book also won an award.

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3. Intel's Startup Chief on Trends in the AI Landscape

Intel Ignite is the chip giant’s startup accelerator program that focuses on deep tech. It takes in and mentors startup cohorts in the U.S., Europe, U.K., and Israel throughout the year.

AI Business recently caught up with Tzahi (Zack) Weisfeld, who is the general manager and vice president of Intel Ignite, to find out what he is seeing in the AI startup landscape.

Trending areas for AI startups include cybersecurity, small language models, multimodality, computational biology and edge computing.

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4. Generative AI and the New Frontier in Cybersecurity

Generative AI is bringing cyber attacks to a new level of sophistication and reach, enabling even low-skilled and less-funded criminals to commit such acts.

“We expect to see generative AI and LLMs being leveraged by hackers to personalize and slowly scale their campaigns,” said Phil Venables, who is the CISO of Google Cloud. “New AI capabilities will enable threat actors that once were limited by reduced resources and capabilities to further scale their campaigns.”

Large language models offer various ways for hackers to carry out their nefarious acts. One is in a traditional phishing campaign.

Another use of an LLM is to create code for the attack. This could allow for making a realistic landing page, without having to know how to use a programming or scripting language. For example, a hacker can take a screenshot of a website of a bank and the LLM will create the code for it.

LLMs themselves are becoming targets for hackers as well.

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5. Cisco, Nvidia Offer Alternative to Cloud Giants’ AI Infrastructure

Networking giant Cisco and chipmaker Nvidia said they are forming a partnership to offer integrated AI hardware and software solutions in the data center.

It is a move that will give corporate clients an AI infrastructure alternative to those offered by the cloud giants. Currently, access to advanced AI hardware is available mainly through the data centers of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

The Cisco-Nvidia alliance will see Nvidia’s advanced AI chips, GPUs and platforms available through Cisco. The two have offered integrated products and services for years; this latest alliance will deepen their collaboration.

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