Lau leading the masterclass on “Driving Sustainability with AI” at Asia ESG Summit.
The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and ESG practices has become a prominent trend in the sustainable business landscape.
From energy management to data analytics and to preparing reports, AI is emerging as an increasingly powerful and innovative tool helping companies tackle their ESG priorities.
collaborating with AI, however, requires the right knowledge and skills, which was why over 40 sustainability practitioners signed up for the masterclass on “Driving Sustainability with AI” at the Asia ESG Summit.
The summit was organised by Star Media Group Bhd, a member of the Asia ESG Positive Impact Consortium.
It was held from Nov 5 to 7 at Sunway Resort Hotel, with Sime Darby Property as the Urban Biodiversity Partner.
“No coding required,” the event description promised. Instead, there was plenty of practical, hands-on learning guided by Dr Lau Cher Han, whose many hats include chief executive officer of Accio Technologies and founder of Lead, an AI and data science training academy.
“If there’s any takeaway I would like you to bring home today, that’s in the AI era, writing good prompts is something that is very essential.
“Whenever we use AI tools, the key is writing a good prompt,” he shared.
He walked the participants through AI chatbots of different models across a variety of platforms, and demonstrated use cases that would benefit organisations’ sustainability pursuits through automation of tasks and simplified workflows.
A basic example is utilising an AI assistant to perform OCR, or optical character recognition, on bills to extract, classify and tabulate the information.
The data entry process is otherwise time consuming and error-prone if done manually.
AI tools can also be used to generate sustainability-focused presentation slides and reports. Lau’s demonstration on creating custom AI agents for specific workflow automation piqued the participants’ curiosity.
A key issue that was top of mind for everyone was none other than data privacy, which Lau duly addressed.
He cautioned that data submitted to AI tools could be used to train their next model, especially if users are using the services for free, adding in jest that no one would read “470 pages of terms and conditions” before clicking the button to proceed.
Other than neutralising information by redacting confidential details, a practical tip is to use open-source AI models and run them directly on equipment fully controlled by one’s organisation.
This way, proprietary data will not leave the organisation’s environment.
Diving a little deeper, Lau explained that while the recency of the models does not correlate with their intelligence level, models that are trained on more recent datasets will better reflect current knowledge.
Using gold price as example, a query on an open-source AI model returned the prices in September 2023, while ChatGPT was able to retrieve and summarise real-time information from sources on the Internet.
The masterclass, packed with a wealth of valuable and actionable insights, had the participants in awe of AI’s seemingly limitless capabilities.
“There are so many (AI tools) out there that we don’t know about. The world is really changing,” one of them shared at the end of the session.
