In this conversation, MFN sat down with Ben Parfitt, Co-Founder and Chief of AI at Vardera Labs, and also Founder and part-time CEO of Cambridge-based Diligently.ai, to discuss the importance of Applied AI and offer his perspective on the trend of AI technology within the Massachusetts innovation ecosystem.
MFN: Could you give us a summary of what Diligently.AI does?
Ben Parfitt: Sure! At Diligently.AI, we’re helping companies that are building on top of generative AI, to bring higher quality software to market faster. And then to continuously improve that software by using AI-created and discovered insights. So it’s AI for AI to some degree. And I gotta break that down a little bit, because there’s two parts to it.
Ben Parfiit: The first is that it’s crucial to strike the balance of moving quickly, and producing something that’s high quality. The second is to remember that the job is never done. Even after you’ve put something out into the world, especially with AI, you always have to keep an eye on this kind of technology, because it’s not entirely predictable, and respond to how users are interacting with it. I think both of those tenets of what we’re building really feed into what we’re going to be talking about with applied AI and the new Massachusetts AI Task Force, because they’re going to need to work quickly to produce high quality work, and to also take a look at the long term picture on how things are going to play out five or 10 years from now as well.
MFN: What would it look like for Massachusetts to become a global leader within the applied AI space? If we get there, what does that future look like?
Ben Parfitt: Yeah, I think you’re going to have a lot of companies born out of Massachusetts startups, along with academic institutions like Harvard and MIT, working closely together with the government to bring advancements quickly. I don’t want to say we have a sort of society built on AI, but it’s almost that AI is integrated closely into every part of your daily life. Probably in a way where you don’t even know it’s there, in a good way.
Ben Parfitt: So public zoning, for example. I was at the MIT Media Lab a few weeks ago at this “AI in the construction sector” event. And they were talking about how you can use AI to decide on zoning laws to solve problems where we have a housing crisis. The people renting the apartments that were zoned by AI don’t need to know AI was there. It helps alleviate the pressure of rising housing prices. Or it helps to reroute traffic in some way that’s unique. Or it just helps you with your health care, right? All these things that you don’t need to know [AI] is there. But it’s helping seamlessly behind the scenes in every piece of your life, and in a really beneficial way, and I think that’s going to be critical to having it having Massachusetts be a leader is to set the example for other states, in the United States and other places in the world, of how you can have government integrated closely with AI in a way that benefits your citizens.
Interested in exploring Massachusetts Resources for AI Technology? Learn more at the Massachusetts AI Hub, based out of MassTech Collaborative: https://aihub.masstech.org/
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