AI presentations & impact workshops
Duignan’s perspective on AI
AI’s fast takeoff presents opportunities, major disruption and risks at multiple levels. Dr Paul Duignan specializes in looking at the strategic, individual, organizational and societal impacts of AI and the range of possible strategic responses to it. He brings his extensive experience in technology impact analysis to his strategic thinking about AI. You can download his new book, Surfing AI: 30 New Concepts for Getting Your Head Around AI, to check out his original thinking about AI’s impacts and how we should best respond to it.
His background as a psychologist has seen him researching the impact of new technologies on employment, community responses to social harm, researching how governments can use smart regulation to reduce social harm and mitigate its impacts, helping organisations encourage civil society groups to be new technology early adopters who use it creatively for community empowerment, defining outcomes for government digital strategiees, running an award-winning software start-up focused on speeding up organisations strategy and implementation using visual planning, and working as a clinical psychologist and career coach helping people cope with a wide range of stressors including AI’s impact on jobs
Presentations and workshops on AI strategy and Impact
Duignan does keynote conference presentations and runs high-level strategy sessions for boards on the business, psychological and social impact of AI. These workshops are not aimed at the technical aspects of AI, there are enough consultants in that space. Rather, they focus on increasing sophisticatd strategic-level understanding of the impact of AI and its broader implications for business models, customers, clients, and a company or organization’s comparative advantage. They also cover the likely social responses that will impact businesses and organizations that are now arising in the face of the rapid advance of AI into all areas of life. The novel analytical framework he uses is the AI Scan: Opportunities and Risks Analyzer based on the content of his Surfing AI book. He then prepares and workshops a DoView strategy diagram for companies or organizations so as to translate the AI scan analysis into a clear visual format of their forward strategy regarding AI.
Media comment on AI
Duignan also does a significant amount of media commentary on the psychology, social, strategic and political impact of AI. See his media pieces on AI.
Dr Duignan’s Technology Experience
During his career, he has been a researcher on the impact of new technology, involved in discussions regarding the effects of new technologies such as the introduction of electronic barcoding, involved in national IT workforce planning discussions, involved in presentations, training and promotion of the use of the internet and web to sector groups and groups such as the NZ Institute of Directors. He did strategy consulting on how the NZ government should move to more digital interaction with citizens, work for the Royal Society of NZ on public consultation regarding the management of technological risk, was involved in setting up the system of Access Grids in NZ universities (early multimedia internet-connected hubs for research on the NZ KAREN academic network) and ran a startup developing award-winning strategy visualisation software. His wider experience includes strategy work in all sectors. Duignan was the director of the Labour Research Unit at the NZ Parliament. He served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Urban Institute in Washington D.C. and has undertaken consulting work for international organisations such as the IMF and other governments.