BCBusiness

50 B C B U S I N E S S . C A M A R C H 2 0 2 5 Her quickness in adopting the new tech- nology puts her ahead of most Canadian businesses. Just 6.1 percent of companies in the country made use of any AI tools in producing goods or services during the 2023-24 12-month period that Statistics Canada looked at. But companies and investors are flood- ing money into an AI race that will revolu- tionize how the world conducts business. Global private investment in the sector lingered in the low single-digit billions between 2020 and 2022. Market intelli- gence firm IDC expects 2024's total to ring in at US$235 billion and nearly triple from there to some US$630 billion in 2028. Business schools across B.C.—and the province's premier technical institute, BCIT—have always prepared students to adapt to rapid change, and to drive some of that change themselves. But many of the billions of dollars of AI investment globally are pouring into research and develop- ment, not the production and delivery of tools available now. Computer scientists are still grappling with what the emergent technologies will be capable of perform- ing, and how they will change business developmentally nascent, but people like Zubair who know how to put them to good use are already producing transformative effects for themselves and their businesses. These platforms will grow ever more pow- erful and ubiquitous. Students learning to harness AI today will be taking their skills to the workstations, managerial offices and C-suites of tomorrow. CRACKING THE CODE UVic Gustavson School of Business assis- tant professor Andrew Park is an academic with roots in tech. He started his career as a software developer and founded and sold a successful Seattle-based health technol- ogy startup. He's interested in the technical development of the different artificial intelli- gence models, but in his current incarnation as a member of UVic's business school, he's also investigating what their development means to organizations and the public. Most of the public, he says, is only aware of the tip of AI's iceberg. "So you've got your large language models like ChatGPT READY OR BOT It may not take your job, but experts say that adaptation is required in all industries now that ChatGPT and its competitors are widely available. and society. Educators are likely to launch students into a wildly different future—one where AI's eventual impacts are nowhere clear enough to grasp. The biggest changes are years downstream. Artificial intelligence will, however, cre- ate opportunities for smart, skilled people who can use it to leverage their own capa- bilities. It's a broad category of technolo- gies, with many different approaches and potential use cases. Its applications may be "So you've got your large language models like ChatGPT that everyone knows about, and then your image models, but then there's a whole constellation of different AI models that try to achieve different things," Andrew Park UVic Gustavson School of Business assistant professor

• Cover