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52 B C B U S I N E S S . C A M A R C H 2 0 2 5 Zubair's team investigated and found the white-and-blue packaging was confus- ing consumers into thinking Milkis was a milk-based drink. When they changed the colours, it changed people's feedback on the taste. "It was finally moving away from milk-based to soda-based—like fizzy and young," Zubair reports. Chunhua Wu, assistant professor and division chair at Zubair's Master of Busi- ness Analytics program at Sauder, says the 2012 deep learning revolution in the field of computer vision gave marketers new ways of looking at data. That was the year, among other breakthroughs, an experi- mental Google computer network taught itself to recognize cat images by watching YouTube videos. No humans taught or hinted to the network what a cat was, or what one looked like. That ability—to learn and extract information or patterns from raw data without extensive human intervention— differentiates deep learning from tradi- tional machine-learning techniques. It makes training machines vastly more scal- able, because computers can now comb through massive, unstructured data sets without requiring people to, say, manually label millions of cat pictures. LLMs are deep learning models trained on astronomical struggling to catch on among Pakistanis. She scraped data from Facebook, the main platform her compatriots used for reviews, and ran an analysis using a branch of arti- ficial intelligence called natural language processing, or NLP. "I extracted high-frequency and high- relevance words," Zubair says. "I discov- ered that people were using 'milk' a lot, and they were comparing the taste to yogurt." Milkis is sparkling and delivers a cream soda feel to your mouth. But Pakistanis were expecting something similar to a regional drink called doodh soda, which people make by mixing milk with equal parts Sprite or 7Up. THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE Hunter says BCIT works with industry part- ners like Fujitsu, Amazon and local employ- ers to ensure its graduates have skills useful to the sector. The school surveyed and consulted with those businesses as part of its preparation to launch its new master of science in applied computing degree in September. The program won't produce program- mers, but rather what Hunter calls tech- nical leaders. Businesses told him they needed mid-level professionals who can manage tech projects, not just perform the basic tasks. "It's somebody who's supposed to come in and lead the development of a product or lead the development of a team," he elaborates. "They need to be able to direct and organize software development." AI tools aren't just changing technology development—they're also changing busi- ness operations. Shauna Begley heads BCIT's business information technology manage- ment diploma program. It's been offering an artificial intelligence management option since fall 2020. She says the diploma teaches students technical and analytical knowl- edge, along with business strategy. Companies want graduates from pro- grams like hers who can, for example, use data scraping tools to gauge consumer sen- timent of their products. More importantly, they want to put that information to good use. Begley says organizations are looking for people who can answer a key question: "How do we leverage this in a way that is going to add value in our business?" AI began offering powerful business analytics tools years before LLMs burst into public consciousness. Zubair was digging into her toolkit as soon as she joined the workforce in Pakistan after her undergrad- uate degree. Her employer in 2020, Lotte Akhtar Beverages Ltd., was trying to figure out why Milkis, the popular Korean soda drink it introduced to the local market, was "Maybe there you don't need as many of the software developers doing the same tasks that they were doing before. But, overall, we're still predicting growth in the industry, because all of these AI tools still need people to work on them, manage them and develop them." Aaron Hunter Mastercard Chair in Digital Trust at BCIT "In terms of AI coming for our jobs? I'm not concerned about that, at least not yet." Wilson Scott Software engineer

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