A year of corporate profits in Hawai‘i was overshadowed by a massive loss at Hawaiian Electric Industries, parent of the utility at the center of litigation over the deadly Lahaina wildfire that killed 102 people in August 2023.

Once among the state’s most profitable companies, Hawaiian Electric reported a more than $1.42 billion loss in 2024 – driven largely by a $4.04 billion wildfire settlement with thousands of Maui residents and businesses.

Plaintiffs alleged the utility failed to shut off power lines despite high-wind warnings that preceded the fire. The company, which supplies electricity to about 95% of Hawai‘i’s population, agreed to pay nearly half the settlement amount.

The state, Maui County and other defendants, including Kamehameha Schools, West Maui Land Co., Hawaiian Telcom and Spectrum/Charter Communications, also agreed to contribute to the settlement.

Hawaiian Electric’s 2024 loss was greater than the combined total annual profits tallied by 53 companies and organizations in the state during the same period, according to the annual ranking by Hawaii Business Magazine of the most profitable companies in the Islands. The list includes all the local companies whose data is publicly available or was submitted to us.

Hawaiian Electric president and CEO Scott Seu said in the company’s annual report that the Hawai‘i Supreme Court ruling earlier this year to allow settlement funds to be released helped “to move the settlement forward and provide more clarity for our company’s path toward reestablishing financial stability.”

The amount of Hawaiian Electric’s loss was also seven times the size of the company’s prior year profit of nearly $200 million.

To help pay for its portion of the settlement, Hawaiian Electric sold 90% of its stake in American Savings Bank to independent investors for $405 million in cash.

“Importantly, the proceeds from this transaction support our efforts to rebuild our financial strength while creating flexibility for how we finance Maui wildfire-related obligations and key utility initiatives, such as wildfire risk reduction,” Seu told shareholders.

“We are deeply committed to advancing our wildfire mitigation efforts, and since launching an expanded wildfire safety strategy in the wake of the Maui wildfires, Hawaiian Electric has rapidly advanced efforts to reduce the risk of wildfires ignited by its equipment.”

We asked the 341 participants in the BOSS Survey:

To what degree, if at all, is your business using artificial intelligence?

Those using AI in the workplace were asked to describe how they use it. In general terms, the top five uses of AI are:

• Content creation and communication

• Greater efficiency and productivity

• Customer service

• Data analysis

• Research and information gathering

“I’ve never wanted for work,” he says. The calls can come from a former client upgrading that same home that Kinghan worked on decades ago or a new client who got his name through the grapevine.

BIG PROJECTS: He moved to Hawai‘i in 2013 for a job at the former Kaiser Estate in Hawai‘i Kai. He and a crew spent several months pulling 40,000 feet of wire from giant thousand-foot spools to various locations on the estate and installing equipment.

“Wiring for lighting, audio, video, network connections – everything,” he says, plus computer coding for the system.

That project had included a $200,000 aquarium behind the bar, but the owner instead settled on four large TV monitors stacked two by two that could show either four video feeds or a single big one.

Soon after, Kinghan set up a million-dollar home theatre on Hawai‘i Loa Ridge that included high-end Steinway speakers and amps as well as individual controls for the seats.

He worked on a live sound reinforcement system for shows at the Four Seasons Resort O‘ahu at Ko Olina and in a past life helped do live sound for a vast range of performances – from San Francisco 49ers football games to Luciano Pavarotti and Herman’s Hermits.

BEGINNINGS: Kinghan grew up in California and Nevada. When he was 5, his father gave him a Phantom Rolls Royce radio. “I immediately wanted to open it up, and I broke it,” he says.

His love of playing guitar and other instruments helped him make friends and become an audio expert. But playing in a garage band wasn’t a long-term career, so he joined the Navy, got an electronics degree and became a sonar tech. He says he solved his final exam problem in seconds – so fast that some exam supervisors thought he cheated.

Kinghan’s first job after the Navy was with International Game Technologies out of Reno. A new technology back then was video gambling machines – video keno, video poker and video slots. “They’d call me to come in and validate a machine. That it hasn’t been tampered with,” he says.

The “first coolest thing” he ever did was installing a powerful pan-and-tilt camera on a cabin’s giant dome in Tahoe. From Dallas, the cabin owner could “show the boys in Dallas where he lived and just see what was going on” all the way across Lake Tahoe. The house also had electronic door locks that could be opened or closed remotely if a contractor needed entry.

LEARNING THE TRADE: He honed many of his skills while working on estates and pricey condos in the San Francisco Bay Area for VIA International Systems, a high-end concierge AV company where he filled just about every role at one time or another: programmer, techie, engineer, project manager and salesman.

But sales was not his first choice. Kinghan told his boss: “I prefer to bring things to life. I like getting my hands dirty, rolling up my sleeves.”

THE ISLANDS CALL: He had let VIA International know he was interested in moving to Hawai‘i, and the call came when he was leaving the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco after working on former Vice President Al Gore’s penthouse condo. The company needed an expert on O‘ahu for the former Kaiser Estate job, so he sold almost everything he owned and moved.

SOLUTIONS: His company’s philosophy is, “There’s never a problem; there’s always a solution.”

Another guiding principle: “Always do the right thing,” he says.

That’s especially important on O‘ahu. “It’s a small island, and everybody knows everybody,” Kinghan says. “Everything gets around real quick … whether you’re a dirtbag contractor or somebody who means what they say and says what they mean.”

OUTSIDE HIS COMFORT ZONE: Once, he was asked to give a presentation on the future of home automation to a large convention of architects in Los Angeles in 1994. He was nervous but pulled it off. “There isn’t anything we can’t control,” he told them.

“They loved it though they didn’t understand it then. It was so new.”

Today, you can remotely turn on items at your house: lights, A/C, even your hot tub. Or Kinghan can set the system to turn the devices on automatically when your phone is a specific distance away. The possibilities are almost endless.

MENTORS AND INSPIRATION: “I’ve always had really awesome people in the right place at the right time,” Kinghan says. “I’ve had these blessings of angels and mentors.”

