AIP Podcast EP 80 - Scaling AI Adoption Through Ecosystems and AI Centers of Excellence with DAIMLAS

This episode's guest, Joseph Wehbe, Founder and CEO of DAIMLAS, joins host Anne to explore why building AI ecosystems—not just deploying AI tools—may be the key to long-term success in the age of artificial intelligence. Joseph shares his journey from Silicon Valley to becoming a World Economic Forum AI Entrepreneurship Expert, and discusses how DAIMLAS is helping governments, enterprises, and institutions create AI Centers of Excellence that accelerate adoption and innovation. He explains why AI fluency at the leadership level is critical for successful AI implementation, offers practical guidance for organizations launching their AI strategy, and shares his perspective on the growing importance of sovereign AI. Tune in to learn how DAIMLAS is empowering organizations to build AI-ready workforces, identify high-value use cases, and create scalable pathways into the AI economy.

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Website: https://daimlas.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/daimlas/

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The AIP Podcast is hosted by Anne Cheng, on behalf of the AI Partnerships, a Railtown company

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

There seems to be a global race for enterprises and governments to embed AI strategies within their workforces, products, and customer journeys. Yet, on the other hand, every technology giant has shifted its focus into ecosystems, partnerships, and community, a step change in moving from competition to collaboration. It doesn't take a genius to realize that to be successful in the age of AI, the ones who win will be the ones who build a village around themselves. Hello everyone and welcome back to the AIP podcast. It's your host, Ann Cheng, on behalf of the AI Partnerships Corporation. And today we explore how building an ecosystem around you can be your competitive advantage in the age of AI. Now, my guest today, Joe Webby, has been recognized as an AI expert through the World Economic Forum's AI Entrepreneurship Expert Network. Now that's a mouthful. And over the past six years, we've had he has worked to build AI ecosystems for governments and large enterprises alike. Let's all welcome Joe to our episode. Hi Joe, you've been recognized by the WEF as an expert in AI. That's amazing. Tell us your backstory.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Thank you, Anne, for having me. My journey in the AI world started in 2018. I was living in Silicon Valley at the time, and a lot of entrepreneurs were bastardizing the term AI. So I said to myself, do I want to become a practitioner in the field or just watch this whole revolution go by? So I started to check AI master's degree in New Jersey, AI master's degree in New York, AI master's degree in Massachusetts. And it turns out a former computer science professor from Harvard was sending students to Canada to do their postdoc in AI. So I said, wow, something special must be happening in AI in Canada. So I, after doing some searching, uh it turns out that Canada was the first country to launch a national AI strategy back in 2017. And they organized their AI ecosystem in Toronto, Montreal, and Alberta around people like Jeffrey Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI. So I applied uh to an AI master's degree program, got accepted, moved up to Toronto uh for two years, and um I started to build my expertise around uh national AI strategies and uh creating pathways into AI for everyone that wants to participate. And uh that's how I started to build my expertise uh in um AI ecosystems. So for the World Economic Forum, uh I contribute on three things mainly national AI strategies, uh, how to build the next generation of AI talent and sovereign AI, uh sovereign AI from a people perspective. And um that's how I got there to the World Economic Forum AI Expert Network.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

That's an incredible story, Joe. How did you start Dameless and what are you trying to solve for?

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah, started the company uh exactly six years ago in June of 2020. So at the time, there was an MIT challenge um in the knowledge economy. And our idea at the time was um how do you create more knowledge economy opportunities? And the idea was uh to create more of these knowledge economy opportunities in AI, we need to uh platformize an AI ecosystem. So the AI ecosystem that exists in Toronto, in Boston, in Silicon Valley, uh doesn't exist in emerging uh eco in emerging hubs, um, for example, in Africa or the Middle East. So we started Daimelist, which stands for Deliver AI Machine Learning at Scale. And for you to deliver AI machine learning at scale, you need to create uh these platforms where you could uh replicate what an AI center of excellence is. So if I'm sitting today in Toronto, I have a whole uh bunch of resources in uh the ecosystem that I could participate in. And that's what we're we're aiming to do is recreate what happens, let's say, at the MIT AI Center of Excellence or in the Toronto AI Center of Excellence uh and platformize that. So uh that's what we're trying to solve for is create more opportunities for uh stakeholders to participate in the AI economy.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

That's amazing. Well, you know, I've seen this almost maddening rush towards this thing called the AI arms race, and yet so many large-scale enterprises have tried and failed to embed AI into their ways of working, their products, and transform their businesses. They almost felt like they've been trying to find a silver bullet. So, what advice would you give an executive or CTO who's disillusioned by all these failed implementations of AI?

