SASKATOON – More than 75 professionals gathered at 7Shifts’ downtown offices Thursday, June 6, for the inaugural Saskatchewan Artificial Intelligence Gathering (SaiG).
The gathering attracted an enthusiastic group that included computer scientists, developers, lawyers, marketing agencies and staff from major corporations like Cameco, Colliers and Vendasta.
The event was hosted by Artificial Intelligence Saskatchewan (AiSK), which was recently launched to champion the growth of the AI sector in Saskatchewan.
“There is so much going on with AI, not only around the world, but right here in Saskatchewan,” says AiSK co-founder and chair, Alex Fallon. “AiSK will help bring together the province’s AI ecosystem to help shape the future of AI in Saskatchewan.”
One featured speaker at the event was Josh Baker, a product manager at Vendasta, which provides a variety of web-based marketing solutions for small-to-medium sized businesses.
Baker says there have been plenty of company-level discussions around AI recently, and this event helps those conversations cross pollinate.
“An organization like this brings everyone together and tries to be this mutual ground where people can kind of come together, learn, share, network and collaborate,” he said. “I think it's a really cool thing.”
With so much hype around AI’s potential, Baker says, it's important to remember what’s actually possible – and responsible – at this relatively early stage of development.
“How do you actually build something that's genuinely useful to people, is safe to use, and companies want to bring to market?” he asked. “I think there's a lot of work to be done, but a lot of opportunity there too.”
Another featured speaker was Raul Chedrese, a homegrown Saskatoon tech talent on the rise.
After his bachelor of computer science at USask, Chedrese worked his way up through Saskatoon’s budding local tech scene at 2 Web Design, Vendasta and 7Shifts. After eight years with 7Shifts he’s now principal engineer, and at the forefront of bringing AI-enabled solutions to the restaurant industry.
7Shifts is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool that helps restaurants manage their staff schedules. One long standing technical challenge, Chedrese says, had been the intake of a restaurant’s scheduling data when they were getting set up on 7Shifts for the first time.
“You’d think restaurants in the United States would be using a similar Excel template, but turns out that's not true,” Chedrese says. “They're all like all over the place, so it turned out to be a really, really difficult problem that we never did end up solving.”
But now armed with new AI tools, Chedrese revisited this hard problem and found it suddenly resolvable within a few months, and with a surprisingly light lift.
“We actually launched exactly this week. It basically – at a very high success rate – takes the schedule of an existing restaurant and within 20 seconds we've pulled out all the data,” he says. “That's a problem that we couldn’t solve years ago, that today we can solve relatively quickly.”
Christopher Dutchyn, a computer science professor at USASK, says the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” of AI will have profound societal effects like other major technological leaps in the past.
“If you think about the Second Industrial Revolution with child labor and coal mining and all those various things…they ended up needing to have legislation and controls applied,” he sys.
But striking the right balance between safety and not stifling development will be a difficult task for legislators and governments, Dutchyn added. There are also complex regulatory and ethical questions that harken back to the cloning debate of the late 1990s, which led to bans in some countries.
“You don't need a huge medical lab and a pile of PHDs doing work like you do with cloning,” he says. “You could do it on your laptop, if you've got a good laptop, so it's going to be really difficult to manage.”
Fallon says AiSK plans to make the Saskatchewan Artificial Intelligence Gathering an annual event, and anyone interested in future events can visit www.aisk.ca for more information.
