AI Tools for 2024

Hope everyone is well and getting off to a good 2024.

Today at Portable we're releasing two publications and tools in the AI space: our national AI index looking at AI adoption in organisations and our AI Policy and Strategy which showcases an approach to driving AI in our organisation. 

Many of you who have been following Portable closely over the past few years will know that we’ve been working in the AI space for some time, particularly through our work with Amica where we developed a model to help guide people towards the splitting of assets in divorce settlements as well as our predictive work in the transport space. With the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, the landscape has completely changed and we’ve been able to accelerate our applications of AI far beyond our previous work with the new tools available. It means that we’ve had to be more intentional about the settings and guardrails we have at Portable to foster innovation in an explorative and safe way. 

Part of this intentionality was first being open to experimentation, to learn and understand. In 2023 we hosted three online events covering the application of AI in justice, design and technology. These were really about starting a conversation about what the implication of AI might be in each of these areas with these communities and our own team. In September we released our overarching policy and strategy for AI, which was informed by a year of ChatGPT experimentation and engagement. This has provided the framework for how we not only transform our own organisation, but help others to drive change.

Since then we’ve been able to deploy AI across Portable in a range of areas and this does not mean exclusively in our technology team, which is where most minds go when the word AI is mentioned, but more broadly across the business into our strategic design practice, bid writing and policy generation. We’ve also been able to help advance a wide range of clients in their adoption of AI through design and technical projects, particularly in the justice and transport space, through dedicated AI sprints on specific business problems. If you’re interested in learning more about how we’re doing this, how it might be applied to your organisation and how much it might cost, feel free to connect with me directly or reach out to our team. 

So back to the two initiatives we’re launching today. 

The first is our nationwide AI survey to learn how organisations in the government, justice, mental health and NFP sector are seeing AI. It's about 7-10 mins to complete and canvasses a broad range of questions relating to how organisations are preparing and posturing for AI. We’re keeping it open until the end of January and intend to publish the findings in February to share the current state of AI in our specific Australia, purpose oriented context.

In addition we're releasing our own internal policy, strategy and approach to AI as an organisation. I know many of you are grappling with how to move your people (the enthusiasts and the sceptics) culturally towards the benefits that AI can offer, including ethics, policy development, training and board alignment. What’s clear at this point of time is that most organisations have a lot of work to do to move through the governance issues that AI poses, not the technology issues. It’s a strategic design problem that can be way too complex for a single business unit such as IT or HR to navigate and requires engagement and organisational design experience to help pull together the strategic, policy, ethics, training and risk elements into a shape that the whole organisation can feel comfortable with before moving forward. We've made our approach open and free for our peers and community to download and are open to talking about the best way of approaching your organisation. 

I hope you find what we’re sharing useful and we look forward to sharing more of our initiatives later on in the year with you.