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Yes, so what we found the biggest barrier to the enterprise and governments and universities starting their AI journey is the level of AI fluency at the board, at the leadership, and N minus one and across the leadership um managers. So if a company doesn't invest in AI education for their leadership to have a level of AI fluency, there's no amount of uh magic or um any you know type of initiative you could run that would convince a company or invest in starting the AI journey. So it starts with uh AI education, and what we do particularly is called an AI fluency uh masterclass or training. And once you do an AI fluency training for the board and the leadership, you share this art of the possible with AI. So if the board and the leaders don't understand or don't have a level of um belief and know the art of the possible with AI, then all the the uh AI implementations and projects are are going to uh stall. So that's uh what we usually recommend is starting with AI fluency training. And once you do an AI fluency training, from there you would identify champions in various uh departments within the organization. So, for example, if you're a bank and you're starting your AI journey, um once you do an AI fluency training, you'll identify AI champions in wealth management, AI champions in customer service, in call center, in marketing and sales, etc. So without having those AI champions in the various tracks, you can identify use cases. And that AI champion needs to believe that AI impacts every part of their life and society and work. And um, that's why it's important to have that um that level of AI fluency uh training. And uh after all of the identification of the AI use cases and the champions in AI, that's when we need to figure out how do you platformize uh the entire AI capabilities of the company so that everyone can have a pathway to participate in the AI journey of your company. So if you're a bank, you want everyone in the wealth management department uh identifying use cases. If you're if you're in a university, you want that uh the business school or the medical school, you want every one of the faculty starting their AI journey. So when you platformize that AI uh center of excellence for them, uh that's when everyone has a pathway into um initiating their AI journey and um identifying those high-value uh AI use cases.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

That's great. Now, there's a hot topic in the world of AI these days, which is sovereign AI. Tell us, why does it matter to governments in a world where AI is still viewed largely as unproven and mostly hallucinating?

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Yeah, so the the topic of sovereign AI is becoming more important, not just in the US uh and the Middle East and Africa, but the global AI race is real. Uh, there's something called the global AI rankings, where 83 countries are being ranked. Uh, and it's they're ranked on uh seven factors or seven levers. It's uh talent, infrastructure, uh, strategy, operating environment, research uh, and development, and commercial opportunities for AI. So, what that means is uh, for example, in the US context, uh made in America AI exported to the world. Uh, number of patents filed, number of patents accepted. So, all of these, the one of these seven levers are what promotes or pushes a country's uh global AI ranking. So, if a country is thinking about sovereign AI, you have to first approach it from a people perspective, not necessarily the data and the infrastructure, because you could build all the data and the infrastructure, but if you don't have the people working on uh identifying, you know, patents and um uh research and development and building the next generation of AI talent, all that infrastructure is not going to be useful. So you have to start with the people in terms of uh a sovereign AI strategy, whether for your company or for your government, um the sovereign AI starts with the people, and then um anything that you work on as a uh government or as an organization needs to push one of those seven uh levers. And those seven levers are uh what you would work on towards um your sovereign AI uh strategy. Now, the other barrier to having sovereign AI is a lot of uh governments and organizations don't have yet an AI strategy. So if you don't have an AI strategy, um you don't have a starting point that's going to guide you in your journey. So the the national AI strategy needs to be in place, the company uh AI strategy needs to be in place, and the company's AI strategy is driven by uh the willingness to pay of the of your customer and the attributes, the top six attributes basically that drive your customer's willingness to pay. That's what drives your company's AI strategy or your scorecard for your organization, uh, whether you're a bank or a hospital, uh, you have a scorecard, and that's what drives your company's AI strategy towards sovereign AI as a nation, uh as a region, uh, but it's no more a buzzword because uh we have to think about um all the ways it could go wrong. And um, the problem is AI is exponential and the regulation in these regions is linear. So, how do you educate those lawmakers, the regulators around AI? A lot of uh governments and regions are approaching sovereign AI from a regulation perspective, but AI is not regulation driven. AI is intellectually driven and RD driven. So that's how we have to approach it from a people perspective as it relates to sovereign AI.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

That's amazing. Well, one for the road, Joe, how would you help a company that's starting its first AI office or center of excellence?

SPEAKER_01 12:18

Yeah, so I'll recap a bit of what I said earlier. So again, it starts with AI fluency at the board, at the leadership level, and then identifying the champions. Now, once you identify those champions, it's where we come in and help is really, uh, of course, with the AI fluency training, uh, we can help you there. The map the masterclass formats are either half a day or two days um um format, but then identifying those high-value AI use cases. So JP Morgan, uh, in their AI Center of Excellence, they started with 400 AI use cases. Now they're up to 800 uh AI use cases at JP Morgan as a bank. How does JP Morgan identify 800 AI use cases? Every department within JP Morgan can contribute to the AI journey. And uh in the AI Center of Excellence, you basically have a global view of everything that's happening in AI plus X for your industry. So let's take a bank, for example, um, wealth management, AI plus wealth management. What are they doing in Switzerland? What are they doing in Qatar, in London, in New York, in Singapore, in Silicon Valley, in Boston? So you get that global view, uh, and that's what um helps you in your AI journey because AI is no more just large language models and and the and a chatbot interface. It's solving real problems. But if you uh, you know, because there's too much noise, you don't know what you don't know. So if you're working in a bank, you're an expert in wealth management, you need to understand globally what's happening in AI plus wealth management. And that's how we help through uh setting up that AI center of excellence. So this the AI Center of Excellence becomes, let's call it the center, uh the source of truth for your organization and your AI journey so that uh everyone can have a uh a pathway to participate in AI, whether you're the call center or uh wealth management or the or the leadership. Everyone should be able to contribute to the AI journey uh of the organization.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

That's great. Well, Joe, it's been super having you with us on a podcast. I've certainly enjoyed myself on this episode, and I hope you have to. And to our audience, thank you for tuning in once again. Your likes, follows, and shares mean so much to us, and we are so happy to have you with us every single episode. Once again, on behalf of the AI Partnerships call, my guest has been Joe Webby of Dimless, and this is the AIP podcast, and your host, Ann Chang signing off.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Thank you.