It fosters a culture of digital proficiency, cultivating a workforce equipped with necessary skills to navigate the future landscape 

by NURUL SUHAIDI 

IN TODAY’S competitive business landscape, enterprises of all sizes and industries recognise the imperative of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their operations and explore untapped growth opportunities. 

In the face of an ever-evolving and challenging business environment, integrating a robust AI strategy into a company’s framework becomes essential. 

This strategic adoption not only maximises the potential benefits but also fosters a culture of digital proficiency, cultivating a workforce equipped with the skills necessary to navigate the future landscape. By embracing AI, businesses can unlock new levels of efficiency, innovation and cultivate a talent pool capable of thriving in a digitally-driven world. 

LifeTech, a local IT services company and cyber security services provider said that since implementing AI into their operations in 2018, its AI technologies have helped the company become leaner, primarily by allowing its analysts to properly identify and discover threats first-hand in order to prevent malicious activities for its clients. 

“The automation allows our cyber threat analysts to be smarter, more deliberate, have deeper insights and have more actionable intelligence so that they can act in ways that are more efficient and effective for our customers,” its Business Development director Evan Loh said. 

In addition, Loh said utilising AI also enhances operation, time effective and cuts almost 90% average time used to discover threats. This in return enabled them to focus on a full investigation, ultimately, to contain the problem so that the customers do not deal with the security issue multiple times. 

“We were able to cut down false positives and improve mean response times. Before we implemented these processes, analysts spent a lot of time on research while compiling information and reports,” he told The Malaysian Reserve (TMR). 

Instead, Loh said, the valuable time could have been used to focus on providing solutions or containment of the issues. 

Among the AI components, Life-Tech leverages machine learning, automation and (orchestration capabilities) which enables its team to make the best choices and decisions before leveraging and executing them into appropriate practices to achieve a higher level of cyber security and cyber resilience. 

“For example, our AI will derive more information related to cyber threats such as indicators of compromise, forensic data, relationships and threat intelligence,” he said. 

Through all this information, its AI system will provide several recommendations so that the analysts can provide the best solutions to customers such as blocking malware or malicious IPs, patching vulnerabilities, escalation and more. 

Despite all the benefits it brings to the company, he added that leveraging AI can be a complex process and challenging. 

This is primarily because each client may have different environments and varying devices, hardware and software, which required its team to build many of the integrations from scratch. 

“However, as we began to understand the different customer ecosystems we were able to customise our AI to fit these different environments,” he said. 

Nonetheless, tapping into AI translated into key benefits for their operations, especially in keeping its team leaner since incorporating more AI use cases, analysts are able to handle more incidents and threats with less effort compared to before. 

“Response has significantly increased over time as we implement more playbooks. Most importantly our Service Level Agreements (SLA) are now being achieved with significantly fewer human errors occurring,” he added. 

With the anticipation that AI has the potential to disrupt the cyber security industry, especially the proactive measures, Loh opines that the advancements are a positive call as it may complement business in a way that customers are not just protected against the latest threats but also future threats that have not even occurred.

“The further advancements in predictive analysis mean that AI would be able to predict and protect against future zero-day vulnerabilities or even malware,” Loh said. 

AI Enables Human to Focus on Strategic Works

Meanwhile, Krenovator Technology Sdn Bhd CEO Mahadhir Yunus said the integration of AI has proven to increase its business efficiency since AI can free up employees from automated work, and focus more on strategic work while leveraging an efficient hiring process for its client. 

Providing a platform that focuses on streamlining tech talent and recruiters, he said the AI platform has helped companies to make better hiring decisions as its AI provides insights into the skills and experience of candidates. 

Given the results, he believes that businesses that fail to adopt AI may lose market share to competitors who are using AI to improve their operations, incurred increasing costs, as well hinder their innovation process. 

“For example, AI can be used to develop new products and services, and businesses that don’t adopt AI may miss out on these opportunities,” Mahadhir said. 

Krenovator.io platform, Mahadhir said, offers three main services such as AI Coding Assistant for developers; which helps software developers save time for repetitive tasks like code checking and refactoring. 

Other than that, it also provides an AI CV Maker, helping talents save time to create a CV by offering AI assistance for grammar as well as AI Talent Filtering that enables Human Resource (HR) departments or personnel to save up to 80% of their time to filter potential candidates. 

Whereas, in terms of improving business decision-making, he said AI can analyse large amounts of data to identify patterns and trends that would be difficult to spot with human eyes. 

“For example, this information can then be used to make better decisions about everything from product development to marketing campaigns,” he told TMR. 

For its business, he also shared the remarkable success of leveraging AI as such it has so far helped clients that comprise tech start-ups and SMEs to retain qualified candidates in open software engineering. 

He shared that a common problem faced by larger companies is a high turnover rate among its IT staff and they are struggling to find ways to improve employee retention. 

“Decided to try our AI Tech Talent platform, they were impressed with the results as the AI Talent Filter and job portal feature tool helped them to identify the skills and experience that were most in demand in their industry,” Mahadhir said. 

Overall, Krenovator has helped local companies attract and hire more qualified candidates faster and easier as well as helping corporations to reduce employee turnover. 

Moving forward, expecting there will be a more competitive environment for recruiting platforms using AI, he intends to stay ahead in the market by consistently developing and upgrading its AI Tech Talent platform to provide users with better learning, career development and hiring experience. 

“This will be done through continually improving our AI algorithms, adding new features to our platform, partnering with other companies as well as expanding our global reach,” Mahadhir concluded. 

Boosting Job Opportunities Using AI

In a similar vein, sharing the perspectives of AI impacting the talent and recruiters’ markets, LinkedIn Malaysia and Head of Emerging Markets, Sout-East Asia country manager Rohit Kalsy opined that professionals must build up their AI skills wallet to boost work productivity and creativity especially for managers to hire their dream candidates. 

“For example, job seekers can tap on AI-powered tools to unlock new opportunities in their career journeys. One of our new features leverages an advanced OpenAI GPT model to help professionals create outstanding LinkedIn profiles,” he told TMR. 

With this tool, candidates can highlight their most important skills and experiences in their profile, which allows them to showcase their unique voice and professional journey more effectively. 

Meanwhile, for recruiters, he said adopting generative AI technology can go a long way in streamlining the overall hiring process. 

“For example, LinkedIn recently introduced AI-powered job descriptions to simplify the process of drafting job postings, leveraging the data that our customers have chosen to share with us on our platform,” he said. 

Recruiters will only need to provide basic information, and the AI tool generates a job description, which they will be able to review. 

According to Rohit, in a global study by LinkedIn, 75% of hirers hope that generative AI can free up time for more strategic work and two-thirds hope that it can help uncover new candidates. 

He added that in Malaysia, LinkedIn research shows that the top skills required for a particular job have changed by an average of 27% since 2015, with the pace of change accelerating during the pandemic. 

At this pace, skills could change by close to 50% by 2025. By 2025, LinkedIn would likely see three new skills in the top skills for a job in the country. 

“There is urgency for Malaysian professionals and businesses to keep up with this pace of change or risk falling behind,” Rohit added. 

Nonetheless, he said authenticity is still invaluable as with all technology, and AI tools alone cannot replace the human touch required in the recruitment and job-seeking journey. 

“Recruiters will still need to build relationships with candidates and find the best talents for the job, while job seekers will still need to acquire and highlight relevant skills, personalise their resumes to align with their tone and experience and so on,” he said. 

While AI is becoming mainstream to drive productivity and innovation, the adoption must be blended with the human workforce as the co-pilot. Both need to work hand in hand in order to reap the maximum benefits and achieve smarter work. 

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• This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition