Technology expert and Byteside founder and head of content Seamus Byrne delivered his keynote speech at the recent inaugural ProPack Packaging Forum in Sydney around the topic on everyone’s minds – generative AI.
“The big thing with AI is that it’s important to be asking ourselves the right questions to know what we want to achieve with it,” he said.
“Sometimes, we can get really focussed on the cool, shiny new toy. But we need to make sure we’re focussed on what’s the actual outcome we’re looking for. What is it we want to achieve with these tools? Do we want a white-collar workhorse? Do we want the trusted confidante or the analytical genius here? What exactly is it we think is going to add value to our business to push things forward?”
However, Seamus warned that generative AI is at the stage where language does not actually equal intelligence – that a good command over putting together ‘cool paragraphs’ and ‘cool ideas’ isn’t the same as being truly intelligent.
“There’s this concept of the stochastic parrot. I don’t necessarily agree with it in full, but the idea is like, an incredibly advanced version of teaching a parrot to say some words which it does not understand the meaning behind. So, we may have to be careful about using AI for decision making if it doesn’t fully understand what it’s meant to do,” he said.
A way to mitigate this is through prompt engineering, which Byrne said is about knowing how to ask for what you want.
“When you add that little extra ‘oomph’ in the message that you’re asking it to solve, somehow you can just encourage it to give you something better than it would have if you didn’t offer that little bit of extra encouragement,” Byrne said.
“Generative tools can also help to elevate somebody who doesn’t know much about a space to learn a lot more, but once you’re in the industry, you’ll very quickly start to see the difference between what these tools are capable of to help you without them becoming trained on the expert details that you need in this industry.”
The other big question for businesses, according to Byrne, is what to do with data.
“There’s so much data coming off systems, so you need to work out how to enable that data to be fed into AI systems. The data can exist, but are you able to unlock it to start feeding it into AI tools that can bring that data to light and give you the extra intelligence you need,” he said.
“On top of that, we have the governance issues around data, the security issues, the privacy issues and getting the guardrails right on this. That’s a big consideration for the long-term.
“The key, right now, is experimentation – to start exploring some of these tools and to start learning lessons on them. Maintain flexibility, unless you absolutely know there is a specific reason why we need to make that commitment right now.”
Byrne said the future is heading towards agentic AI, where it starts to manage complex problems for you and independently do things on the internet for you.
“It will use applications on your behalf to go and get other things done,” he said.
As a starting point, Byrne also suggested businesses explore the following tools depending on their areas of expertise: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Mistral AI, Claude by Anthropic, Perplexity AI, Runway, Arc Browser and NotebookLM.
The inaugural ProPack Packaging Forum would not be possible without the support from its sponsors:
Platinum Sponsor – Durst Oceania
Gold Sponsor – Cyber
Gold Sponsor – Miraclon
Bronze Sponsor – Hybrid Software
Bronze Sponsor – Kissel & Wolf
Bronze Sponsor – Koenig & Bauer
