Creative thinking key element to being successful as AI changes work

Creative thinking key element to being successful as AI changes work

SHREVEPORT - A philosophy major as a keynote speaker at an artificial intelligence conference?

Tony Zanders, president and CEO of Nexus Louisiana, kicked off Tuesday's Technology Forum on Artificial Intelligence at LSU Shreveport not with the latest coding trends or AI prompts.

In a room of more than 50 AI professionals and students, Zanders said noticing and identifying problems that AI can solve is just as important as any execution of a solution to that problem.

"The muscles that we exercised in philosophy, thinking about questions that haven't been answered sufficiently in hundreds or thousands of years, allowed us to be comfortable in ambiguity and to not get nervous or change course," said Zanders, who runs a Louisiana tech company designed to assist early-stage startups bring their ideas to fruition. "That's a skill that we all have to develop.

"Because when you're building a new application or a new piece of hardware that's never existed before, what blueprint do you follow? What guide do you follow to build something that's never existed - to go from zero to one?"

Zanders said this mindset is beneficial whether one is aiming to start a company or looking for an existing job in the industry.

"In an age where social media algorithms are destroying our attention spans, can you focus on a problem or a project for a sustained amount of time?" Zanders asked. "Just a college degree is no longer a proxy for showing potential employers or investors that.

"The best way to do that is through building your own projects, whether that's contributing to an open-source community or building a tech startup."

Many of the forum attendees demonstrated their own projects in a series of oral presentations at conference, which was organized by the Shreveport Section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

College students from LSUS and across North Louisiana showcased their research or prototypes, ranging from applications that assist the vision impaired to discovering illegal mining.

LSUS computer science student Udaysinh Rathod won the graduate student division with his research into radio frequencies identifying whether patients have fallen in a hospital setting.

ULM undergraduates Ankit Ghimire and Isaac Isidahome-Iyobebe shared the undergraduate prize. Their project used AI to prepare job seekers for interviews.

It's the first such conference that the Shreveport Section has hosted, something that planning members Dr. Richard Watson and Dr. Subhajit Chakrabarty (LSUS computer science faculty members) aim to make an annual affair.

Attendees heard from representatives from major technology players like Amazon Web Services, NVIDIA, IBM, and Oracle in panels about Agentic AI, innovation and workforce development.

Zanders urged conference attendees to not forget the human piece, the need to connect with humans that aren't part of the technology stratosphere.

"As a person that's hired a bunch of (software) engineers and unfortunately laid off a lot of engineers as well, sometimes you have to have the skill to figure out what is the problem that needs to be solved," Zanders said. "To figure that out, you have to spend time offline.

"If all you know how to do is open up a computer and prompt a program or an application, you're literally going to be building the agents that will replace you."