While so much dis­cus­sion on ar­ti­ci­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) in re­cent weeks, Gre­go­ry Fer­nan­dez is hop­ing to al­so bring forth the idea of op­por­tu­ni­ty to the fore.

On Tues­day, Gre­go­ry Fer­nan­dez in­tro­duced his new com­pa­ny, In­tel­li­co AI Agency Lim­it­ed, at a me­dia con­fer­ence.

Fer­nan­dez said while there has been de­bate about the fea­si­bil­i­ty of AI da­ta cen­tres in T&T fol­low­ing the re­cent an­nounce­ment of MoUs signed with Ernst & Young and Hum­ming­bird AI, he said the re­al­i­ty is the coun­try would have to adapt to such an in­dus­try soon­er rather than lat­er.

As a re­sult, he is hop­ing to use AI tools, cre­at­ed by In­tel­li­co, to cre­ate a com­pa­ny that can com­pete on a glob­al scale.

“What we are do­ing here is we are build­ing out ac­tu­al­ly a soft­ware suite, which we are launch­ing on Au­gust 26 at the Cham­ber build­ing that al­lows or­gan­i­sa­tions to op­er­ate on a glob­al lev­el. So, the ap­pli­ca­tion that we are launch­ing then can op­er­ate across mul­ti­ple ter­ri­to­ries, sup­ports mul­ti­ple lan­guages, mul­ti­ple en­ti­ties with­in the soft­ware and mul­ti-cur­ren­cy, mul­ti-lan­guage,” said Fer­nan­dez in the me­dia brief­ing at the com­pa­ny’s Ed­ward Street of­fice on Tues­day.

“So all of those things that al­low you to op­er­ate on a glob­al scale, and that is why I have em­ploy­ees in Latin Amer­i­ca, in Africa and so on.”

Fer­nan­dez said the com­pa­ny cur­rent­ly has 10 lo­cal em­ploy­ees, but is aim­ing to have over 1,000 em­ploy­ees across the world when op­er­a­tions take off.

“We are go­ing to be build­ing a part­ner net­work across the globe, and that is what is go­ing to al­low us now as a Trinidad-based com­pa­ny; the head of­fice is here. If we suc­cess­ful­ly do that, we will be able to sig­nif­i­cant­ly con­tribute to for­eign ex­change and those things,” he said, as he ex­plained his work ex­pe­ri­ence en­cour­aged him that his new ven­ture could al­so be­come an earn­er of for­eign ex­change.

“What has hap­pened is with the in­ter­net, which is quite ma­ture now, you can scale a busi­ness out­side of your nor­mal ter­ri­to­ry and across a glob­al foot­print. So, in my last com­pa­ny, HR Plus, we op­er­at­ed in 23 coun­tries in the Caribbean. I re­signed from that com­pa­ny to form this com­pa­ny be­cause that com­pa­ny is es­tab­lished and has 300 cor­po­rate clients across (the re­gion),” he ex­plained, “So this one is our par­a­digm shift be­cause of AI. I’ve al­ways want­ed to con­quer the world, so to speak, and this is the op­por­tu­ni­ty,” he said.

He point­ed out that T&T is chal­lenged by the avail­abil­i­ty of for­eign ex­change and that “di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion re­al­ly means hav­ing your foot­print in many places, so even though there’s a down­turn in one, there won’t be a down­turn in all, and you can do busi­ness on a long-term ba­sis. You could sur­vive. You could grow.”

Fer­nan­dez, who is al­so known for be­ing a part of the Move­ment of So­cial Jus­tice as well as his in­volve­ment in the In­ter­na­tion­al So­ca Monarch, start­ed see­ing the po­ten­tial of AI while work­ing in mu­sic just over a year ago.

