The buzz around AI is growing louder. The AI Future Summit at Fort Lauderdale sought to cut through the noise to focus on what truly matters. But more importantly, the ways businesses can deliver value with AI by way of profit and savings, not just in terms of technical metrics.
“AI is not a new concept”
An impressive line-up of speakers weighed in on why AI is drumming up such buzz. Artificial intelligence as Murray Izenwasser, SVP of Digital Strategy at OZ Digital, rightly points out, “AI is hardly new. We’re now in the 80th year of AI research.” So why are companies rushing to embrace the technology all of a sudden? What’s behind the recent AI-hype cycle?
The renewed interest is largely due to the rise of Generative AI (Gen AI), particularly Chat GPT. Murray takes us back to 2015, when Open AI was founded, and how it eventually became the hotbed of AI research and innovation. He travels back in time to guide us through the key milestones that have led to the resurgence we’re experiencing today. Which is not whether we need AI but rather how we can integrate it into our business.
He highlights that “what we’re now starting to hear are conversations around AI strategy. Organizations are starting to get serious about strategically implementing AI solutions to improve business operations, enhance customer interactions, and boost employee productivity, with the customer at the center.” And not to forget security, as we navigate the thorny issues around data privacy, ethical AI use, and sustainability.
Murray supports his insights with many compelling global use cases where we’re seeing them play out in different ways.
Watch Murray Izenwasser’s full keynote here
“AI isn’t a futuristic concept anymore”
In his welcome keynote, our CEO and founder, Amjad Shamim, highlights the growing impact of AI. He points out that in just two and a half months, 77 to 80% of the devices we use daily will have some form of AI integrated into them. To put that into context, in 2018, that number was only 35 to 40%—now, it’s almost double. Which means, AI isn’t a futuristic concept anymore. It’s the engine behind today’s innovation and business growth. He emphasizes how the democratization of AI has made the technology more accessible to everyone, from small businesses to large, global enterprises. Mr. Shamim outlined OZ Digital’s vision for AI, rooted in client-centric innovation, ethical AI development, and agile technology solutions.
Watch Amjad Shamim’s full keynote here
“Generative AI is getting all the airtime at the expense of Predictive AI”
Our main stage keynote speaker, Dr. Eric Siegel, has been helping companies deploy machine learning for three decades. In his keynote, he offers a fresh perspective on AI arguing that “despite generative AI being easier to use, in reality, it’s harder to use well than predictive AI when it comes to delivering concrete, proven, measured enterprise value.” He also notes that, “generative AI is sucking the oxygen out of the room and taking some away from predictive AI, which has been around for decades.”
Dr. Siegel believes that organizations should balance their AI investments, financing pilot projects with predictive AI as they do with generative AI. Highlighting various use cases, he stressed the importance of successful deployment or what he calls “bizML,” a business-focused framework for deploying predictive AI projects. “Experimentation is essential but insufficient. What is needed is a big shift to deployment, which should be at the heart of your business strategy,” he adds, outlining the six steps organizations must take to deploy any machine learning/AI project successfully:
1) Establish the deployment goal
2) Establish the prediction goal
3) Establish the metrics
4) Prepare the data
5) Train the model
6) Deploy the model
He concludes by reframing predictive AI “not as a technology install, but a consulting gig” reiterating that “we should not think of predictive AI as a machine learning project but as an operations improvement project.”
View Dr. Eric Siegel’s full keynote and presentation here: The AI Playbook—How to Capitalize on Machine Learning
With these big themes as the backdrop, the summit dove into the ways three companies were making AI a reality in their day-today business operations.
“We reached out to OZ and said we’d like to see how AI can help.”
SBA Communications: An App Innovation AI Solution
Let’s go behind the scenes with SBA Communications to explore how they tackled a major business challenge with AI.
The challenge: A complex environment—100 applications, 200 databases, and a financial system across three production environments—led to long average call times reaching 22 minutes and a dysfunctional financial system.
The solution: Two AI-driven solutions — 1. “Bob,” a conversational AI agent, and 2. “Bob, the fixer,” both using LLMs and company data streamlined customer support, drastically reducing resolution times while achieving high CSAT scores.
Watch the full presentation here
“We realized we had a massive store of unstructured data that was being underutilized and we engaged with OZ and got a deployable AI tool in a remarkably short time.”
EPIC Insurance Brokers: AI-Powered Claims Insights Solution—Automating Worker Injury Data Analysis
Explore how EPIC Insurance Brokers, one of the top 15 U.S. brokerage firms, use AI and automation to streamline claims processing, gain faster insights, and stay compliant. Workers’ compensation claims often run into thousands of pages of attorney and medical notes, which creates its own challenges. Insurers must verify claims, accounting for workplace safety, the type of job and accident, and geography, which can take years, sometimes decades, to resolve. The faster the claims are processed, the quicker employees can get back on their feet—and to work.
The challenge: Insurers were spending excessive time manually searching through lengthy worker injury claims, delaying decisions, and missing critical trends.
The solution: EPIC partnered with OZ to create an Azure OpenAI-powered system to automate the categorization and analysis of claims data, providing a plain language search interface for quick, accurate insights. What the AI did—where previously spreadsheets couldn’t—was spot trends from thousands of pages in minutes.
Watch the full presentation here
“You can’t talk about AI without talking about data”
Seminole Hard Rock’s VP of Enterprise Architecture and Software Engineering, André Gowens, in his insightful keynote emphasizes how there can be no AI without data. He explores the complexities of managing valid data in the hospitality and gaming industries where businesses have to contend with all kinds of data—customer and booking data, employee, sales and marketing data, and so on—residing in different pockets and systems across the world. “When you acquire companies, you acquire new systems, new data, new databases, and new customers. And so as a result, you have tons of fragmented technology and customer data all over the world, lots of property management systems, point of sale systems, casino management platforms, CRM systems, websites, mobile applications…lots and lots and lots,” André points out. He demonstrates how AI integration stitches everything together and streamlines guest experiences, personalizes interactions, and boosts efficiency across a global network like Hard Rock’s.
Download the presentation here
“The future of AI is already here”
Join Beverley Kodhek from Microsoft to get a sneak peek into all the exciting developments within Azure AI. More importantly, learn how you can leverage these exciting Microsoft products to grow your business. “Ten years ago, in a lot of companies using AI meant you built a team of data scientists, who trained the model, cleaned the data, and then deployed it. It would take a very long time and is very expensive. So a lot of big tech companies began to build their own language models. And these were models that could only do one thing very well,” says Beverly, adding, “We’ve come a long way.”
Ready to Go All-In on AI?
The summit was a true collaboration between our clients, our trusted partners and business leaders. It set the stage for all the ways AI can create opportunities to transform your operations, drive more revenue, and unlock new growth. With the latest Microsoft AI technologies, cloud data solutions, and AI-driven cloud architectures, businesses can more easily adopt and integrate AI into their ecosystems, paving the way for limitless possibilities. If you’d like to know more, get in touch with us or start your AI journey with this free AI readiness assessment below.
