Alex Ball discusses Block Dojo’s role in supporting startups

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been grabbing headlines for the past few years, and naturally, it’s the emerging technology that has attracted the most investment in that time. Many new startups are leveraging the technology, and the latest cohort of Block Dojo U.K. graduates is no different. However, Alex Ball insists that AI should only be an enabler to real solutions.

Ball is the global program director at Block Dojo, the London-based venture builder that has emerged as one of the premier blockchain startup incubators.

In an interview with CoinGeek’s Becky Liggero, Ball acknowledged that AI was quite popular with the Dojo’s latest cohort.

“The AI revolution has hit us like a freight train in the face,” he stated, noting that it has become critical to leverage the technology to enhance efficiency and cut costs. While the Dojo encourages its participants to tap into AI, it focuses on the problem that a startup is solving, not the technology.

With new and trendy tech, there’s always a danger that startups will just stick it into their pitch deck to impress investors. Blockchain went through a similar phase when even multinational listed firms were adding the term into their documentation to attract investors.

“Blockchain was en vogue, and everybody was adding a blockchain element to their startups. Right now, AI is en vogue. This is what everybody’s doing,” he said.

To counter any unnecessary AI mentions or usage, Ball and his team have insisted that the Dojo startups must prove that AI can help solve problems.

“The technology’s the enabler; it needs to enable their businesses and their business models to solve these problems. If it isn’t enabling anything, cut it out,” Ball pointed out.

While AI is the fashionable technology for most startups, Ball insisted it doesn’t work without blockchain. As it’s being used today, AI operates as a black box, with the end users and regulators having no idea what goes on behind the scenes. Industry leaders like OpenAI are going to great lengths to maintain this anonymity, disguising it as protecting their competitive advantage. However, ultimately, this makes it impossible to assess what (and whose) data has been used, why AI models hallucinate, and how to best regulate the sector.

“The purpose of marrying AI up with a public blockchain is that now all that data is open, transparent, and can be interrogated. For anyone investing in companies using AI, they need to be looking for companies that are leveraging blockchain as well,” Ball said.

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI. 

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