AACC hosted its first innovation summit Thursday to spotlight student entrepreneurs, small businesses started on campus and artificial intelligence technology.
The School of Science, Technology and Education and the Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies have partnered with the Maryland Tech Council, Maryland Department of Commerce, Anne Arundel Economic Development Corporation, Google, Dell Technologies , Business Version and Thibodeau to host the college’s first innovation summit. .
At the Innovation Summit, six panelists presented their inspiration, ideas and business advice to AACC students. Additionally, keynote speaker Mark Thomas, Senior Data Scientist and AI Solutions Architect at Dell Technology, spoke to students, faculty and staff about the “third wave of AI” and the implications of AI agentic, a form of AI that takes a more active role. in problem solving.
“We need to embrace (AI),” Thomas said.
At the event, Thomas presented Veronica, Dell Technology’s new generative text-to-speech AI software, a program capable of answering questions in 50 foreign languages, excluding political questions.
According to Thomas, his team at Dell Technologies programmed the AI with “guardrails” so that it avoids answering these types of questions to “find common ground.”
The technology is “not static” and can be programmed to meet the needs of any customer, organization or business, Thomas said.
Gavin Kesselring, a second-year business management student, said he was “very excited” about the event.
“I’ve always been very pro-AI,” Kesselring said. “AI is the way of the future.”
Kesselring, who also won $500 for the Tech Prize at the Big IDEA event for his Peake Technology Labs, a company that helps other tech startups, said AI is “extremely useful” for businesses because it can help with management.
Mattie Peri, a second-year web design student, said she expected a “dystopian” presentation, but came away saying it was “pretty reasonable.”
“I see a lot of people panicking that this is going to steal our jobs,” Peri said. But “I don’t think that will be the case, at least not anytime soon.”
AI will be “very useful” in the years to come, but will “not be able to do anything without human review” because it can “hallucinate,” according to Peri.
AI “can invent things and it’s biased,” Peri said. “So it’s better, you know, something that can speed up and streamline the process.”
Thomas suggested his AI technology could replace the AACC website at the event, which Peri disagreed with.
“I would be really annoyed if I tried to browse my university’s website and a chatbot tried to chat to me,” Peri said. “I agree that the AACC website needs a lot of work. It’s very busy and complicated and not very easy to navigate, but I feel like (AI software) would be too simplistic.
Peri added: “I don’t like that the main thing when you open your website (for example) is to talk to a 3D model woman who is obviously not real. I don’t think I would find that very attractive.