Then he adds, “Being grateful: That’s what inspires me – just being grateful [for] where I live and who I’ve got to love.”

hiavls.com

Zippy’s, the popular Hawaiian restaurant chain which expanded into the mainland last year in Las Vegas, has released new digital ordering programs.  

 On Wednesday, Zippy’s launched a new digital experience update focused on pre-ordering on its app and order.zippys.com. When people place an order online at Zippy’s, the amount ordered is higher than when people order in its restaurants, according to Kevin Yim, VP of Marketing and Communications at FCH Enterprises. 

The update by Zippy’s underscores the demand to increase technological advancements in restaurants and improve customer convenience. Hawai’i businesses are responding to mainland trends of increasing digital services like mobile kiosks, direct connection to delivery services and ordering at the table with a tablet.  

The digital update features a redesigned interface, making it easier to order, find favorite items, apply rewards, and view daily and seasonal specials.  

The move allows Zippy’s to have a MACH architecture which stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless. This allows Zippy’s to use and test different programs at the same time without impacting other programs.  

“We needed this MACH architecture so that we can plug and play new vendors as the world of restaurant technology is fast,” Yim says.  

Some current features include limited items marked ASAP, meaning that they cannot be reserved for multiple hours. Customers can now view and order breakfast items for the next day. Before the update, breakfast items were only available during the scheduled breakfast hours of the restaurant – a feature that was highly requested by customers. 

 “I anticipate that we’ll see a little uptick in breakfast sales as a result of making breakfast available to be ordered anytime, but still only picked up during breakfast hours,” Anthony Meija, VP of Information Technology says. 

While Zippy’s is privately-owned and does not disclose revenue, Yim says the company is slightly above the national average for online orders. He says that as the company looks forward, it is aiming to increase the usage of overall orders.  

The new technology was developed in-house with the help of an outside agency. Yim says Zippy’s is looking to hire more locals who are in the technology field with a desire to return to Hawaiʻi.  

The company is also working with Piʻiku Co., a local non-profit focused on training students interested in technology in Hawaiʻi. Piʻiku interns at Zippy’s have been working on creating a custom cake ordering website for Napoleon’s Bakery that will allow customers to select what kind of cake size, frosting and decorations they want.  

Zippy’s is aiming to improve the holiday meal programs for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s as people order larger portions of meals weeks in advance. Both projects won’t be released until later this year.  

“We look at programs like Piʻiku as not only training the next generation of Hawaii-based tech engineers, project managers or UX designers, but we also look at them as a potential source for recruiting,” Yim says. “So who knows? Piʻiku intern today, Zippy software engineer tomorrow.” 

The restaurant chain’s focus on technology doesn’t mean that it will decrease staff at its restaurants or be replaced completely by kiosks. 

“Service is a big part of our brand. We want to make sure we’re there to help you,” Meija says. “But I do think that there’s an opportunity for more digital to try to get us in line with what other people are seeing.” 

This approach is especially critical for small and medium-sized businesses – which can no longer assume they’re not big enough to be targets. Think of a well-planned cyber resilience strategy as part of your business continuity plan, just as you plan for disasters like major storms.

Here are seven ways to strengthen cyber resilience.

1. Develop a Comprehensive Incident Response Plan

The plan should contain clearly defined steps for detecting, containing and mitigating threats. It must include roles and responsibilities across the organization, from IT teams to executive leadership, ensuring that each stakeholder understands their part in mitigating damage and restoring systems. Ensure that you have role clarity by establishing an incident response team to handle the cyber incident and business continuity leaders to manage communication and keep essential services running.

2. Clear Communication Plan With Preapproved Messaging

Having preapproved messages for a few scenarios will increase transparency with your customers and keep your staff apprised of the situation. For instance, external communications will tell customers you are having a service outage and will send updates at a specific time, while your internal communications would focus on what teams need to be activated and what employees should do.

Example of a message to customers: “We are currently investigating a cybersecurity incident affecting some of our systems. Our business continuity plan is in effect, and essential services remain operational. Further updates will follow as more information becomes available.”

Example of a staff message: “We have detected a potential network breach. All employees must disconnect from the network immediately. Incident response teams please report to your locations immediately.”

3. Prioritize Data Backups and Disaster Recovery

A strong disaster recovery plan is essential for cyber resilience. Businesses must prioritize regular data backups and establish “failover” systems that automatically take over when main systems go down, ensuring data integrity and accessibility. Cloud-based systems and hybrid solutions can provide redundancy and ensure continuity, even if primary systems are compromised.

Ensure that you know how to contact your breach coach, a lawyer who specializes in cybersecurity and data protection law, through your cyber insurance policy, and have nondisclosure agreements in place with appropriate outside client services such as general counsel or public relations firms.

NDAs are necessary to ensure confidentiality in case of a breach. While it may be necessary at a certain point to notify impacted parties or make a public statement, you want to maintain control over the communications timeline so you have all the facts before engaging with stakeholders. Any details leaked too early could fuel speculation or false narratives.

4. Conduct Regular Verification and Validation Assessments

Cyber resilience is not a set-it-and-forget-it concept. Regular verification and validation assessments, such as running tabletop drills and tests of employee compliance, are critical to maintaining strong defenses and identifying gaps that may require IT upgrades. To prepare for communication disruptions during an incident, ensure you have printed copies of employees’ phone numbers or an alternative messaging system for emergencies.

5. Engage in Continuous Employee Training

Employees are often the weakest link. Frequent training sessions focused on recognizing phishing attacks, practicing good password hygiene and following data protection protocols can help minimize human error. Consider running simulated phishing attacks to gauge employee readiness and improve response protocols.

6. Leverage Automation and AI for Faster Detection

Cyberattacks often go undetected for weeks or months, allowing bad actors to do more damage. AI and automated systems can improve detection rates and flag suspicious activities in real time. Automating incident response protocols can also reduce downtime and improve recovery speed.

