This was the starting point for a panel discussion on the benefits of Artificial Intelligence in companies. The panel included Hugo Augusto, CEO of Semapa Next and leader of the A.I. group, Ricardo Carvalho, Digital Director of Secil, and Abel Aguiar, Executive Director for Channel and Partners at Microsoft Portugal. The impact of A.I. on employees and current company practices was the first topic addressed. Participants in this debate included Hugo Augusto, CEO of Semapa Next and leader of the group responsible for Artificial Intelligence, Ricardo Carvalho, Digital Director of Secil, and Abel Aguiar, Executive Director for Channel and Partners at Microsoft Portugal. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on employees and current practices in companies was the first topic addressed in the panel.

Abel Aguiar began by explaining the rapid changes in the way we work over the past decade, making it challenging for employees to keep up. The Microsoft executive director mentioned their annual “World Trend Index” study, involving tens of thousands of employees from 31 countries. “This year’s study brought a somewhat alarming conclusion: 64% of employees said they do not have enough time to fulfill their roles – due to excessive meetings and/or an inability to process all the information they receive daily.” Accompanying these 64% is a twice as likely probability of employees leaving the organization and a three-and-a-half times higher probability of them not dedicating time to strategic tasks. “Focus time”, the thinking that changes and transforms, is lost.

This poses a problem for companies, but Abel Aguiar argued that Generative A.I. has the advantage of summarizing information (e.g., from meetings), processing data, and producing content instantly. Many mechanical tasks performed by employees are no longer necessary as A.I. can take over. By accelerating these tasks, A.I. frees up time for people to focus on higher-value functions. “Studies on A.I. users this year, regarding productivity and collaboration, already demonstrate an average time saving of around thirty minutes per day – more than ten hours per month. This is a matter of transformation, but above all, of cultural transformation, a different vision of work, and not just tool adoption.” Abel Aguiar also underlined the high transformative potential of, through AI, reinventing the customer experience, optimizing operational processes or even creating new business models. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence also presents benefits when applied to the areas of Research & Development and Occupational Health, Safety and Hygiene, minimizing errors, anomalous behaviors and risks.

Ricardo Carvalho addressed the various challenges that A.I. poses in the industrial environment. In addition to Generative A.I., which creates content, much of the A.I. applications in industry use other algorithms, from machine learning to deep learning. According to Secil’s digital director, this is probably the biggest wave of opportunities in the last 20 years since the Internet. However, “implementing these A.I. applications requires overcoming difficulties in the industrial environment. The Semapa Group has industrial facilities with recent equipment, but also some that are 100 years old, such as the Maceira-Liz Factory. The big challenge is finding a way for the existing factory data to be used by A.I. and integrated into a contiguous system, making it much easier to scale from one facility to another.”

Secil currently has several activities integrating Generative and Non-Generative A.I. “An interesting example is what we are doing in the concrete business. We have predictive models from the concrete plant to the arrival at the site to obtain data related to viscosity, which allows us to ensure that the final product is increasingly of better quality”, Ricardo Carvalho mentions.

Finally, Secil’s digital director stressed the need to increase A.I. literacy to reduce the perception of A.I. as a threat and ensure employees feel well prepared to use A.I. tools effectively in the future.

In the final phase of the panel, Hugo Augusto mentioned the increasing number of investment opportunities analyzed by Semapa Next that involve Artificial Intelligence and Climate Tech. He provided some practical examples: “We have seen opportunities from companies trying to replace call centers in parts of the process, such as scheduling sales meetings for their clients where A.I. interacts with people. But, as Semapa Next, what interests us most is seeing A.I. applications in business problems. Recently, we invested in a company sending satellites into space to collect data, gain insights about soil temperature, and obtain information about water management for agriculture.“

The Semapa Meeting 2024 panel on Artificial Intelligence highlighted how A.I. is transforming the business environment, not only as an efficiency tool but also as a catalyst for significant cultural change in companies. A conscious and strategic adoption of A.I. is crucial, ensuring that employees feel well prepared and capable of keeping up with technological evolution and making the most of it in their daily functions.