What does AI’s omnipresence mean for Delaware?

Delaware technologists, data scientists, researchers and a futurist will convene at Zip Code Wilmington on March 22 for Tech Forum’s “AI in DE: How Local Businesses are Leveraging Artificial Intelligence.”

“AI is here,” Jason Clarke, CIO for the State of Delaware, told Technical.ly. “We’re going to need to understand how we leverage it moving forward, and its policy and privacy implications.”

Clarke will be one of five speakers at the event, and will discuss AI and its impact on state agencies and the people of Delaware. Topics he’ll touch on include cybersecurity, transportation, and balancing policy, privacy and the customer experience.

“Our cybersecurity tools, and the amount of data inputs that we need to consider and have to correlate, requires artificial intelligence and machine learning to help us decipher and think about decisions as we make them move forward,” Clarke said. “And we could never do that with the limited staff we have.”

Ryan Harrington, director of strategy and operations for Tech Impact’s Data Innovations Lab, will discuss AI and mission-driven organizations.

“The fundamental thesis of what I’m talking about is how nonprofits are resource constrained, so optimization is really important for them,” Harrington said. “Artificial intelligence is inherently about the idea of optimization, so there’s a really strong connection, and therefore nonprofits should embrace it.”

Ryan Harrington. (Courtesy photo)

AI can be used to help an organization figure out what market it should be attracting, or when to send fundraising notices, he said.

“Imagine social services trying to manage your pool of clients,” Harrington said. “Am I reaching out to people at the right time? Can I predict which people are about to drop off from using my services so I can wrap them around with support to make sure they don’t drop out? You can imagine a lot of scenarios like that that would be meaningful and helpful for different organizations.”

In addition to Clarke and Harrington, speakers will include StratFI’s Jim Lee (who recently contributed the Technical.ly guest post “How AI changes the investing game“) on how AI is being used to forecast daily moves in the stock market; DuPont’s Bernardo Tiburcio on how AI is used to forecast machine failures; and the University of Delaware’s Kathy McCoy on keeping up with the demand of AI in research and teaching.

“AI and machine learning are far more embedded than probably most people consider,” Clarke said. “ChatGPT has made the news recently, and it’s an easy one for people to connect with. But it is really just a trigger for the larger discussion.”

Register for the event