Meet Ben Parfitt, Founder and CEO of Diligently.ai, a software development startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MFN Community Engagement Manager, Andrew Fitch, recently sat down with Ben to discuss the importance of ‘Applied AI’ and offer insights into the AI technology in the Massachusetts ecosystem.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Andrew Fitch: Hey, welcome, Ben. Welcome, folks. We’re here to talk today about applied AI and Massachusetts. We’re here with Ben from Diligently.AI. Ben, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Diligently.AI?
Ben Parfitt: Sure, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. So 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. The first is that it’s sort of crucial to strike the balance of moving quickly, and producing something that’s high quality. And 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. And I think both of those tenets of what we’re building and diligently really feed into what we’re going to be talking about with applied AI and around 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 and how things are going to play out five or 10 years from now as well.
Andrew Fitch: 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 like society built on AI, but it’s almost that it’s it’s aI integrated closely into every part of your daily life, but 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.