7. Collaborate With Third-Party Experts

Cyber resilience requires an ecosystem of expertise. Collaborating with cybersecurity consultants or managed security service providers can offer external assessments and strategies tailored to your industry. These partnerships provide an extra layer of vigilance and bolster internal IT resources.

The summit, held June 4 at Mid-Pacific Institute, included a session called “The Future of Work.” Participants in the session were:

• Brent Grimes, founder and CEO, Reef.ai
• Megan Hall, founder of segment X
• Yolanda Lau, founding board member, Hawaii Center for AI
• Gavin Steele, director of product management, altres
• Moderator: Ian Kitajima, president, PICHTR (Pacific International Center for High Technology Research)

Kitajima: These panelists have been using AI, building applications and launching businesses. I think it will be fascinating to hear from folks on the front line, implementing AI, finding the opportunities and challenges that you will also face as you go forward in this rapidly changing future. My first question: What is the future of AI?

Grimes: In the medium to long term, it’s going to be very difficult to imagine what life was like before. AI will be a default assumption: We’re going to operate kind of seamlessly around AI. In the short term, it’s going to be much more uneven. Think about an analogy: In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was becoming popular, there were a lot of businesses building on the internet. But there were also lots of existing businesses dependent on old ways of doing business.

The first wave of the internet was establishing the businesses and adapting to capabilities, but preserving what was known and realistic. That’s an analogy for AI in the short term. There’s going to be things that seem like magic appearing regularly. And it’s going to move very fast.

But the way that it works its way into our lives, it’s going to be much harder. A great example is automated home technology. You can already tell Alexa to turn your lights on or off. AI will be able to work with your home automation, but somebody has to build the scaffolding between the AI and the home systems to get them to work well. In the future, there’s going to be some company that’s invented from the ground up to create AI-enabled home automation that works very differently than adapting to today’s world. So I think there’s going to be a series of incremental changes that will add to a very different way of living 10 years from now.

Hall: I already have a hard time remembering what life was like just two years ago – before everything changed with ChatGPT. And I think that one of the big wow moments is AI allows computers to act more like a human and allows humans to act like a computer. People may say, “I’m not good with computers, so I’m not going to like AI.” But now computers are adapting to those people, and they might learn to love computers. And I think there will be a lot less clunky software in the future, because AI will make it easier for people to interact with software.

Steele: I think we’ll see a hyper-personalization of everything from education to work. As a parent, I want my child to have an education that suits her particular needs and strengths. I think schools can use AI to provide that personalized touch, whether it’s lesson planning or assessing students’ work.

It can get candidates in front of jobs that match their skill set and what they want to achieve and then personalize their tools so they can have a more meaningful impact at work.

Lau: AI will be incorporated into everything and that will accelerate the rate of change. AI will enable computer vision, enable robotics, hopefully solve climate change faster, improve synthetic biology and quantum computing.

Ian Kitajima: The moderator posed questions about AI in the workplace, useful tools for today and AI’s role in the digital divide. | Photos: Aaron Yoshino

Are We Creating a Greater Digital Divide?

Kitajima: What about equity? This group is probably the 1% really involved with artificial intelligence. You’re making the investment. Are we creating a greater digital divide?

Hall: ChatGPT and other AI tools are free, but if you are not aware they exist, you will not benefit from them. So there needs to be that awareness.

Lau: That’s why we started the Hawaii Center for AI – to increase the responsible, ethical, beneficial use of AI in our state. Not just to lift up individual people but to lift up the entire community. Hopefully the state economy becomes less reliant on tourism and diversifies. (Gesturing to Grimes and Hall) It brings me joy to see you’ve started tech companies in Hawai‘i.

Steele: At Altres, we provide services to 3,000 customers with 15,000 employees in Hawai‘i. So as we integrate AI into our tools and features, we are doing the research and asking questions across all departments so that all those businesses and employees can take advantage of these new tools.

Grimes: When thinking about equity, think about information access 20 years ago. We’re in a much better place now – it’s more available to most of the world. And a large percentage of the world’s population now has access at least to a mobile phone, which unlocks content and learning that was never available before.

But just because somebody has access to a phone doesn’t mean they have the time or support to invest in skill development and really participate in this shift to AI. So I think it’s important for organizations like yours (gesturing to Lau) and Purple Mai‘a to do great things locally, to help people reskill and adapt to the opportunities. These things are happening on a small scale, so I think it’s important for government to invest in making AI more accessible, so it’s not 1% participation in AI, but benefits the entire population.

I think a lot about what is the right skill set to succeed in the next 20 years. Traditionally, skill development has been about developing a deep set of skills around a certain problem. I think a lot of specific skill development will be replaced by being very adaptable, being a lateral thinker and adapting to a quickly changing world.

Change is scary, especially rapid change. But it also presents a lot of opportunities. The people who take advantage of those opportunities are those people who are proactive, intellectually curious and embrace the idea of “I may not know everything but I’m willing to dive in, learn and get out of my comfort zone and out of the thing I’ve been doing for 15 years.” Those people will create a lot of opportunity for themselves. And that’s a skill set employers are looking for.

Hall: You don’t need to take a course to learn AI, just like you don’t need a course on how to Google something or use Microsoft Word. You need to just try it. My theory of AI adoption is start by creating something that’s fun, whether it be music or a fun email.

Then incorporate it into your day-to-day job, like writing emails, then maybe a customer presentation. Then you can start experimenting with ChatGPT plugins and keep advancing. Just start by being curious, try it and have fun.

Steele: I think there’s a natural progression from asking ChatGPT a question, then progressing to telling it exactly what you want, whether it’s to generate code or a new process or another system to bring into the workplace. Once you get to that point, you really want systems in place internally that allow employees to bring results back into their work in a way that isn’t just copying and pasting. And younger employees will expect that some aspect of their work (will) be handled by AI, and if you use those tools in your workplace, that will be a competitive advantage in attracting them to your organization.

AI on the Job

Kitajima: How are you bringing AI to the workplace?

