SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Paul Brody is Global Blockchain Leader at EY (Ernst & Young). He sat down with Malandrino to discuss how the intersection of AI, data verification, privacy, and blockchain could create new industry standards within the coming years.
Under Brody’s leadership, EY has established a global presence in the blockchain space by creating blockchain-enabled solutions such as the EY OpsChain Contract Manager (OCM), designed to help enterprises more efficiently execute complex business agreements while preserving confidentiality.
EY has also worked with leading Italian news agency, ANSA, to develop EY OpsChain Notarization, a blockchain-powered solution to help content creators and media outlets protect their content from misuse and manipulation.
“What we’re doing for ANSA involves tagging and fingerprinting content so that you can verify its authenticity and originality,” Brody explained.
Another important use case for this technology is differentiating human versus AI-generated content.
“We have reached the point where it is possible, using AI, to create content that is virtually indistinguishable from original pictures, original writing done by humans,” Brody said. “And so this idea of being able to fingerprint your content as you create it and understand the provenance, the origin of that content is going to become very important.”
On the horizon, he is looking forward to exploring the benefits of merging blockchain and AI.
“In terms of the positive synergies of blockchain and AI, I’m expecting them to be very large. They’re starting now, but they’re going to ramp up quite a bit over the next few years.”
He said one of the most exciting frontiers is the combination of AI decision-making with blockchain execution. Harnessing blockchain’s accurate and reliable deterministic system alongside AI’s vast analytic capabilities could help large corporations more quickly and efficiently assess problems and devise solutions.
Brody underscored the tremendous care and consideration needed to leverage blockchain and AI in such complex and nuanced systems while mitigating risks like hallucination.
“We have to think about how we’re going to constrain and manage those to avoid bad outcomes.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Paul Brody.