AI uncontrollable and unstoppable: WiseTech boss Richard White

AI has evolved at such a pace that anybody who claims they know what it will look like in five years time is lying, says WiseTech founder Richard White.

WiseTech CEO Richard White said even his staff are receiving calls from scammers pretending to be him. Picture: Aaron Francis

AI has evolved at such a pace that anybody who claims they know what it will look like in five years time is lying, says WiseTech founder Richard White.

The technology is not just an app on your phone but something that is transforming businesses across all industries, the billionaire tech boss told an audience at the Australian Shareholders Association conference on Monday.

It is even being used heavily by scammers, which Mr White knows about first hand.

“There are people on the criminal element using AI to do quite terrible things and last week three different staff members were confronted by a WhatsApp call with ‘me’ on video telling them to give them some money,” he said. “Luckily they’re all Tech guys so they knew immediately that wasn’t me.”

AI’s rapid development was something that could not be stopped, no matter how hard governments tried, Mr White said.

“Despite all of the fears and all of the potential for governments trying to regulate it, that is not going to happen – this is unstoppable,” he said. “No matter what you do, no matter how well, or how concerned you are, how bad or good. This has happened ­already.”

One of the best ways a company could future-proof itself was to not have all of its AI eggs in one basket.

The best way to do that was to have AI connected in the back-end and always be on the lookout and aware of competitors in the market, Mr White said, adding that WiseTech was a customer of both Microsoft and Google AI services.

When asked about how technology was changing WiseTech as a company, Mr White said: “I’m not going to change guidance for you but I think over the medium term, you’ll see that our cost base will be much more manageable,” he said.

“From my perspective, everything I can squeeze out which is an automatable cost, an unnecessary cost or a friction you can remove, I will do everything I can to … I’ve always done that but now I’ve got another tool set that is quite powerful to do that with.”

Speaking alongside Mr White was NextDC chief commercial officer David Dzienciol, who described what NextDC did in the AI space as slightly less exciting.

“You need picks and shovels in a revolution like this. We see ourselves as, and I hate to say it too loudly, but the boring part because we don’t go in and do demos of software to CEOs (and) CFOs that can change their business,” he said

“What we do is take care of the area of the business that perhaps they don’t need to do on their own anymore. Whether you’re a bank, whether you’re a hospital, whether you’re in any industry, you will need digital infrastructure to enable those services. Data is not shrinking, data is growing.”

He said his company was like Westfield, which didn’t control the retailers inside it.