New Report Examines Intersection of AI and Blockchain

90% of global decision makers in the US UK, China and Europe plan on investing in A I over the next year. While 75% feel positive about adopting Blockchain technology. That's according to Casper labs, a firm exploring the intersection of the two innovative technologies. Joining us now to discuss a recent survey is Casper lab, CEO and co-founder Renal Manohar. Welcome. Thank you, Jen. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Of course, let's talk about this survey. Now, 608 people were surveyed. How did you identify the business decision makers to include in the survey? We wanted to make sure that we uh had a representative sample. So we, first of all, we made sure we were geographically diverse. Um So 600 business executives across the US UK China, Germany, Australia, uh sorry, Austria and Switzerland. And then most of these were C level executives, meaning CIO S CTO S and there was a prompt to ensure that they were the people making uh that had the decision making capability on um purchasing of it infrastructure when you're putting this report together? Was there anything you found that was surprising. II, I, I'd say in extent, yes, I'd say the 22 or three things that I found surprising and also um very optimistic were we did a similar survey. And by the way, every time, when they say we do the survey, we use a reputed third party called Zob to do it to ensure that it's uh really, really legitimate data. Um Firstly, the first time we did this, you know, last January, more than half of the people uh who responded, thought Blockchain and crypto were exactly the same thing and didn't identify it as, you know, a technology versus one of its use cases. Now, about 84% really say they understand it better. Um The second thing is that um the direction of people uh you know, who either say they understand Blockchain technology and it's enterprising uh enterprise use cases better or people saying they're willing to buy Blockchain technology to help their operations within their company have both increased uh since we did it last January, which uh you know, even though there's a crypto bear market in general, fundamentally, it looks like businesses are moving towards really embracing and understanding this technology. It's interesting you say that what are, what are some of the blockers for businesses when they're making these decisions? Of course, there is this regulatory overhang this regulatory question when it comes to both Blockchain and A I, is that something that these business decision makers, these leaders are taking into consideration when they are thinking about using either technology. Yes. Um so Blockchain specifically, I think it really stems down to two things. One is of course regulatory and, you know, unfortunately, there have been some bad actors in the space and so the industry in general has a little bit of a black eye, but that's a temporary situation which will resolve itself over time. But I think the second and bigger reason is really just a lack of education in the market. I think, you know, a as I mentioned right up front. Uh historically, people have really thought Blockchain and crypto are exactly the same thing when in fact, they're not, one's a technology and another is a use case on top of it. And I think uh enterprises don't realize the massive operational and efficiency impacts Blockchain technology can have uh within their existing bills. Um The other thing I think is um the technology really needs to fit in nicely with existing tech stacks and that's happening. Um I think historically, as an industry, we've kind of been a rip and replace. But now um most of the use cases you see are very, very strong augmentations to existing technology which I think will be very powerful and meaningful going forward. Can you give me an example um as to how a business might implement both Blockchain and A I to improve the process? Yes, let's take a very specific example. In fact, this is the example we highlighted uh in a webinar we uh co-hosted with IBM on Gartner. Um So let's, let's say there's an insurance company and they're using an A I chatbot. So there's an A I chatbot that gives insurance quotes every time a customer uh you know, asks for the insurance quote. They say, hey, I'm a 40 year old smoker. Uh Could you tell me what kind of life insurance quotes I can get? For example, now say they have an administrator who's uh administering all their A I chatbot. Uh and one of them is for this life insurance product. Now, the A I administrator wants to know that if that Chatbot starts giving, you know, false information, a hallucination, a bias or just offers that uh are not profitable for the insurance company, she wants to be able to monitor it and version control that chatbot Blockchain is the best solution for that. In fact, what we demoed would plug in, you know, directly with any governance layer for A I. So if your Blockchain is examining what version of A I you're currently using, if your Blockchain determines the, you know, data sets that are going in and out. And the parameterization, you basically have taken A I which is a black box technology and something that's impossible. Diversion control today and made it very easy diversion control. So basically they would use A I for the chat box and Blockchain as basically the governance layer on top of it. And because it's multiparty, you know, the people producing the chatbot might be different from the insurance company. Blockchain makes uh those uh multiparty interactions incredibly easy. And that way you could govern A I very successfully. What are the risks or challenges that the folks surveyed are concerned about maybe or that have top of mind while they're looking at how to implement both of these technologies into their processes. Yeah, I think so. Uh number one is level of control of their underlying infrastructure. And I think, I think that's very germane to Blockchain. And I think we, we try to solve that by ensuring that people are allowed to build hybrid blockchains. So you get the benefit of both, you know, a fully private network, but the immutability and trust of a public network and that really goes into the reason they need some control is they want to make sure that their GDPR H IP A, you know, compliant with all the regulations out there. Uh Another big barrier with uh adopting A I um is really the fact that people are scared that if the A I starts hallucinating or starts giving biased results um that there could be legal operational all sorts of risks to a company. And that's why the combination of the two technologies is actually incredibly powerful because Blockchain actually solves one of the adoption issues for A I that being said A I is actually being adopted incredibly rapidly with or without, you know, blockchains governance on it. That being said, uh if you look at the new executive order that came out of the Biden administration, it looks like safe and responsible A I will be a very high priority both for companies uh and the public sector. All right, and very quickly before we wrap what needs to happen to address some of these challenges to make businesses feel more comfortable about experimenting with both of these technologies. I think coverage really, it's it's mostly an education gap if if you think back, you know, there's a massive education gap on what cloud computing really was, which really limited uh adoption for a while. There's massive confusion of what Linux and open source software were today. These are incredibly normal everyday technologies that we in fact take for granted. I think the same thing happens with Blockchain and A I I think there's a lot of misunderstanding, you know, as we open the segment, people still think Blockchain is just crypto when in fact, it's so much more than that crypto is very, very interesting. But uh you know what it can do for operations, what it can do for supply chain is really, really mesmerizing. Same with A I, you know, people kind of have Skynet uh nightmares, et cetera. But in fact, it's an incredibly useful technology that could have massive operational implications. I think educating people and people understanding what the technologies actually are and how they can be governed would be a massive step towards. Um really, uh I'm going to get some misinformation that's out there in the market. It'll happen. It's just a question of when and how rapidly Reynold. Thanks so much for joining the show this morning and providing uh that insight and analysis on the back of your survey. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. That was Casper Lab, CEO and co-founder Renal Manohar.