Steele: At Altres, we’re taking a slow approach. We invested early in this small AI team that looked at policy and research, then asked, “Where can we test this?” We started by testing Microsoft 365 with Copilot, asking employees about mundane tasks that frustrate them or take all their time, asking the engineering team to figure out the best tools for generating code and running test cases.

For our customers it’s, “How do we augment existing services rather than taking bigger swings at new technology?” We looked at our job description generator. If you’re hiring for a new position and you’ve never hired for that kind of position before, you’re wondering, “How do I write this job description?” So the first tool implemented was a position generator that allows you to have variable information to generate a job description. It gets you that first draft that you can edit to your organization’s needs and get posted sooner than in the past, or refresh existing posts that didn’t attract talent.

Grimes: Reef.ai is a startup based locally and we’ve been around for about three years. We’re building AI to make information more accessible for our customers. Using their own customer data that lives in different places, we help them better understand how they should allocate resources to drive more revenue with those customers. We make it possible for them to use an AI interface and their own corporate data to ask open-ended questions about their customer base.

They have a history with these customers. They know when they bought certain products, but they really want to understand which customers that bought Product X should be targeted to buy Product Y? These questions are very difficult historically to answer. That would take an analyst or data scientist weeks or months to answer. Our goal is to put the power of all of this data at the fingertips of day-to-day workers so they can do their jobs without them having to learn new skills around data science or machine learning.

Lau: What you’re talking about is essentially how Amazon grew their business. What I love about what you’re doing is enabling any company to have that data-first mindset to scale. I was on a Zoom meeting yesterday with some Stanford researchers and they presented research on how AI is being used to improve businesses. One of the most high-impact use cases is operations, including customer experiences, so I think you’ve got a great company.

Hall: I’m the founder of Segment X and what we do is help sales reps and marketing people personalize the sales cycle. They’re going after multiple industries and multiple personas making sales presentations and sales proposals. My company helps sales reps navigate that complexity and personalize all the documents through a sales cycle for each individual customer.

Photos: Aaron Yoshino

Many Possibilities for People

Grimes: I hope there is an opportunity for Hawai‘i to move away from being a follower to being an AI leader. I think the good news is it’s a relatively small community so we can get the right people on the same page. There’s interesting examples out there like Malta, with about half the population of Hawai‘i. But they’ve committed to create funding, building support and programs around AI, and they’ve already got a thriving startup ecosystem, and a lot of momentum around becoming a leader in AI.

I’d love to see a future where we can embrace AI in a way that is true to the values of Hawai‘i.

Hall: I think AI will lead to a rise in micro entrepreneurs and micro influencers because young kids are being told, “Start your own brand, music label, clothing brand, blog or channel.” I’m seeing both young and old embracing AI, and a big creative wave is coming.

Lau: I agree that AI is creating massive opportunity for anyone. Any one of you (gesturing to the audience) can start a business overnight – one that would have probably taken a team of people six months or more to launch, you can do in one weekend. And that’s going to change everything. I frankly wonder if my kids are going to go to college.

What AI Is Not Good At

Grimes: There’s a lot of things that AI is not good at. The reality is that if you’re looking for precision, generally AI is not fully there. If you use it to give suggestions, it can be very good.

There’s this misnomer that humans are creative, and AI is not. But AI can be very creative. If you ask it to auto generate some image and give it parameters, it’ll be very creative with what it generates. It might not be what you want or need, but you can adjust it. On things where there’s flexibility, the results you get back from AI can be powerful and effective.

If you’re looking for a very specific answer that’s repeatable over and over again, that’s where a lot of development is still needed. If there’s a clear answer, then AI can be pretty good. But if it has to interpret to get something correct, there’s still a long way to go. And it might be solved in six months or it might be 10 years.

Soft Skills Required in the Future

Kitajima: Over the last few years, what are the skills you and your teams have needed? I’ve heard adaptability is pretty core. What else?

Grimes: Being aware and humble about all the things you don’t know is a really important skill. The deeper I get into this, the less I feel like I know. A philosophy that’s been helpful for me in my life is: Even if you can’t see the whole road ahead, if you can figure out that first step and just make the leap, then the road becomes clearer and you can take the next step, and suddenly you’re well down the road. You now have a much clearer vision of what the opportunity is and what it can become. But the first step is the hardest. There’s a lot of uncertainty, fear and self-doubt to overcome to make the leap of faith, whether that’s changing a job, starting something on your own or just doing something dramatically different than what you’re used to.

But if you have this lifetime learner mindset and are willing to embrace a little discomfort at the start, the rest usually sorts itself out.

Photos: Aaron Yoshino

Your Next AI Steps

Hall: (To the audience) I’m assuming most of the people here have already used ChatGPT or Google Bard or something like that. If you’re ready to step up to the next level, there’s a couple things you could do. If you are in Google Sheets – that’s the Excel for Google – you can get a ChatGPT plug-in where, in the same way that you can pull down on Excel and have it run 10 calculations, you can instead have it run 100 requests. Instead of typing one and then another, you can do 100 at once.

I am equally if not more passionate about automation than I am about using large language models. There is an app called Zapier that you can connect to your email that’s connected to ChatGPT that has your prompts, so when you receive a type of email, it will reply back with the answer you want. You can actually make your own mini employees with Zapier and connect them into all the other software that you use.

Steele: Those tools are code free. They’re all clickand-drag and just connecting things together with the tools you already use. Start playing around with them, testing to see, “Am I getting the results that I would have expected in a normal business year or a normal business project that I might be taking on?”

Then you’ll graduate beyond the basics, maybe invest in AI and make small investments within your organization, whether it’s existing employees getting together or going to the market and hiring people.

Lau: I’m going to admit that I don’t fully trust ChatGPT to do my charts and stuff for me. (laughter) I’m still having it tell me the Python code or how to do it in Excel and doing it myself. So do what works for you. If you’re not comfortable with something, there’s certainly some other way that you can figure out how to use AI that you are comfortable with.

