Informatica CEO Amit Walia on ‘Guardrails’ for Generative AI

foreign and on today's espeaks we're looking at some of the challenges and solutions for getting the most from Ai and your business including how to set up corporate guardrails for the use of artificial intelligence including generative AI to discuss that I'm joined by Ahmed Walia chief executive officer at Informatica Ahmed very good to have you with us today James Pleasures all mine great to be here so I I think you know we can certainly agree there's a major Gold Rush going on and artificial intelligences these days ever since chat GPT came out in November of last year there's been almost a I would call it a quasi hysteria but AI there's a lot of dollars flowing in of course there has been for for a number of years in reality uh but not every company is happy with how they're using AI some some of them are run into problems with with scaling and operationalizing artificial intelligence what do you see in terms of some of the difficult challenges here with AI well first of all I can tell you that was super excited about what the current uh innovation in AI is and I will Begin by saying I think we are all in the short term there is more hype than reality but I think that for the long term we are truly underestimating the uh opportunity here it's going to be exceptionally powerful in other words I I definitely think so and if you think about it like I mean AI I mean if you look at it that's a trifecta that's coming together which is cloud data and AI there is no AI without without data and there is no Ai and data without the scale of the cloud so I think its AI has those two as foundational layers so all of that stuff is happening as we speak right but the question you asked me look I think right now the biggest thing is I talked to uh Enterprises across the globe the chief data officers the chief analytics officers achieve information officers everybody is just trying to wrap their head around what does it mean for my business what do I do with it I mean in some ways the debate is oh my gosh it's gonna unleash this amazing uh profound productivity you can do so much more the other one is that geez yeah is so much so much intelligence so much richness sitting out there that I can harness and then the third one is the fear comes in so what does it mean governance how do I feel about it if I may interrupt you a little bit on that one I I and the fear piece I did not hear the fear pieces much before chat GPT I I I've talked to experts and they would say well it could be some job losses but you know that it can be made up because people will be needed in the AI industry now they're there's a certain sense of of uh anxiety that's that's new and it's pretty pretty Fierce I would say yeah and I think it's natural when something such profound comes out it's unknown the scale impact of that one so I think extreme optimism and sometimes extreme pessimism of fear are both very normal to have so I think that's what is happening right now everybody's trying to grab their head around it but I think if you really really step back there are three opportunities here or three things that are happening here there is definitely profound value creation here we can do so much more we today can scale and analyze our business and and see things we can democratize a lot of that stuff because the chat interface and the ability to do that for you know users like you and me can actually do complex things that were just impossible for us to do right and then there is going to be the I think Regulatory Compliance will become a lot more profound here how do you still make sure that we are not doing things that we should not be doing or we are not accessing data that we should not be accessing or we are not letting AI bring things together that should actually be for even individual users like you and I should be monitored controlled and managed so I think all of those are happening as we speak well I think certainly part of the the concern is issues around AI ethics and compliance I think one of the problems that's going to be is there an entity that can really regulate artificial intelligence I mean there's so much money going into AI in theory perhaps there could be government regulations around AI but the problem is Private Industry tends to be so much better funded and and able to move faster than government so can government really you know regulate AI so what about the issues of AI ethics and complete and compliance the idea of guard rails around your AI deployment yeah but I think here so I think that'll happen I think we have to be thoughtful we Innovation can also sometimes get kabashed very quickly if you get too quickly on top of it I think there has to be an element of what needs to be regulated how it leads to the regulator first we need to let Innovation organizations serve and I think we need to figure out where it lands right now we're in the LED a thousand flower blooms category I think we need to understand what it does I do think that uh both I think software companies like us AI companies like us and the government has to come together to then create some kind of guard rails whether that's Regulatory Compliance at the highest level also what I call ethical management of AI that every organization has to do look we are a data management company I'll give you this we we are going to basically naturally graduate into with our governance portfolio to help customers understand hey with your your data was like this now with the help of AI it becomes more sensitive because it can be brought together and it can do many more things and it's in the hands of different kinds of users do you know that just contextualizing and providing awareness of that workflow will become extremely important in the world of AI and that's an opportunity and then I'm sure different countries and regions will also look at how do you responsibly govern that and organizations have to maybe talk about that contextualize that all of those things organically evolve also in my opinion well all right if drill down on that just a moment I mean if um if AI is to be regulated or or if there's guard rails What specifically would that mean for for a given company is it either regulation piece or the guard rail piece I mean what what what what what is a company guarding against when they put up guard rails I think two things look forget regulatory complies for a minute if I am any company today really is in the business of in the end serving their end customers and our brand any if I'm a retail company my brand is tied to how well I managed the trust of my own customers and trust is earned once over the course of many years of hard work and lost in a minute and I think Enterprises get that so I think there will be natural force of making sure that you can keep the trust of your ready customers that's very important so I think that the internal guard rates then there will be Regulatory Compliance oh my gosh misuse of data or you know misuse of data in many different ways loss of data or somebody trying to come through and and leveraging AI to to to take different pieces of data and putting it out in the world wide web or or ransomware I think those both of those things will happen and there will need proper Regulatory Compliance and I think that I would say that you you also heard what open AI was saying I think industry believes that some amount of that will be needed but guard rails internally will also be needed so we as companies serving our customers don't lose that trust well let's look at let's drill down to the Informatica product offering how is Informatica position itself around the Gen AI Trend in particular what about the cleric solution what does that mean for customers yeah so if you if you like kind of step back you know we have we actually launched our AI which is called clear back in 2017. you know around the time over uh opening I started doing their work and you know takes a couple years for AI to hold and where we are today is that we've scaled clear running it on all kinds of machine learning algorithms inherently baked into our platform to do things like you know what what happened in the consumer world like Photo tagging on Facebook recommendations on Amazon we brought that to the world of data management it's called Data tagging for data