Artificial intelligence for everyone
Jacob Bergdahl is one of Sweden's foremost lecturers. He performs inspiring and energetic lectures and workshops that makes AI entertaining and easy to understand. Jacob has been speaking in front of both small and large audiences in both English and Swedish since 2019. He has talked at relaxed after work events, energetic kickoffs, leadership workshops, and conferences. A talk of his can last anywhere from fifteen minutes to several hours.
Jacob speaks on a wide range of topics. Below are some of his most popular topics.
- Real-world AI. A trademark topic of Jacob's and the subject of his book. Jacob's approach to AI is to make it concrete, simple, and understandable, ensuring that his lectures are not just inspirational but also informative. With a collection of hundreds of real-world AI use cases, ranging from common recommendation algorithms to AI-powered satellites, Jacob walks you through a number of real implementations of AI. He explains the business and societal impact, the ethical dilemmas, and more, keeping the lectures varied and surprising.
- Generative AI. The most popular form of AI since the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI is a transformative technology that is rapidly evolving. With its ability to perform a wide range of tasks, tools such as ChatGPT mark a new era in AI. Text, image, video, and audio generation are improving at a rapid pace. Jacob explains how these tools work, what alternatives are available, what the latest news is, what will happen in the coming five years, and practical advice for using generative AI.
- Creating value with AI. For many years, Jacob has been using a powerful and simple framework for creating value with artificial intelligence. He's shared this framework in his book and through viral articles, and even the US Army reached out to Jacob to thank him for sharing, as they used it to explain to their superiors how they use AI within the army. Jacob walks you through this framework to create value with AI and can also host creative workshops where you can apply it to your business.
- Ethical AI. One of the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence is that AI systems have been trained on humankind's long history of discrimination. As a consequence, police and court systems around the world are used to discriminate against minorities. But even everyday tools exhibit biased AI. Ask an image generation AI to produce an image of a lawyer, and it will likely create a picture of a white man. Jacob combines serious conversations with comedic relief to show how biased AI systems create self-fulfilling prophecies – and presents guidelines to prevent it.
- Superintelligence. As we transition from AI assistants to autonomous AI agents, we are inching closer to superintelligent AI. What was once thought to be sci-fi may be very well. Superintelligent AI may allow us to make work optional as well as to cure all diseases, but it could also spell humanity's doom. This philosophical topic is a great conversation starter and encourages the audience to think about the bigger, long-term picture.
- AI for software developer productivity. Jacob explains AI programming assistants: what they are, how they work, and why we use them. He goes into great detail on data privacy, explains how to set up local AI programming assistants, describes techniques for getting greater output from AI-generated code, and discusses the future with autonomous AI programming agents.
- Building Autonomous AI Agents. Jacob built his own architecture for running autonomous AI agents with JavaScript. His agents can be given any mission, such as writing a book, creating a podcast episode, or making a website, and independently figure out and execute the tasks to complete the mission. Jacob explains how he built it, why agents are the natural evolution after assistants, and what technologies one can use to implement AI agents.
- AI for you. Naturally, Jacob tailors AI lectures to your needs, your industry, your topics. Do you seek to AI-enable your organization? Are you looking for guidance on how to start your journey, what AI tooling to use, how to think in regards to AI strategies, or anything else? Please reach out to Jacob with your specific needs, and he will get back to you with a concrete agenda.
All of Jacob's topics and services can also be done in the form of a workshop, seminar, or webinar. Whether you are looking for a half-day workshop or a LinkedIn webinar, Jacob can craft the perfect event for you.
Jacob has spoken at
Get in touch and let's plan an agenda that works well for you!
About Jacob Bergdahl
Jacob is Head of AI at byBrick and has been building AI solutions since 2013. He has a background as a software developer with a Master's in Information Systems. Jacob has studied IT at universities in three countries, created solutions for some of the largest organizations in Sweden, performed talks for company leaderships', written an Amazon best-selling book, worked on Minecraft at Mojang, composed viral articles, built JS Is Weird, helped the US army convey how to use AI, and created the open-source AI interface Limopola complete with an architecture for running autonomous AI agents.
Jacob can help you implement AI in your organization.
- He is an experienced software engineer who has built an entire architecture for running autonomous AI agents from scratch. He understand the technologies and AI models for building advanced custom AI solutions.
- He has crafted role-specific recommended sets of routines, tools, and courses. He calls this approach “paths”. Jacob can help you identify and create paths for roles in your organization.
- He is experienced with setting up and configuring AI solutions across organizations. Whether a custom AI system where the data never leaves local premises or setting up a widespread AI platform such as Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Jacob can help you get up and running.
- Jacob has a framework for value creation with AI and is knowledgeable about AI implementations across most industries. He can provide guidance on how you could implement AI in your organization.
- Jacob is experienced in monitoring AI and setting up practices for its ethical and responsible use.
