The Jamaica Productivity Centre (JPC) is the National Organisation responsible for promoting and facilitating productivity improvement in Jamaica, in celebration of its 20th anniversary, and acknowledgement of World Productivity Day hosted a forum discussing the relationship between AI and productivity on Tuesday (June 20).

Speaking at the event titled Paving Productivity Pathways for a Prosperous Nation held at the Terra Nova All Suite Hotel, Ambassador Dushyant Savadia, founder and CEO of Amber Group shared his insight on the topic, stating, “The very purpose of AI is to improve efficiency; it is here to make our life easier, to put the effort in things in which computers can do better than us trying to do it ourselves.”

Questions about the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the present world and the future have become a hot topic of conversation and academic discussion. Questions about how AI will change our lives, change education, whether it will make certain jobs obsolete and whether it will influence politics.

“If you look at the entire progress of AI, it’s a whole new arena in what it’s doing for the whole world now, but nothing so far has come out that says AI can take away human creativity and human intelligence,- it will not change who we are,” he added.

He further commented that the advent and adoption of AI will give people more freedom to spend time with their families and work on other tasks. He pointed out the era before calculators, which required people to tally complex or multiple formulas by manually and the changes that came about with the adoption of calculators which causes the process to now take a fraction of the time for example.

In response to a question about the impact of AI models on the labour market and potential opportunities that Jamaica could take advantage of, Savidia said that the onus is on the people to look through the business communities and government and look at where they will be affected by AI and upskill them. He explained that while AI will make jobs redundant, it will also bring many jobs as well.

“Everything is changing, if we do not adopt AI, if we do not move as fast as AI is moving, Jamaica will get left behind,” said the tech CEO.