Opportunities and challenges of human and AI collaboration potentials

With success, concluded the regional-renowned seminar, “MIT Media Lab Southeast Asia Forum”, run by MIT Media Lab, a world-leading research institution on technology, media, science, art, and design of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States. The seminar was supported by True Group with the digital ecosystem that helped uplift tech and startup industry and True Digital Park opening its door to welcome participants from all over the world to show the true potential of Thailand and its people.

Mr Natwut Amornvivat, Chairman of the Board, True Digital Group, joined in with a special talk on “Human + AI: Opportunities and Challenges” and shared his thoughts on how AI technology will change the way businesses operate and how people live. In his talk, he also emphasized how True Group, as a leading tech company, strives to encourage the balance collaboration between humans and technology in order to create innovations that will put forward new developments for people, organizations, Thailand’s economy and its competitiveness, as well as the better living standards for Thai people. To fulfil the ambitious goals, he also outlined the plan to expand the collaboration on business and solution developments with other organizations in order to bring about top-of-the-line innovations for Thailand’s tech entrepreneurs and startups.

AI Technology: Life changer and business transformer

Stressing on True Group’s leadership as a tech company with integrated telecommunication infrastructure and end-to-end digital ecosystem, Natwut gave some examples of the innovations developed by True with the combination of AI technology and the various fields of knowledge from experts that move forward industries such as healthcare, agriculture, and retails.

Healthcare: Partners to expand fast and equal medical care

While Thailand may have an abundance of medical experts, most of them could be found in major hospitals and capital cities, resulting in inefficiency in equal reach to healthcare. To help alleviate the struggle, True strives to help decentralized the healthcare service system by partnering with leading medical institutions, such as King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital, Ramathibodi Hospital, and Siriraj Hospital, as well as renowned medical professors.

True now has around 400,000 patients using telemedicine services and with a firm belief that we have on “Physical + Digital”, which aligns with Media Lab’s belief that the collaboration between humans and technology is better that relying solely on technology, True opened “TrueHEALTH corner” in many areas, equipped with basic health evaluation tools and the ability to immediately connect to doctors online, to help lessen the gap in healthcare service distribution.

In addition, True also worked with Ramathibodi Hospital and opened RAMA Health Spaces for all, which has a more spacious service floor and service offerings such as phlebotomy service, specimen collection for lab tests, chest x-ray, and EKG. In another collaboration with Siriraj Hospital, Smart EMS (Smart Emergency Medical Service), highlights a human-led solution by using technology in a supporting role with the medical expertise of doctors and nurses at the forefront. 

The collaboration was a reflection of True’s ambition to put forward partnerships and collaborations with every party in the ecosystem. It is True’s belief that once we have an integrated view of how the healthcare system connects, we can achieve the better service and solutions for the people.

Agriculture: Smart AgTech and the challenges in productivity

Though the agriculture sector is known to be the largest industry in Thailand, efficiency challenges still persist and result in a lacking quality of life for farmers and environmental problems. To tackle the pain points, True developed various solutions for each agricultural sector. For crops, we use satellite and drone technology to monitor and predict the upcoming impacts. For livestock, we use IoT and analytics to detect and analyse livestock’s behaviors, such as for dairy farms, we use health monitor tools that can alert farmers of potential health risks to curve early problems, for swine and shrimp, we use video analytics technology to detect movements in order to help plan and manage both the quality and the volume of the production. However, precision agriculture, robotic harvesting, and machinery quality control, among many others, are still some of the predominant challenges that True and startups are working together to crack, in order to uplift Thailand as the industry leader.

Retails: Revolutionize retails with AI

There is still room for retails to grow, from driving efficiency to serving customers’ needs better, which inspired True to develop various solutions to bridge the gaps. For example, heatmap was developed to learn more about how customers behave while in the store in order to improve the quality of services, a shelf detection system that sends alerts when the shelf is empty with connected data with the warehouse for planning, as well as AI-enabled sensor that analyses and monitor freezers to preserve product freshness. These are also some of the examples of how humans and AI need to work together; while challenges such as demand analysation, shell management, customer behaviour analysation, and personalized advertisements are still among some of the prevalent areas that need a collaborative network of organizations, startups, government, researchers, and innovators to work together to overcome.

Positive attitude and belief power innovations

Natwut concluded his talk with inspirational learning for participants; while AI may be able to help elevate works for humans, empathy is still something that AI cannot do. The collaboration between humans and AI is, therefore, what True has always believed in and practiced. Introducing innovations will also be met with doubts, but it is also a great opportunity for the innovator to be the first to succeed. A positive attitude and strong belief will be what open people’s mind and the key to making innovations come true.