- Jacob has read the European Union’s 458-page AI law (“the AI act”) and is knowledgeable on its fundamentals. While Jacob is not a lawyer, he can help determine how the law may impact your organization.
Jacob has written software for
AI is everywhere
Artificial intelligence is already everywhere. It’s creating music, videos, perfume recipes, software code, and alcoholic beverages. It’s used to tutor children, ensure a presidential candidate’s victory, match job candidates, commit mass surveillance, scan pizzas, explore Mars, track and identify suspects, and much more.
The technological progress of our times is genuinely astounding. Did you know that if our planet had been created a year ago, humanity would have existed on the planet for ten minutes, and the industrial era would have started only two seconds ago? The world wide web and social media were barely mainstream only two decades ago, and today, it’s hard to imagine our world without them. For most of human history, technological progress was incredibly slow. Look at where AI was five years ago, look at where it is today, and try to imagine where it will be in another five years.
World leaders such as Ulf Kristersson, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping have all commented that AI is the most important innovation of our time, noting that the leader in AI will also become the leader of the world. In its late 2023 annual outlook, OECD noted that its member nations may be on track to enter a new industrial revolution, and other institutions appear to agree.
AI’s impact is massive. Hence, it’s no wonder that big tech is investing billions of USD into AI investments. Below are a few interesting statistics on AI’s impact.
- OECD notes that 27% of all jobs may be automated by AI. (Source)
- IMF reports that 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be impacted by AI. (Source)
- JPMorgan Chase & Co’s CEO argues that AI can augment virtually every job, comparing the technology to the steam engine and noting that their bank found 400 use cases for AI. (Source)
- All US federal agencies must now have a chief AI officer as the United States blazes ahead with plans to embrace AI across the entire economy. (Source)
- A British report shows that 8 million UK jobs may be lost to AI. (Source)
- Klarna’s AI assistant does the work of 700 full-time agents, resolves errands more than five times faster, is 25% more accurate, and is estimated to drive USD 40 million in profits in 2024. (Source)
- 43% of young US adults have already used ChatGPT (which is just one of many AI tools). (Source)
- AI initiatives already make up 20% of the average company’s IT budget. (Source)
- A Slack study found that 80% of those using AI say that the technology is already improving their productivity. (Source)
- A Pluralsight study found that 75% of organizations already have or formally plan to implement AI solutions. (Source)
- A BCG study found that 89% of executives rank AI as a top tech priority. (Source)
People and companies want to use AI in their work and daily lives, either to automate the unfulfilling tasks they don’t want to do, or to augment the fun tasks to perform them even better. Yet, it can be daunting to know where and how to start, and how to deal with major challenges such as ethical and responsible use of AI.
A lecture by Jacob makes the topic tangible, inspires the audience, and sparks awareness and creativity. In addition, Jacob can also be hired as a consultant for longer terms for any aspect of AI initiatives, such as implementing large language models (LLMs), examining ethical and responsible AI use, comprehending AI regulations, or realizing business value with AI.
Creating value with AI
There are many tools that helps one to understand how to apply AI to one's business. From the trusted DVF-framework to simple impact-vs-effort measures, you can apply many different techniques for ideation and implementation depending on where you are in your AI efforts. For companies at the very start of their AI journey, a good idea is to simply experiment and gain familiarity with AI tools.
The framework in the image above is one that Jacob has been using many years. This powerful and simple framework explains the four possible AI strategies which can be applied to business processes. Jacob has shared this framework in his book and through viral articles, and even the US army reached out to Jacob to thank him for sharing, as they ended up using it to explain to their superiors how they use AI within the army.
Executive summary
It’s important to understand that AI can empower any activity through either automation or augmentation.
- Automation is the removal of humans from an activity.
- Augmentation is the empowering of humans in an activity.
Automation and augmentation are opposite extremes, and few AI solutions are fully automated or fully augmented. Automation and augmentation is a scale that encompasses our four strategies.
- The efficiency strategy, in which activities are optimized through automation.
- The effectiveness strategy, in which activities are made seamless, enabling communication.
- The expert strategy, in which AI empowers decision-making.
- The innovation strategy, in which AI enables creativity.
By analyzing the complexity of an activity, we can roughly determine the appropriate AI strategy.
- Low data and work complexity: The efficiency strategy.
- High data but low work complexity: The effectiveness strategy.
- Low data but high work complexity: The expert strategy.
- High data and work complexity: The innovation strategy.
Have fun with AI
Jacob uses AI to automate and augment his and his clients' work, but he also uses it for fun. In his spare time, Jacob often experiments with the latest AI tools for generating voices, music, video, sound effects, and images. Jacob has even been approached by companies to create AI-generated video advertisements for companies. Have a look at a few videos made by Jacob, and feel free to reach out to learn how they were made. Watch the clips in full screen and with high volume for the best experience. All video, voices, sound effects, and music are AI-generated.