governance recommendations for data if you're doing analytics that's what we are doing today across the globe that itself is basically giving tremendous value to our customers but where we sit today the generative AI we're taking it a step for a big meaningful step forward where we are doing multiple things tremendously simplifying data management we're taking that chat interface and applying it on top of Claire we call it clear GPT so where users like you and I through a very simple text chatting interface can actually do complicated data management activities simply click simply if you want to ask can you bring me the data from my western region of customers that I'm aware very high churn risk good Lord the amount of work that happens under that covers is very complex but you can now do that interface second is we're also providing co-pilot capabilities that once you start doing that co-pilot will sit next to you and keep recommending you the next best thing to do oh you want to do that but have you thought about these two other things that you should be thinking because we are not sophisticated users so we're bringing clear GPT capabilities clear co-pilot capabilities and our goal is twofold democratize the use of data management to any user and also dramatically reduce the overall cost of doing these kind of activities from the past so customers can get more value from these capabilities you know it's a really interesting idea the idea of democratizing access to data and democratizing data management and that the idea that a user who is not necessarily a technical expert can can use a text prompt to input into a data management platform does change everything because there was a time when only a data scientist or true analytics Pro could do that so it is part of this this larger Mega trend of the democratization of technology I think it's pretty interesting actually we totally believe in that I mean allowing and by the way the power users will still stay James you know right and the power users are going to do more stuff but basic stuff was getting I would say stuck by not being able to do that and now using NLP kind of capabilities many of such things can be done by simple users business users who are wanting to do little things but they cannot get their hands onto it so we think it's a game changer for those kind of users what does it actually look like in terms of the user interface so I I I'm working with Claire and I input you know send me all the data from the western region between 2011 and 2019 uh is it is it ventured into grass how does it actually produce those results for the user visually now you're asking some great questions real technical questions so under the tower all the data management and complex activities still have to be done now but we have first elevated and simplified it for the end user to not have to see that it's masked for them but under the covers what happens James is and if I keep it very simple is that our platform intelligent data management cloud idmc is the metadata system of record for a customer because data is so distributed everywhere fragmented everywhere we basically understand the context of data about data which is metadata so it hits the metadata and from there it knows what to do it understands what is customer data and in a lot of places customer data is not loaded as customer data but Claire understands that it also understands western region it's taking all of those things and like what you do in natural Google search it breaks it apart into many things it also knows that oh my gosh this data is duplicate so it starts using data quality rules to make it better oh my gosh the phone number is missing so let's add that it starts doing all of those things under the cover and Claire has natural knowledge because we've done this for thousands and thousands of customers and millions and millions of times so we have so much intelligence to make it better that's what starts happening under the covers and we start giving output to the user and then co-pilot starts telling you if you if you start doing job one you say oh now I know what James you're trying to do let me recommend you three other things so it starts complementing the GPT interface interesting interesting all right definitely a need for that um well I think that the big question that the companies are wondering the consumers are wondering what is the future of generative Ai and the it seems like the difficulty with that issue is that it is changing and evolving exponentially even as we speak so it's I think it's a particularly hard question to answer because it is so you know leap frogging and it's gross but what do you see from where you said the future of generative Ai and how will it evolve and how will it affect business and I think that's probably a five hour answer but I'll ask you to answer it anyways yeah I couldn't agree more it's a long answer I think it's going to be transformative no doubt about that one I think we are seeing these you know sometimes we have to do this step function technology changes the the internet was one of those Cloud was one of those uh distributed computing back in the days was one of those and I think we are seeing something similar right now it's transformative and you see three things first is intelligence AI has scale intelligence it it can start inferring things that you and I or any human driven models or things will not be able to do so that tremendous amount of intelligence will be at scale will be crazy for example if certain thing if I'm a Unilever something is happening in Philippines Indonesia and that Trend it can immediately correlate to say hey something like this maybe should be happening in the western region of us because they look very similar that that predicting is going to be that that one thing will be tremendously powerful second is tremendous amount of simplification and productivity Improvement uh and I think that that's bound to happen I give you some examples of how it will happen even in a complex infrastructure area like data data management third one is in my opinion is basically where we'll come up with many new things many new things that we've never done before right to be honest think about this climate change it will start telling us telling us in effect in a predictive way where climate change can happen faster and where maybe civilizations can can hurt us sooner or or than anything else and maybe where we should put our resources first I think it will have a transformative effect on productivity intelligence also new use cases emerging uh we will have to harness this carefully like I said it's over hyped in the short term but we are underestimating it in the long term and I think we're in the very very very early readings we still don't know what we don't know we all have to learn and scale this responsibly I think it is I would agree with you we don't know what we don't know it's very true but and also agree with you it will be transformative uh what is your take in terms of uh how gen AI will affect jobs will there be job losses how do you think that'll shake out an interview look I I don't think like that I think what will happen is that it will like anything change the nature of jobs I think in the short term it probably it will not in the medium term to long term I think what will happen is that certain things that we are doing today will change to certain different things every time new technology comes we always worry about that and I think what we've always seen is that it has always created a whole new wave of talent and skills and what we need to do I think that's going to happen some amount of stuff that we are spending our energy on will not happen but I really think that there are so many new things that will come out that we still don't even know so I think in general my belief is that it's going to be net complementary to our civilization all of us especially uh things that we have not yet even thought about I like the sounds of that and that may come true and I hope it does come true um I mean you definitely have said it I learned something now thank you so much for sharing expertise and I hope you come back and talk with us again sometime pleasure to be here with you James and uh look forward to it next time foreign

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