Advancing AI: Real world technology, delivering real world benefit
AI is the key tool which will shape our future. It can only do so with widespread trust
Ajay Bhalla, President, Cyber & Intelligence, Mastercard
The world at large tends to look to musicians, artists and writers when they want to experience powerful creativity. But what’s more powerful than redesigning the world we experience every day? Artificial Intelligence (AI) developers and creators have had the vision and talent to design, create and implement systems that have transformed the way the world works.
We’ve seen the impact of this come to life over the last year. The unimaginable challenges of the pandemic have shown us how resilient communities, business, industry and commerce can be. And underpinning our response are digital systems, from fraud detection to ecommerce and healthcare, powered by AI. It is well and truly out of the lab and into the real world, with half of businesses globally saying their organisations have adopted AI in at least one function.
These AI systems are in place because those who create and use them do so with the trust of the consumer and in partnership with other businesses, governments and stakeholders. Innovation cannot be pursued at all costs; it must be good for people and society. At Mastercard, the way we ensure this is to acknowledge and address their needs at the fundamental design stage of the systems and solutions we create. Because without the trust of billions of global consumers, frankly, there is no business.
And fostering trust in AI – using systems that prioritise privacy and the responsible use of data – has multiple benefits for us all. A case in point is the way we’ve developed and implemented AI solutions on our own network, which has been a significant driver of success for business, our customers and card users the world over. We have prevented $20 billion of cyberattacks in the past three years and a further $20 billion of fraud in 2020 alone. In addition, we have built in an ability to trace and alert on financial crime across our network – a world first – and developed the biggest cyber risk assessment capability in the world. We are empowered to achieve this because of trust.
Delivering the world’s future with AI
As we stand at the emergence of a newly digital era, this guiding principle of earning trust with AI becomes more critical than ever before. The future is closer than we think.
The pandemic has shone a spotlight on the way that health and social care is provided across the world - responsibly developed AI technologies will help us accelerate our learning from the pandemic further so that, in the future, we will be able to identify warning signs sooner and model likely impacts in greater detail, which will in turn enable better decision making and support better health outcomes. We’ve also seen the extraordinary impact AI has had on food production and agriculture, and we can expect it to have a similar effect on the way we model the evolution of the climate crisis. The potential impact it could have on minimising waste, fuelling clean energy development, reducing transport emissions and monitoring the impact of climate measures could be profound.
Looking further ahead, the very fundamentals of computing could be revolutionised with the application of quantum computing, taking AI to new levels. In short, the potential is boundless – from self-driving cars to predicting financial markets and the weather, even finding cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Alongside these big global challenges, AI will be the foundation of commercial and national success too. As we’ve seen from our own Digital Intelligence Index, produced in partnership with The Fletcher School at Tufts University, the fastest progress is being made where economies put digital investment at the heart of plans for prosperity – where policy is developed in partnership with industry, where technology is brought to bear collaboratively and where the needs of the individual and communities are built into the solutions being offered.
Though we are in a golden age for the creativity and imagination of technologists, technology alone will not solve the biggest challenges that we face. Partnership, relentless focus on the consumer, and continuous innovation are the most secure route to a sustainable, AI-powered future that works for everyone, everywhere.
