Сompetition with time: the HSE Graduate School of Business discussed the opportunities of AI for business, science and education
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More than 150 GSB professors and researchers gathered at the Shabolovka campus for a series of presentations and a panel discussion with speakers developing cutting-edge AI technologies in Cloud.ru, GitVerse and SberBusinessSoft projects. Sber is a recognised leader in the development of advanced technologies, that established the most powerful research centres in the field of AI and implemented innovative business models based on it.
In his welcoming speech, Valery Katkalo, Director of the HSE Graduate School of Business, emphasised that all the guests of the event were united by a common desire — to keep up with the times, but also to succeed in competing with them.
The gathered experts were unanimous in their opinion that the current technological breakthrough based on AI is comparable to the era of mass introduction of personal computers and the Internet. And that artificial intelligence will not replace humans, but on the labour market, an employee with AI tools will take the place of someone who is used to working without them.
"Today, higher education, science and business are obliged to accept this new reality as a given and organically integrate AI into their processes in order not to fall behind in the technological race," said Armen Beklaryan, moderator of the discussion and academic head of the Business Analytics and Big Data Systems programme at GSB.
In recent years, AI has already demonstrated significant effects in various sectors of the economy: up to 15% increase in harvested in agriculture, up to 95% accuracy in cancer detection, unmanned transport has provided up to 30% reduction in delivery times and growth in the volume of transport cargo — such data was shared by Anton Smirnov, product leader of Cloud.ru.
"Today we are attending a conference dedicated to business, and one of the huge challenges is the percentage of AI penetration in enterprise applications. This is one of the focuses that we are working on, among other things," Anton Smirnov told.
The expert noted that the government has set an ambitious task: to stay in the top 5 world economies, and to fulfil this task, 80% of all those involved in economic processes should be able to use AI-technologies. 3.6 trillion rubles has been allocated for the development of AI projects.
In partnership with major research centres, the government plans to develop a number of initiatives in which universities play a significant role, because mass implementation requires both supercomputers and technologies, and also specialists. Russian universities have been ranked into groups, and the HSE University has joined Group A of educational institutions that are at the forefront of AI development initiatives. The Cloud.ru, GitVerse and SberBusinessSoft projects are already ready to offer modern educational and competitive mechanics for business and students, mechanics for automatic checking of learning progress in a discipline, and various services for practical practice of theoretical material, as well as a platform for hackathons.
Maxim Ivanov, Director of Artificial Intelligence at SberBusinessSoft, shared cases of implementing AI models to solve industry-specific problems — in logistics, marketing, agriculture, and education. He emphasised that the successful application of new technologies does not require any narrow technical competences from the customer, but critical knowledge and understanding of their own business processes.
Igor Sychev, corporate architect at SberTech, spoke about the Russian source code storage platform GitVerse, and shared his successful experience of working with generative models based on GigaChat. The speaker also supported the point of view of his colleagues that the best results in working with AI are shown by those employees who are able to clearly formulate the task using the necessary terms. The expert noted that technology can give people tools that will help them be more effective, but it is important to learn how to use them correctly.
Asya Yablokova, Executive Director and Head of IT Bootcamp at Sberbank, spoke about the BootcampLabs project. This is an area of work with universities that offers access to a range of technologies on a free-of-charge basis. The key idea of the project is to immerse students in solving practical problems in the learning process. The system has already been tested on new Sber employees: before being assigned to teams, specialists undergo "lab work" on the LMS platform, which immerses them in a specific environment with uniform rules. The launch of joint projects with universities and schools is scheduled for September, and active recruitment of participants is underway.
During the panel discussion, experts discussed how the development of AI technologies will affect the emergence of new educational products and the educational process as a whole, the problem of staff starvation in the labour market and copyrights of AI-based products.
As an advanced centre of expertise in management, the HSE Graduate School of Business actively develops the professional community through open events. Conferences, forums and panel discussions at the GSB campus help business teachers and practitioners to keep in touch with the main ideas of the global business agenda and better understand the opportunities to use them in their work.