Yes, dear guests, I also greet you with love and respect. Today, together with our dear Professor Pınar, we will take a tour of the horizon on the subject of Artificial Intelligence. Normally, we are used to speaking one by one, but today we decided to do a duet. I hope you like it. First of all, I would like to introduce our dear Professor Pınar to you. Actually, she doesn't need it, but since I am very impressed, I want to introduce her while giving her the floor. After graduating from the German High School, she went to Stanford University, studied Economics and German Studies, and completed her master's and doctorate at the same university. Today, she is a very valuable professor who is a faculty member at Oxford University. She is a very valuable asset in the field of business. She has the Under 40 Best 40 Professor award. Alongside technology startups and venture capital companies, she provides academic and strategic consulting to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, the Financial Conduct Authority, the European Commission, and the OECD. I welcome her again and I want to ask: Why is AI entrepreneurship important and what will it provide to society? Let's start talking from here, Professor.
Thank you very much, Mr. Hakan. I'm sorry, I couldn't bring my voice for the duet. However, I am very happy to be here, and it is truly very proud that such a study is taking place in Turkey. I want to start by asking why AI is important. AI was something we saw on the very edges of technology and perhaps weren't sure if it would affect our lives much 5, 10 years ago. But actually, for a long time, we have been collecting data in many sectors, many areas of our lives. From the watch you wear to the smart rings we now use, from the emails we write at work to the Zoom meetings we started with COVID, we have collected so much data over time. And these data don't mean anything on their own, but they can actually change and beautify our lives. For this to have an impact on our lives, we needed some tools and equipment. Here, Artificial Intelligence and what we call Machine Learning became very important. These technologies had been developing for years, but they became truly important when combined with data. Especially in sectors with very intensive data like finance, insurance, and health, AI can create very big changes. With your permission, I would like to give a few examples. Some of these belong to the startups here, and some are startups I have seen abroad. For example, when we look at the finance sector, using your personal data, startups can now help you use money much faster and better. This existed before, but it was only valid for the richest, the top 1%. But now, using AI, taking into account all the spending we have done so far and everything we can do, we can produce ways to use money faster and better in a much more different, much more democratic way for everyone. In the health sector, for example, the Corpo AI company here is also one of the 100 companies. There are very important developments here. What we see in the health sector is not just discovering drugs faster, but also using our own health data to help us live our lives better. In insurance, again, the Lumion company is also one of the 100 companies. These companies have now become companies that can offer insurance pricing tailored specifically to you and your life. In every area of our lives like this, using personal or company data, we are moving towards a point where we can live a much better, much more democratic life with everyone's information. Of course, there are some obstacles along the way, and we will talk about those too. But overall, I am very excited about AI and the future.
Yes, thank you very much. Indeed, AI is actually what excites and gives the most hope to humanity right now, and of course, if not positioned correctly, it also raises concerns. Today, especially when we look at where generative AI has come, we think about what it will provide, how it will provide it, what benefit it will bring to society, and why it is important. But it is a fact that it also contains problems from many angles. Especially with unemployment, and in an environment where economies are not growing enough and there is stagnation in a high-interest rate environment, the fact that AI is entering our lives at this speed brings with it unemployment concerns, which also creates a question mark for humanity. I think this should be addressed. But I tend to look at this from the positive side. Because as humans, we created AI, we created this technology, we succeeded in copying our brains, we transferred our learning process to machines, to the computer world. We learned to access this data without using our brains, without memorizing, and moreover, by accessing unlimited data, to derive intelligence from it. Now, with the advancements that will be made in the health sector, because technology moved fast and the place we have reached today in AI has overtaken developments in other areas, but when health sector developments catch up, I believe that this time, there will be an integration. The AI technology we produced with AI will meet the human brain and human body, leading to a transition to Human 2.0, and therefore, these concerns will be alleviated at that time. Because just as you don't group people only as good and bad, you don't group technologies as good and bad. Both the good and the bad will integrate with this technology, and in the next struggle of life, the struggle between good and evil will continue with the support of AI.
As İş Bankası, why do we value AI technology and what do we see in AI technology? Specifically, how do we foresee it contributing to the economy? We believe in the transformative power of AI. We believe it has a strong connection with the finance sector and should have. That's why we start this value chain from our universities. We believe that our universities should have very good departments, very good students, and faculty members in the field of AI, and we want to support our universities in this regard. We took our first step about 5 years ago with Koç University. We established the AI İş Bankası Application and Research Center within Koç University, and we wanted to create a space for master's and doctoral students, postdoctoral students who want to work on AI. Both within the university and at the towers, we established the scientific leg of the Koç University İş Bankası AI Research Center. We desire to continue this with other universities. In the second ring, to ensure that the science produced in universities reaches our entrepreneurs, we have taken on the patronage of the AI Factory and the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Because we believe that knowledge from the university can only reach and spread to society through startups. But if entrepreneurship is not connected to the university, it will be very easy to copy and its impact area will be shallow and not large. Since we think on a scale, in the AI Factory, for the startups we listen to and want to invest in, we make it a mandatory condition to have a Chief Science Officer. In the third ring, to ensure that these startups do this for society, not just for art's sake, we want them to meet with industrial establishments, SMEs, and businesses, and to be able to sell and use their products and services to them. Therefore, this time, we are opening İş Bankası's 17 million customer portfolio to these startups. We want our customers to complete their digital and green transformation by using these AI technologies that start from the university and are embodied by entrepreneurs. We provide financing and resources for the investments they will make through these startups for their digital and green transformation. If this investment period is 18 months, it's 18 months payment-free. If the return on this investment is 10 years, we provide the financing for this transformation with a payment plan over 10 years, with a payment-free investment period followed by a long-term investment plan. We find resources for this. Therefore, the role of banks and financial institutions in the economy is to support the creation and formation of this ecosystem, and to create an environment and culture that will allow successful startups to flourish and develop by investing in the ecosystem, not just in individual startups. And subsequently, to bring this together with traditional industrial establishments, we believe banks have a role in utilizing the scarce savings in our country. Therefore, our approach to why AI entrepreneurship is important, what it will provide to society, and what role banks and İş Bankası have in this is like this. Now, I want to ask Professor Pınar what we need to do for these startups, for this ecosystem to be successful. Are what we are doing enough? What else awaits us in this regard? I want to ask these questions.
