Chamber and committees

Good morning. I thank both our witnesses for joining us. I will come to you first, Leo. Originally, our papers showed that Ziyad, who I think is a partner of yours, was to appear for Mamba Sounds, but I think that you are appearing under a different company name today. It would be useful, first of all, to understand what you are doing in the AI space and why, and what has brought you to this point.

It makes complete sense. This session follows our earlier session with Kayla-Megan Burns, who is a board member specialising in AI for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. It would be useful to understand the scale of the problem and the implications for the people in the artistic sector of fraudulent activity around their material.

We also heard from Dex Hunter-Torricke in our earlier session, who said that he could see the possibility of one person operating a company that would have turnover of $1 billion with effective utilisation of AI.

It would be useful to understand the scale of the problem, where you see yourself operating and why you think that the new product that you are looking at could fit into that niche.

Thank you. I will hand back to the convener.

There was so much in that answer. Working on the basis that, almost regardless of what people do, it will already be too late, I get the sense from what you are saying that we should not get in the way of the disrupters who will manage to create sole-employee, billion-dollar companies. However, when it comes to the utilisation of AI in the public sector, trust is a much bigger consideration. In the context of some of the use cases that the public sector deals with, getting it wrong could have catastrophic consequences with regard not only to the data, but to society’s trust in government and all that that entails.

I would appreciate your thoughts on that.

We could unpick so much in that; that is our challenge with such a short, sharp and focused series of sessions.

I would like to get reflections from both of you on another point. About 10 years ago, when I was in Westminster, we talked about AI in a session with a professor from the University of Cambridge. At that point, it seemed unbelievable how many base functions of lawyers and accountants were going to be taken over, although we know that to be true now.

When I asked that professor what skill set was going to inherit the earth, his answer was that the creatives will keep on creating no matter what, and they will harness the power of AI to endlessly create—and that will be the merging point. That has always stuck with me, and I would appreciate hearing your reflections on it. Do you believe that that is true? What does it mean for how we fundamentally shape the provisioning of everything, from a governance perspective?

I will first come back to Dex Hunter-Torricke and finish with Kayla-Megan Burns, and that will be me done, convener.

Thank you. I put the same question to Kayla-Megan Burns.

You make an important point. Before I was elected, I did some primary research into the perception of Scotland’s global diaspora, with about 1,200 participants across 72 countries. One of the big themes that came out was about the trust factors in relation to Scotland as a place to do business and Scots as people to do business with. That is something that we can trade on, because it is a currency that has high value in today’s world.

I return to my point. Leo, you are younger and we all hope that you have a great career and future ahead of you. What have you seen in the skills that you have been able to learn and the ecosystem that has supported you that gives you confidence that Scotland can compete globally in this space?

Good morning. It is an absolute privilege for us to get the benefit of some of your precious time this morning.

I want to come to Dex Hunter-Torricke first. Your hinterland is quite startling, and you have recently started working with the Treasury. Given the private sector career that you have had thus far, what is your perspective as someone who has come in and engaged with the public sector?

Our Scottish Government is working on an AI strategy and plan at the moment, and I suspect that the challenge that it faces is what to make a priority when everything feels as though it is a priority and when you yourself have said that AI integration is more than a technology. What advice would you give the Scottish Government?

There are a lot of follow-up questions that I could ask, but I want to bring in Kayla-Megan Burns.

Earlier, you mentioned some statistics. I know that some of them came from the report on the RSNO’s economic impact, because we held an event on that last week in Parliament, but it would be useful to know, for the record, where the other statistics came from.

Yes. It is just a tiny point, which I do not want to take too much time on, but is the issue not even more complex than that with music? As you have explained, everything has been scraped, but you can create entirely new pieces made up of the best of the rest, if you like. I could sit and listen to Mahler 5, for example, and I could tell you which player it is in the trumpet solo in the opening; I could listen to “Nessun Dorma” and tell you whether the tenor singing the top C is Pavarotti, Domingo or Kaufmann. You could basically splice the best of the rest. It is not as simple, surely, as just taking an artist in a song or whatever; you could create something note by note with key thematics.