“Ear­ly last year, I got in­volved in mu­sic. You know I love mu­sic. I was in­volved in So­ca Monarch, and I start­ed to ex­per­i­ment a bit with AI and mu­sic. And what I no­ticed is that it was get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter very quick­ly,” he said. “At that time I was with HR Plus. We have 15 pro­gram­mers there, guys from the UWI and all of that, and I recog­nised that the rate at which the AI was evolv­ing, and the rate at which it was get­ting bet­ter, meant that it would sur­pass the ca­pac­i­ty of the guys who were work­ing for me at the time. So, what it meant is, and we see that all the time, a new mod­el is com­ing out every cou­ple of weeks, and it’s bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous one, and so on.”

He ex­plained the tech­nol­o­gy rep­re­sent­ed a par­a­digm shift as AI can sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er pro­duc­tion costs and al­low small­er firms to chal­lenge es­tab­lished soft­ware gi­ants, while al­so ac­knowl­edg­ing that AI would dis­place some jobs in so­ci­ety.

“We in Trinidad have to ad­dress that change, and it’s not some­thing we could hide and hope it doesn’t come here be­cause it might have some im­pacts on the so­ci­ety, some dis­lo­ca­tions,” said Fer­nan­dez, “We can’t get away from it. It’s ac­tu­al­ly just a mat­ter of time. So I opened this AI com­pa­ny to al­low us here in Trinidad and To­ba­go to take ad­van­tage of its ca­pa­bil­i­ties and to al­so see it as a way to ex­pand busi­ness on a glob­al scale.”

The In­tel­li­co CEO, how­ev­er, echoed thoughts re­cent­ly shared by Fu­ture Caribbean founder Lily Dash, who told the Busi­ness Guardian three weeks ago that AI could ad­dress sev­er­al in­ef­fi­cien­cies cur­rent­ly seen across sec­tors in the Caribbean.

Fer­nan­dez agreed, point­ing to the fact that T&T cur­rent­ly has many de­fi­cien­cies in cus­tomer ser­vice mod­els that could be ad­dressed by AI.

“AI could help close some of those gaps to in­crease cus­tomer ser­vice with­out hav­ing to re­move any em­ploy­ees from with­in the or­gan­i­sa­tion. They can en­hance all staff,” he said, adding that there were oth­er ar­eas the tech­nol­o­gy could en­hance. He said that if tech­nol­o­gy de­vel­oped lo­cal­ly can re­place sys­tems cur­rent­ly be­ing sought at high cost in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, many lo­cal in­dus­tries would stand to ben­e­fit.

“If I, for ex­am­ple, sell the In­tel­li­Co pro­gram to some of our big com­pa­nies here do­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing and so on. They may be able to save hun­dreds or thou­sands of dol­lars. Mil­lions of dol­lars, and are they go­ing to then take that sav­ings and re­duce prices be­cause the cost of pro­duc­tion has gone down? That is what even­tu­al­ly AI is sup­posed to de­liv­er,” said Fer­nan­dez

Be­yond busi­ness growth, Fer­nan­dez not­ed there were po­ten­tial down­sides, in­clud­ing the po­ten­tial for job dis­place­ment due to AI au­toma­tion. He al­so agreed with a sen­ti­ment shared by Dr Kevin Fleary in last Sun­day’s Busi­ness Guardian, that there was a need for pol­i­cy ad­just­ments to reg­u­late the bur­geon­ing in­dus­try. Fer­nan­dez, how­ev­er, likened it to the in­dus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, stat­ing that it would prompt adap­ta­tion by so­ci­ety.

Fer­nan­dez adopt­ed a cau­tious out­look about the fea­si­bil­i­ty of es­tab­lish­ing da­ta cen­tres in T&T due to the cur­rent un­cer­tain­ty con­cern­ing gas and wa­ter sup­ply in the coun­try. As a re­sult, he urged the gov­ern­ment to place “Peo­ple first, da­ta cen­tre af­ter.”

Fer­nan­dez ex­plained that should up­com­ing gas projects boost sup­ply, the plans could be ex­plored fur­ther, as he stat­ed these da­ta cen­tres are for­ward-fac­ing in­vest­ments.