But to go back to the original question about preparing for this future of work, I couldn’t agree more with everything said about the need for adaptability and lifelong learning. My shorthand for it is the entrepreneurial mindset, because I think that encompasses all the skills that you need to succeed in the future of work.

I just finished the new book by Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy (“Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing)”), and he agrees that the entrepreneurial mindset is what everyone needs – not a specific version of entrepreneurship. I’m not talking about starting a venture-capital-backed company; that’s not for everyone. I’m just talking about knowing how to take appropriate risks, calculated risks, being comfortable being uncomfortable, (being a) lifelong learner – those are important skills.

Change is the only thing that we can count on today. Change is happening fast and it’s just going to keep accelerating. That’s the nature of exponential technologies. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential; we are linear. It’s hard to imagine just how quickly life is going to change for us. So the best thing any one of us can do for ourselves is to be an expert, not just on one thing, but ideally, I’d say, three different things so that if one of those things becomes obsolete, you still have the others to stand on. Besides that, you can be the one expert in the world that is, say, good at dance, therapy and music. That’s something you can do to prepare yourself.

Check Out These Tools

Kitajima: What are some of your favorite tools you could share with people, like, “Hey, check this out”? (See the August issue and visit hawaiibusiness.com for suggestions on apps and tools you can use now, from another panel at the AI Summit.)

Lau: I think the most fun way to use AI is making music. It’s lighthearted but also super educational. You could use it to make a fun jingle about, I don’t know, physics – it could be folksy or a blues song, rap or reggae.

Hall: Think about one thing that you hate doing and how you could try to automate that task. I combine Airtable with ChatGPT and Zapier. There’s a lot of things you can automate in your company or your life that you don’t want to do so you can free up time for the things that you actually enjoy.

Steele: Invoicing. You mean I have to ask for money for the service that I provided all week? That seems like a rotten plan. With things like Zapier, you could automate sending your invoices; plus ChatGPT could generate and send the thank-you notes in the same tone that you want to say it.

Lau: I also love Zapier. I’ve used it for years and years.

Grimes: My favorite pastime for AI now is a WhatsApp image generator that auto generates dad jokes and images that I can send to my daughters and embarrass them.

One tool that’s been really effective in my life is video recording software. If you’re on Zoom, Hangouts or Teams, it’ll not only record and give you the transcript, but it does AI summaries that allow you to quickly kind of remember what you did in your call and what the takeaways were. They can even do things like generate follow-up emails with action items.

Hall: I use Otter for the same thing. The reason I like Otter is you can have it do that live on your phone.

Lau: I also use Otter, but a study I read said overreliance on these things can make you less invested in the meeting, so it’s important to keep a human in the loop. Don’t just automate things and let it go. If it’s important to you, you need to pay attention – though still spend less time on it for sure.

But if you want to understand how to avoid some of AI’s newest cybersecurity threats to your organization and your family, keep reading here.

The moderator of the cybersecurity session, Kelly Ueoka, president of local IT provider Pacxa, described scary new ways that AI was used in a $25 million fraud case that was first reported in February.

A Hong Kong employee of a multinational design and engineering company called Arup was duped by deepfake voices and images on a video call that were so realistic that he thought he was seeing and talking to his CFO and other colleagues.

Create Your “Safe Word”

Another panelist at our cybersecurity session, Natalie Kim, senior counsel at OpenAI, said a “safe word” can offer another layer of protection against these sophisticated, AI-enabled fraudsters.

“People should have a safe word with their family so that if they’re ever in a situation like that, they can use the safe word and confirm who it is,” she said.

Safe words can be used in organizations, too, though they would have to change when people leave the organization. In any case, be prepared. “It doesn’t matter the size of your business, doesn’t matter how sophisticated you are, everyone can be a target,” Kim said.

Panelist Summer Rankin, AI solution architect at Booz Allen Hamilton, said the Hong Kong scam was “light-years” ahead of the cyberattacks we had been used to. So keeping up to date with what AI is capable of doing, she said, gives people and companies a better idea of what the next cutting-edge cyber fraud attack might look like.

Also understand the rules governing the software and platforms you use. “If I’m using a free version, it’s likely that what I put into it is not private. If it’s free, your data is their product. In fact, that may be the case even when you are paying for something,” Rankin said.

“So if you have a safe word with your family, don’t email it to each other,” she added. That got a lot of laughter from the audience, but dumb things like that can happen when we aren’t thinking about how easily much of our private lives can end up as public information.

How to Protect Your Data

Ueoka asked Matthew Joseff, global director for security, fraud and compliance at Splunk, a digital security company acquired this year by Cisco, how companies can prevent their data from leaking out.

Joseff provided a step-by-step guide. “Number one, define what you’re protecting. Data could be credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, 92% of global currency is data. So banks are data companies, not just money companies,” he said.

“Next, where is that data? For smaller businesses, it’s easier to take an asset inventory than for larger businesses. How do you make data secure if you don’t know where it is?”

And if data is your most valuable product, you need to start acting with the right mindset to protect it, he said. He makes the point by describing the elaborate security in some companies’ lobbies: guests require government-issued ID, need badges; there are guards, cameras, maybe metal detectors.

But if I’m a hacker, “I don’t need to go to your office,” he said. So spend the money necessary to provide security for your data.

The final thought comes from Ueoka, but it’s not something he said at the AI Summit. It’s something he told Staff Writer Shelby Mattos for her September outsourcing story.

“I think that within the next 12-24 months, we might see an influx of companies having to adopt AI because they will be getting attacked by AI,” he warned.

Founded in 1978 and based in Honolulu, it’s a nonprofit membership organization committed to advancing information and communications technologies globally, with an emphasis on the Pacific Ocean and Pacific Rim.

“Our organization and our members focus on satellites, subsea cables, data centers, landing stations, mobile, fiber … we have members across the entire industry,” says Brian Moon, who has been PTC’s CEO since 2022. “As we’ve evolved, we’ve started to use the term ‘digital infrastructure,’ but it’s essentially telecommunications and connectivity.”

