Salacia Solutions is getting smarter as a company by the day. Not only through the knowledge and experience of its employees, recently also by embracing artificial intelligence as an aid. The integration of A.I. into Salacia’s systems is in the hands of Bart van der Poel. He has been A.I. Manager within the expanded team since Oct. 1. “I had known Kees Kerstens for some time, as I live in Rotterdam myself,” Bart opens the conversation. “Several years ago I was ready for a change in my career. I was educated at TU Delft, in technical computer science, majoring in A.I. That was really in its infancy back then, so I started my working life as a developer. In my last job I was a consultant. Because A.I. stole my heart from day one, I have always followed developments closely. Everyone knows what a flight A.I. has taken in recent years. Time for me to finally make it my job. And so it came full circle for me. Last year Kees asked me to do a project for Salacia. That went well and last summer I was asked to join Salacia. I used the vacations to think about it carefully and finally said a resounding yes.”
The role of A.I. within Salacia Solutions
As Salacia grows, so does the amount of data that needs to be processed daily. “By using A.I. to analyze the data, we can work faster, work smarter and process more data,” Bart explains. “That’s the help of artificial intelligence that you don’t see, but that matters. On the front end, we can start using A.I., in reports. We then do this by displaying results of analyses in understandable language and visualizing them well. The idea is that A.I. takes work off your hands, ensures efficiency and provides clarity.”
Bart is just getting started and is currently mainly looking at where A.I. can be integrated into Salacia’s systems first. “We will eventually move toward a situation where A.I. will play a role in almost every process, from a very small role to an extensive role. Of course, humans will always remain behind the controls at Salacia, but A.I. must above all be a valuable addition to the way we work.”
The connecting factor between the ESG team and the software team
It is clear that Bart is not on his own “A.I. island,” but is a connecting factor between the ESG team and the software team. “I work with the developers and listen to the ESG team’s needs. The way our ESG team works lends itself ideally to the application of A.I., I make sure that this is properly taken care of on the software side.”
Personally, Bart is not a “die hard A.I. freak,” having set up his entire private environment around A.I. “I read a lot about it and see the now of artificial intelligence in processes. However, don’t expect a futuristic interior at my house, crammed with gadgets. I myself am mostly curious about what A.I. can bring us. My task is to understand how artificial intelligence ‘thinks’ and to look ahead to possible applications. Only then can I achieve integration of A.I. into our own ways of working at Salacia Solutions.”
A.I. now and in the future
We ask Bart to look into the “crystal ball” when it comes to A.I. anyway. “As you may know, deep learning and machine learning are parts of A.I. When you start applying artificial intelligence in your own processes, you start cautiously. After a while you find that A.I. starts to belong to you and evolves with your business and gets smarter and smarter. Through that process of getting smarter and smarter, new doors will keep opening for applications. That’s also the exciting thing about this: I can’t predict what role A.I. will have within Salacia in five years, but that it will be at the forefront of change, that’s pretty much a given.”
In conclusion, he says, “If I have to make a cautious prediction, I envision how in 5 years A.I. will ensure that our customers will be able to use very specialized knowledge without the intervention of our experts. The customer will have greater self-reliance, the software will be even easier and more intuitive to use. Because A.I. can draw quickly and from countless data sources, it can work with much more input than humans can process at all. Data will become much more reliable, analyses even more thorough, and if A.I. can substantiate its findings in human language, it will start to work in a holistic way. The main point is and remains that systems must continue to serve humans and not the other way around.
