Nov. 30 -- Charles Rath believes artificial intelligence is arguably the "most important technological innovation of our lifetime."
"It's on par with the personal computer, the internet, the personal cellphone -- artificial intelligence will completely transform every single industry that we know in the next decade," said Rath, CEO and founder of data science group Resilient Solutions 21.
In order to be a part of that transformation, RS21 has partnered with Amazon Web Services, the world's largest cloud service provider, to aid New Mexico businesses in modernizing their data infrastructure.
Rath said RS21 and AWS see a need for organizations to start using AI capabilities to improve operations, whether that be through generative, predictive or automation services. The challenge, however, comes from a majority of New Mexico businesses relying on fragmented systems and outdated reports.
"We believe that 90% of our most important organizations in the state are woefully behind as it relates to their data posture," Rath said, "which means that New Mexico is not very well positioned economically to be a leader in the 21st century."
Getting onto a system like AWS requires businesses to transfer data from physical servers to the cloud service, Rath said. Once completed, there are "massive amounts" of computing power that can then be applied to that information, he added.
Rath likes to think of "data as the fuel for AI." For example, if a hospital wanted to use AI to predict when a patient may need certain types of services, the predictions would only be as good as the historical trends and data sets the service has access to.
"The biggest barrier to the implementation of AI is that people's data is a mess. It's in siloed, legacy systems, it's bad data, it's data that's not automated," Rath said. "So, our mission with AWS is to prepare the data of large organizations so they can take advantage of modern analytics and artificial intelligence."
RS21's mission is to "use data for good," Rath said. The company and AWS have launched an outreach campaign to bring in the top 50 most impactful organizations in New Mexico to discuss their data readiness, position and level of preparation stepping into the "AI economy."
Organizations include major employers like state and local governments and municipalities, national laboratories and health care institutions like Presbyterian and Lovelace. Adding that RS21 is offering a no-cost data readiness assessment to these businesses, Rath said the company could implement an "AI-enabled environment" for customers in as little as 90 days.