PTC has 12 full-time staff, some working on O‘ahu and others on the continent.

Members include megawatt names like AT&T, Starlink, Meta and Oracle; Islands-based companies like Hawaiian Telcom and Hawaii Pacific Teleport; and entities such as Japanese public broadcaster NHK and Fiji’s Ministry of Communications. There are more than 400 member companies, with 4,000 people total participating in the organization.

One member organization, Google, recently announced plans for a $1 billion project called Pacific Connect, which will create new fiber-optic internet subsea cables and link hubs throughout the Pacific, including Japan, Hawai‘i, Fiji, Australia, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

“The bigger picture is it not only increases connectivity and reliability of internet on the Hawaiian Islands, but will also become literally the lifelines to Pacific islands that many of us haven’t heard of,” says Moon. “When you talk about opportunities of what the internet can do, what technology can do, that’s what our organization’s mission is. When you can connect more and more people, especially the next generation, that opens opportunities, whether it is for remote learning, access to digital health or remote work. Some of these locations, we’re not talking about getting access to social media; they’re just trying to make a consistent phone call or start doing SMS messaging.”

“There are certain areas, Latin America and Africa, that are also going to be hotbeds of opportunity for the industry moving forward. But right now, there’s certainly a focus on the Pacific,” says Moon. “We’ve got companies like Google, who are investing a lot of resources financially. From a business opportunity, there are lots of people in the Pacific who aren’t connected, so it’s an opportunity to reach them. But it’s also an opportunity for the United States to connect with Asia.”

Annual Convening

PTC’s flagship event is its annual conference, which has grown into one of the industry’s most important meetings of the year. “It has become synonymous with the organization,” says Moon. “I like to call it the Davos of digital infrastructure.”

The PTC Conference is held at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, typically in the second or third week in January. Several thousand people fly in from all over the world, with attendees from China and Singapore rubbing elbows with badge-wearers from Finland and India and striking up conversations over a mai tai with people from Kenya and Nepal.

“It brings the people with the research and academic credentials together with the movers and shakers, the people who are actually doing things. And there aren’t that many times when those people are together in the same hotel, over the same few days, sharing ideas,” says David Lassner, president of the UH System. Lassner is a former chair of PTC’s board and a lifetime member.

Lassner notes that along with conference sessions, plenty of business is conducted on the sidelines. “The major corporations that work in this space, they just rent a lot of rooms, and they are setting them up for offices and conducting business meetings all day, and hosting parties for their clients.”

He says the conference is better known outside the Islands than in it. “I think it’s known to a niche group here, but most of the participation is from outside Hawai‘i,” he says. “And it’s kind of amazing that we have one of the major global events, year in and year out, taking place here, and most people have no idea that it’s going on. Everybody who’s deploying major telecommunications infrastructure, certainly in this hemisphere, but anywhere in the world really, gathers in Honolulu in January. I think for Hawai‘i, we should be very proud that we’re a place that brings these people together.”

This year, PTC added a mid-year conference called PTC’DC that will take place in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 5 and 6.

“This will be approximately 250 to 300 attendees, much more intimate, and it’s very specific,” explains Moon. “What I mean by that is, we are convening with the government – the policymakers, regulators – and we’re bringing them together with the audience that PTC is known for, which is the C-suite.” There are a lot of potential regulations regarding digital infrastructure, and the group wants to educate the lawmakers on the issues.

PTC also conducts webinars year-round on timely topics such as AI. It also has an initiative, PTC Beyond, that supports emerging digital infrastructure professionals aged 35 and younger.

“We’ve also partnered with an organization called the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, specifically on a program called Girls in ICT (information and communications technology). It focuses on young women professionals, promoting opportunities and careers in telecom,” Moon says.

“This specific one is around the Pacific, so when you look at islands like Fiji, Tuvalu and others, there are so many bright young women who are just looking for an opportunity. Let’s get them connected. … Then you can become an engineer, then you can become whatever you want to be, but you need this foundation first.”

Trinh said 92% of Fortune 500 companies are either experimenting with AI or actually using it. In fact, Mattmiller added, many individuals are using AI tools at work that are not authorized by their companies.

“Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trends Index surveyed 30,000 knowledge workers worldwide and used the telemetry data from Microsoft Office tools,” he said. “It found that 76% of knowledge workers are already using AI tools and of those, 78% are bringing their tools to work, meaning they are moving ahead of their IT departments. And it’s not just Gen Z. More than 65% of Baby Boomers are using these tools.”

I asked the audience at the summit: “How many of you are using AI, but your company has no AI policy or you have no idea what that policy is?” More than half raised their hands. If that is happening at your workplace, I recommend you set a policy and clearly communicate it. One common practice is to create a committee of diverse users to sort through the issues and recommend guiding principles. Be prepared to evolve as you learn more and AI evolves.

Can’t Code? No Problem

For those of us who can’t code, AI apps can do it for you. It takes tinkering but can pay off with custom-built programs for your unique needs. “That’s a huge benefit for a small investment of time,” Trinh said.

He also called the new multimodal capability of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 and other apps a “game changer.” Multimodal means you can input prompts with text, images or audio and get responses back in any of the three.

And if you have lots of data but not enough time to analyze it, then feed the spreadsheet into AI and say, “Analyze the data, create a chart, then tell it to fix the chart,” Trinh said. This generation of AI excels at repetitive, time-consuming and structured tasks, the results of which can be validated by users for efficacy and accuracy, he said.

Mattmiller added: “When you start to use these new tools, start in your comfort zone, look at the low-risk, high-value uses cases, like a chatbot.”

AI Chatbot Was More Accurate

With his background in government, Mattmiller is attuned to AI’s ability to support public services. One example he cited was especially interesting because it shows the possibilities for chatbots in all kinds of customer service departments.

Microsoft partners with YoungWilliams, a company that builds solutions for government programs like SNAP, the successor to food stamps.

