Dominic Harland, GB Labs: The biggest challenge is to ensure that everyone can work together

Dominic Harland, CEO, GB Labs, in the TFT1957 survey «The year 2030: AI or engineer?».

1. How will the broadcasting industry and broadcast technologies change in the next 5 years?
2. If we model the world of broadcasting and broadcast tech in 2030, what role will AI play?
3. How will AI change your business segment? 
4. Which professions will AI displace in the broadcasting technology industry by 2030?

1. I think that really, one of the biggest challenges is making sure that everyone can work together. There are more and more people wanting to work together from different locations, and that’s the real challenge.

2. I think that AI is going to be instrumental. It’s a great technology if used correctly to speed up workflows. I don’t think it’s going to replace the pure creative part of what we do, but I do think, for various tasks, it’s very useful. For example, this morning we literally translated a lot of videos into different languages using AI, and that was very quick. I think from that perspective, it will change things a lot, and I think that will drive people to work from various locations again, whether that’s using different cloud services that are AI-driven, as well as various people located in different places.

3. Within our business segment, we are a storage company, and it’ll massively change things — and we’re already seeing that. Traditionally, people have used either local or on-premise storage, and that just doesn’t work for AI technologies. You need to be connected to the cloud, you need to have storage that is not only easily accessible but also secure. There needs to be proper auditing and security in place. I think a lot of storage companies have not moved in that area yet. We have. We’ve had products on the market for a few years, and we’re just launching Nebula NAS, which does exactly this. It securely allows you to share and access your files from anywhere in the world, including from the cloud, serving all these AI technologies. It gives you that central storage, but it’s truly globally accessible.

4. It’s always difficult to predict what may or may not happen with AI. I think it will undoubtedly have some effect on the number of people involved. For example, even if you’re using it as a basic translator, you still need somebody to check that and go through it. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to replace jobs, I just think it’ll make people’s tasks easier, which may unfortunately lead to fewer people required to do a task. But I don’t think it will outright replace people in the foreseeable future at this moment in time.

All the opinions of industry leaders can be seen in the survey “Year 2030: AI or Engineer?”.