IBM’s Dr. Radha Plumb Discusses Building an AI Control Plane
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IBM’s Dr. Radha Plumb discussed how CIOs can approach AI implementation through an AI control plane in an episode of “The Savvy CIO.” The discussion focused on setting up governance and security practices while accounting for audits and day-to-day operational requirements.
The episode, moderated by Bradd Busick and sponsored by Park Place Technologies, addressed balancing the push to adopt AI with budget pressures and ongoing operational needs. It also covered how IBM handled data governance while balancing speed and security, along with workflow practices with banks and government.
Plumb contrasted deterministic outcomes from statistical methods with outputs from large language models described as inferential. She said deterministic workflows can use data taken from a flat file and apply a known statistical formula, while LLMs add an inferential layer that yields combinations of information not known in advance, described as a black box.
“I take a bunch of data in a flat file like a spreadsheet, and I apply a known statistical formula like an average, and I put it in, out comes the other side, comes the average, and I can collect that many times over and get a distribution, or I can look at that over time and get a time series,” said Plumb. “Those are all deterministic outcomes. What LLMs bring is taking that vastness of data and connections we both know and don't know and put an inferential layer on it to come up with combinations of information we don't know and couldn't have predicted to have an inferential outcome instead of a deterministic one. That's the black box. Like, that's kind of the secret sauce.” She added that LLM-driven results can produce items users might not have considered, while users may not know the exact components of the result or how to recreate it.
Before joining IBM, Dr. Radha Plumb spent three years at the highest levels of the U.S. Department of Defense as the Pentagon's chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, where she led AI, data, and analytics adoption efforts and helped create pathways to acquire and scale digital technology. At IBM, her role included internally operationalizing AI technologies and concepts to test them before deploying them to clients.
Plumb also said that CIOs should avoid “take and sprinkle some AI magic into a process that is maybe too complex or maybe, under-specified, and that’s going to drive really measurable business outcomes, and it's just not.”
Press release, provided by Globe Newswire on behalf of IBM. Read the original.