“They launched their first chatbot that can help a beneficiary look up their eligibility and the status of their benefits. Beneficiaries can use the chatbot or call a call center. After three months of being live, if you call the call center, you’re on hold for 10 minutes. If you use the chatbot, you’re in right away,” he said.

Once you get a human in a call center, it takes an average of two minutes for that person to find the answer, versus seconds for the chatbot, he said. Most important, the accuracy rate with the human is 91%; the chatbot 96%.

For more AI tips, see here.

The participants in this session were:

• Chase Conching, Principal and Creative Director of Library Creative
• Ryley Higa, Machine Learning Engineer at Sumo Logic
• Yolanda Lau, Consultant, Educator and Co-Founder of Hawai‘i Center for AI
• Liya Safina, Digital Design and Innovation Contractor for Google and other companies
• Moderator: Ryan Ozawa, Emerging Tech Editor for Decrypt and Founder of Hawaii Hui

Ozawa: This session is practical and hands-on. We’re going to open up that AI toolbox. Raise your hands if they have fired up ChatGPT. (scans audience) Almost everybody. Who has an AI app on their smartphone? (scans audience) About half. So rather than getting into basics, we’ll go deeper. Yolanda, what are the innovative platforms you use?

Lau: ChatGPT 4 – and I think you should start there. Before that launched I told people to use Meta AI as their introduction. I think each of the different large language models has their strengths and weaknesses. Meta is better generally for short-form content. I prefer Claude for longer form content. If I’m doing coding, I prefer ChatGPT. But the truth is I have a browser open with all of them in separate tabs. I will try prompts in all of them, and then keep iterating with a model or two before I finally pick the one for that specific task.

Ozawa: We’ll start with the text generators most people are familiar with. We’ll go through text, image, video and specialized business applications. Chase, as a branding strategist, you do a lot of writing. You certainly want to represent the client’s voice, certainly the spirit of Hawai‘i, and we learned that can be a challenge based on what the broad internet has taught people about Hawai‘i. How do you use the text tools?

Conching: There was a good question from the audience in a previous session about the lack of information about Indigenous people in these large language models. What’s really cool is we now have access to a hui of people that have access to Hawai‘i photos and offline text and are using that to inform these language models and plan to open source these Indigenous datasets.

Ozawa: A group called Indigenous AI is focused on improving that representation around the world – the availability of the datasets and the quality of the outputs. Are you using ChatGPT or another text tool?

Conching: Like Yolanda, I go back and forth between a few different large language models. ChatGPT is one; its multimodality is a game changer for me. I also use Claude. I’m on the go quite a bit, so I use mobile apps for ChatGPT, Pi and Claude for different reasons.

Ozawa: Ryley, as a software developer, what does your toolbox look like?

Higa: For generative text, I mainly use ChatGPT and Claude. I use GitHub Copilot for personal projects and I find GitHub Copilot to be a very useful tool for programming.

Safina: If you’re trying to generate imagery that’s very specific to a culture, the large language models cannot get that specific. One workaround is to leverage either OpenAI or Adobe Firefly within Photoshop to generate a piece of an image that I want, rather than trying to have it get everything right all at once. It’s like a puzzle: You get each piece individually correct first, then work on the whole.

For image generation, Midjourney of course. Midjourney will also analyze imagery you send it. For instance, if you are working with a particular photographer, style or artist, you can send Midjourney a referential image, ask it to analyze the image, so Midjourney tells you the way it would describe the image. Then you can work with the output that it provides to get your result closer to the way Midjourney describes it rather than the way humans describe it.

I also use AI because I’m an immigrant; English is my second language and the metric system is my first way of measuring everything. I needed work done in my backyard and I couldn’t estimate the area’s size in square feet. So I sent photos to Open AI with different angles and asked: Can you estimate it in square feet?

Ozawa: Yolanda, why is Claude your preference for long-form content versus ChatGPT?

Lau: I think it’s more about the style. I find ChatGPT too stiff, in the way that Gemini is too informal. Claude has a nice middle ground. I like what Liya said about starting in the corner of an image. I feel the same way about writing. If you ask ChatGPT or any LLM to provide generic content – an article about whatever – you’re going to get something generic and terrible. But if you start by asking: Can you talk about this one idea, then build off that, that’s how you get the results you want.

Left: Yolanda Lau, Right: Ryan Ozawa

Ozawa: Chase, how do you use tools so you don’t get a generic response?

Conching: Provide as much context as possible. Mike Trinh in the opening session said he uses five or six different prompts to get the output as refined as possible. That is important. So is building the expertise to then say, “This is incorrect” or “This is not my style, please correct it.” Nowadays, a lot of the large language models will remember that you like to write in one particular style, or you don’t like to use this particular language. Sometimes people feel they’re bugging the program if they prompt it over and over. But it’s really helping it help you.

Safina: With text, I find what works is reverse engineering, figuring out if there’s a particular writer you like, feeding the model that content and asking what’s so particular about it. What is different about the way this author structures sentences or uses descriptors? Tell me what’s the formula in bullet points. My most common request is TLDR – too long, didn’t read – so it gives me concise answers. I learn what makes this text different and then apply this formula to the prompt I give AI.

Ozawa: My examples of multiple iterations to AI: “You are an expert in agriculture and have a technical understanding of this and that, and are speaking to someone with a 10th grade education. How would you articulate this information?”

Higa: One technique I use when prompting ChatGPT is called in-context learning – giving examples of how to do the task. Another technique is reachable augmented generation. That means you’re providing facts and knowledge inside the prompt so ChatGPT has the information to answer your question. Another simple technique is chain of thought prompting: Ask ChatGPT to explain its reasoning.

Lau: I use Otter to record meetings when I think taking notes will be impractical or I’m likely to miss stuff, and always ask permission before recording. Then I can go over the transcript for details I missed.

Conching: Instead of Otter I use Fathom for transcription because it is HIPAA certified and SOC-2 certified (good for financial data). Also, they have a transparent policy on what data they use. They don’t use any recorded data or chat data to train their models. It’s important before you commit to a tool to read its policy on data retention and usage.

