Introducing AI Chronicles — a new podcast by RMIT FORWARD
Pete Cohen, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
As we sail through 2024, it is pretty much impossible to avoid AI. Every second LinkedIn post, every news cycle, every conversation… something about AI. And for good reason. It is a transformative technology that feels like it has suddenly come out of nowhere, even though it has been in the making for decades.
The difference this time, in comparison to other recently hyped technology trends like blockchain or the metaverse, is that AI is something that anyone with an internet connection can touch and feel by way of freely accessible tools like ChatGPT. And it is relatively trivial for businesses to at least dabble with AI, if not actually create compelling new value.
But despite all this, it often feels like AI is akin to having a gym membership in January — everyone’s excited about it but few are actually using it. Or if people are using it, then it’s rare to hear much detail as to exactly how. For sure, our LinkedIn feeds are flooded with cheatcheats from newly minted AI experts. But I want to know more about how “mere mortals’’ (like myself) are using AI in their daily work and lives, what is working, and where it is falling short.
So it is with this background of curiosity that we launch the AI Chronicles — a series of conversations where we ask exactly these questions about how people are using AI in their day to day work, and also hear some broader thoughts and reflections on the implications for the future of work.
This is highly relevant for our work at RMIT FORWARD, where we are interested in the real world implications of the trends and dynamics at play. Our secret sauce is our network of around 40 Senior Industry Fellows from around the world — a group of the smartest and most engaging people we know, who are each in their own way somehow pushing the envelope in their respective fields. What makes them so interesting is that they are actively creating their difference in the world, and simultaneously have a perspective on how that relates to the future of work which they are willing to share.
We launch with an episode featuring Stephen Bartlett. As an early adopter of the new breed of LLMs, a conversation with Stephen felt like the logical starting point. He shares how he is leveraging AI capabilities in the products he is building, and how they are improving the ways he manages his work and team.
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FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
