Event Title: NEXT Technology Conference

Event Host: Syracuse University

Location: Syracuse, New York

Date: November 8, 2019

Presentation Title: Near Term Trends and ROI of AI

Team Member: Daniel Faggella, Emerj Founder and CEO

What Happened

Syracuse put on the NEXT Technology Conference with a focus on life sciences and manufacturing. Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella was invited to keynote the event. The keynote was about the state of AI in industry, including the appearance that everyone is doing AI. In reality, everybody is talking about AI, but they’re not really doing it. Daniel also talked about the challenges that come with adopting AI in the enterprise. He discussed how AI is not IT, how AI use-cases are very new, and how executives need to understand what to expect from AI ROI.

With traditional IT solutions, companies can generally get some idea of how long a project is going to take, and they can bolt it onto their existing systems. With AI, companies need to set a hypothesis of what they think their data might be able to tell them. It’s generally unclear how long experimentation will take before they’re able to generate any results they could match to their hypothesis. Enterprises are having a difficult time navigating this reality.

Daniel’s full slide deck is embedded below:

What We Learned

• Syracuse has numerous different groups that are focused on economic development and in attracting high-tech businesses to the Syracuse area. The city is particularly interested in bringing drone companies to the area. There is also an airforce research base in Rome, New York, 
• Timothy Gleeson, captain of the Syracuse fire department, talked about how they were using drones to assess fire damage from above to get a sense of what was on fire and where they should focus their firefighting efforts first. They are also using drones indoors. There was a situation where someone had fired a gun in public and had run into a building. The fire department flew a drone into the building and used to find the person in order to determine whether or not he still had his weapon with him.

Header Image Credit: Griffiss Institute