Ozawa: I am a fan of Otter. There’s also Fireflies.ai and other tools. Transcripts are useful if you’re looking for the actual words. Otter makes it easy to edit and correct, which you still have to do. But summary tools within Otter and Zoom are useful because you can come out of a meeting with the action items or a checklist like, “Yolanda will bring the chicken and Ryley will make rice.”

Let’s move to images. Liya got us started with Midjourney. Chase, what’s your image creation tool?

Conching: In my work, that’s mainly creative and by proxy marketing, etc., we do a lot of creative execution, and we use image generation tools for early ideation, but there’s still absolutely the need for a human. Midjourney is one of the tools we use quite a bit.

We are developing our own models using Indigenous faces. That’s something we’re eventually hoping to open source.

An industry standard is still Adobe. I was fortunate to work with Adobe back in 2018 on their Sensei project, their early generative AI model, and that turned into Firefly. What I like about Adobe is they are one of, if not the only major player in the space, that only sources training data from licensed or open source information. They pay artists for images they use in their training data. So even though they might be a little behind the curve in quality of output, they are the most ethical, in my opinion, when it comes to input.

Ozawa: Yolanda, is ChatGPT your go-to for image work?

Lau: I prefer Firefly, for the same reason as Chase: They’re not using data they’ve sourced illegally. You feel safer using content created by Firefly versus ChatGPT or Dall-E.

Higa: I use Firefly and Dall-E usually, but I only use it mainly for personal flyers for meetings and such. I often use something like Magneto, which is free and casual.

Ozawa: Canva has options like that.

Safina: Yes, Canva. For each industry, there’s one tool that tries to be everything, your Swiss Army knife, and in marketing Canva is that, allowing you to generate your own images. For presentations, you can simply drop in three photos of your team members and it will give you four different options of beautifully designed slides, biographies and names, all well designed.

I’m a designer, so I will never advocate for “Let’s replace all designers with Canva.” But there’s a time and place for AI. You will never find a designer who says my joy in life is creating presentations. We want to free designers to do higher level work. But something as simple as a flyer for social media or a presentation, use Canva. Canva is the number one tool that I would encourage all businesses to try. Tell your marketing department: “See how much time you can save to actually be more creative.”

Conching: For entrepreneurs and businesspeople who don’t have full marketing departments, Canva will save time and money. I recommend it.

Lau: I agree on Canva. Another one I use is Ideogram, which gives 100 free images each day. These image generation tools help anyone become an entrepreneur. You used to need a designer to make a starter logo for you. Now you can have AI do it. Anyone can use AI to start their own business pretty much overnight, something that would have taken months before.

Safina: One more tool specifically for presentations: Gamma AI. I used it for a conference and it took me half the time that it normally takes me to prepare a conference presentation. Gamma was easy to use. And there’s Beautiful and 10 others that cut your time in half while creating presentations that are better than templates.

Left: Chase Conching, Middle: Ryley Higa, Right: Liya Safina

Ozawa: Let’s move to video generation. Ryley, what’s your favorite?

Higa: I used Pika, which turns text into video, but the quality was poor. For text to video, we’re not there yet.

Conching: But there are more limited tools that save tons of time for video editors. Premiere now can automatically remove objects from moving scenes so you don’t have to do it manually.

Lau: We can’t access Sora as everyday people, but you can use tools like Canva or Synthesia to make training videos. Take your pages and pages of written training content and turn them into a talking head that people can learn from. It’s easier for employees than reading and they’re likely to retain more of the information.

Ozawa: Let’s talk next about business applications. What about Zapier?

Lau: (turns to the audience) Who has used Zapier? (only about half a dozen raised hands) That’s surprising to me. Zapier is free – you can pay to get more – no coding and it allows anyone to automate almost anything. So you don’t need to write the code to call the API (an application programming interface between two applications), you just use Zapier to call whatever and you can hook up Airtable to literally anything. There’s so many uses. Everyone should have a free account.

Ozawa: Basically a translation tool between different platforms. What common applications do you see for Zapier?

Lau: Use it for anything repetitive, time-consuming, that you don’t want to do yourself. I use it to call data from standard emails into spreadsheets, which is a format I want. Magical.

Safina: If there’s one takeaway from this panel, I highly encourage anybody who’s dealing with marketing, sales or customer relationships or automation, to check out Zapier. A feature called Zaps allows you to write algorithms. If my company gets an inbound email or a form submission, we can segment who submitted this form. Is this an existing customer or new? If existing, do we want to send them a message or Slack or notify our rep to call them? It talks to Slack, Salesforce, Intercom, texts. You don’t need to add new tools, you can link existing tools to automatically do actions that normally a human oversees. It’s an amazing tool to experiment with.

Ozawa: I want to mention a couple of AI companies with Hawai‘i ties. Legislature.ai started here about a year ago and allows you to track legislation that might impact you or your company. A company called Sudowrite has a writing tool focused on creative writing. I know a group that got a grant that AI wrote the application for. And finally Segment X, if you’re looking for marketing and business development help.

Lau: And Reef.ai for understanding your customers. And I just want to mention the founder of Sudowrite, Amit Gupta, lives in Honolulu.

Audience question: The website theneuron.ai ranks AI tools, but is there a platform that replicates this panel and tells me, “You should be using this and that.”

Safina: There’s a newsletter I love called “You probably need a robot.” Every day or every other day, it sends you the latest business tools to use.

Higa: I find it useful to see if there is an AI integration for apps I already use and then test it. There’s good and bad AI integration, so test first.

Audience question: How do we learn to trust that these products are not uploading our data?

Safina: Every time I accept a privacy policy, I copy the whole policy and throw it in ChatGPT and ask, “Summarize this in 10 bullets,” so I know what I’m agreeing to.

Ozawa: All of these AI tools have a switch where you can tell them, “I don’t want you to use what I’m submitting to you to further train your bot.” They hide the switch but you can trigger it.

For more AI tips, see here.