Why the journey from digital to smart must include 'responsible' AI

Sherif El-Meshad from ABB Electrification explains the road from digital to smart… and why he’s confident that AI is in safe hands in the energy sector

Digital and smart. They sound the same: they are the same, right?

Not according to Sherif El-Meshad. And he should know, considering he is Head of Digital for ABB Electrification.

“Digital is the first step to be able to efficiently manage information. But ‘smart’ takes it up a notch,” he says.

El-Mashad is based in Germany, however, we are talking in Brno in the Czech Republic, home to one of ABB Electrification’s largest switchgear manufacturing hubs.

He continues: “Not everything which is digital is smart. In fact, if I want to make a system smarter, I need to be able to crunch information: I need to be able to have access to a good database of information and also in a readable and understandable way.”

He says smart “is about making our systems closer to understanding what should be done, giving us insights to tell us which direction we should take”.

He explains that in the recent past, “we had to look at values and numbers and we had to interpret them in our heads and take decisions based on that”.

“Now we have smart systems that are capable of taking this information and putting it in context, and telling us: I have understood the information you have given and these are the most plausible directions in which you should go to achieve a certain degree of efficiency or autonomy.

“We have been working in digital for decades. But smart is the new digital: it’s how we are going to use digital and leverage it to be more intelligent.”

I ask him how much smarter can we get?

He chuckles: “This is a very interesting question… but I think the sky’s the limit in terms of what we can achieve.

“We have been witnessing in the past months the evolution of large language models and technology like ChatGPT, and it has been impressive what AI is capable of doing if it is given the right level of information and the right level of complexity: it keeps developing at a very, very rapid pace.”

Responsible AI

However, he has a warning: “When we talk about AI and the maximum level of ‘smart’ which it can achieve, we have to use these technologies with responsibility. We should not act without thinking about the consequences could be.

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And I’m not just talking about consequences such as fears that these technologies might become sentient on their own: I’m talking about other consequences like sustainability. The more complex these models become, the more processing power they need, and the more energy they use.”

Yet he is confident that in the energy sector at least, artificial intelligence will indeed be used responsibly, mainly because of the cautious nature of the industry.

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“The first step towards a problem is to be aware of the problem, and sometimes this doesn’t cross people’s minds. However, the energy sector is a very stable sector by nature.

“We experiment and we reach for new technologies, but we have very rigorous processes before something can be deemed to be worthy of mass implementation.

“You don’t want to break the system – because it’s a critical system.”

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