SALISBURY — Artificial intelligence was the topic at the Rowan County Chamber of Commerce’s Nov. 21 Power in Partnership Breakfast with Dr. Zack Hubbard, chief information officer at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, as the featured speaker.

RCCC served as the event sponsor, and Dr. Carol S. Spalding, president of the college, welcomed everyone to the event noting there were many partners they work with in attendance. 

The college has been in the community for 63 years, she said, and added that the campus here is expanding, and that they are the “eighth largest community college.”

A brief video was presented sharing things that are taking place at the college and noted that tours of the campus are available.

Spalding then introduced Hubbard to the group, telling that he has “14 years of experience in higher education and has had a lot of diverse roles” including faculty member, program chair, a dean of information technology and as of January has served as the college’s CIO.

She said he is “very much attuned to cybersecurity” and wrote the first AI course for the college prior to the role he currently holds.

Hubbard told the crowd that he likes to “talk about AI with a perspective of where we are right now and also what’s coming our way in the future.”

He said that AI is something people are interested in and that it “changes lives, whether we realize it or not.”

In his PowerPoint presentation, Hubbard told some common examples and future examples of AI.

Common examples included smart assistants such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant; social media recommendations, which he pointed out happens often on Facebook with friend recommendations; shopping recommendations; and Chatbots.

Future examples, which he said, are things “that are emerging and are in different levels of development,” were self-driving cars; AI-based robotics; AI in healthcare; AI in finance; and increases in AR/VR capabilities.

He provided definitions for four concepts taking place in AI such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language model and generative AI.

It was based on generative AI, which, he said, is a type “capable of making something, generating something, text, images, video,” that he addressed various implications in society and the jobs that could be most impacted.

He talked about some advantages, several being efficiency and the potential for the creation of new job opportunities, and disadvantages as he touched on privacy concerns. He said this was a big one and stressed the importance of not putting out personal information.

The conclusion of the presentation focused on how RCCC is responding to this as he noted a “partnership with Dell and Intel and being a part of their AI incubator program,” which means they can access their training resources for their courses for AI as well as other areas of computer science. Plus, he said, they can also use these AI resources in their cybersecurity program noting that these threats are huge and help is needed to go through the many messages that organizations receive as it helps to filter them out.

Attendees were given the opportunity to ask questions before Elaine Spalding, president of the Rowan County Chamber of Commerce, expressed thanks to Hubbard and to all for attending.