Fundamental Group organises its first AI Week

The inaugural event saw detailed discussions on how AI and LLMs will change our business and industry

Two weeks ago, the Fundamental Group held its inaugural AI Week, bringing together our senior AI and LLM experts to share ideas and our vision for the future.

The week started off with a joint session by Jeanne Daniel, ML Engineer at Fundamental Group, and Stuart Reid, CEO of Nosible, who gave an in-depth overview of artificial intelligence, its possibilities and drawbacks, and the opportunities it offers the media and marketing industry.

On Wednesday, Fundamental Group’s CEO Angus Maclaine spoke about the practical use of AI in our business, focusing on how media buying can be fully automated to be able to match product to client demand in close to real time. He reiterated our company vision to develop a SaaS solution for rapid, responsive marketing that democratises data and transforms activation for marketers and sales professionals across all B2B sectors powered by unique and proprietary data sets providing AI-powered insights, strategies, and execution.

The Fundamental Group is in a perfect position to deliver on this vision, Angus explained, adding that there are five steps we have been building towards to get us to deliver on that vision. Our exclusive, deep sector data across the asset management and business education sectors is fully integrated into one platform, facilitating seamless and automated workflows.

At the core of our strategy is the development of an AI-powered recommendation engine, specifically trained on B2B data with an initial focus on investment management. This engine will leverage large language models (LLMs) to provide tailored, actionable recommendations, enabling marketing and sales teams to make informed decisions swiftly. It also automates content creation across multiple languages at scale through customised LLMs trained on our proprietary data sets.

The next session was a panel discussion with Angus, Stuart, Fundamental Group’s COO Vincent Hooplot and Nina Boshoff, managing director at Fundamental Media. Moderated by Jeanne, the panel discussed how AI will change our working world.

It turned into a very lively and interactive discussion, with many questions and observations from our colleagues in the room and online. Topics covered include the media planning and buying landscape in 2030; obstacles and concerns our clients are having when it comes to implementing generative AI; what GenAI opportunities we see; and what is keeping senior business people awake at night when they think about the impact of GenAI on their business.

During the final session, Fundamental Group’s Director of Innovation, Oli Knight took the stage to explain the thinking behind Fundamental Group’s decision to train its own LLM. The speed of adoption of generative AI has been exceptional, also among bigger and more traditional businesses, and we need to protect our place in the market and be bold. Adopting GenAI makes strategic sense for our business and will help us support our clients with tackling their challenges and seizing their opportunities.

Finally, Oli revealed the new name of our LLM, Allium, and announced the winners of our Hackathon competition. All colleagues at Fundamental Group were asked to submit their ideas for problems that could be solved by the use of GenAI, and the three winning teams will have the opportunity to build a prototype of their solution before our senior management will have the difficult task of picking an overall winner.

All in all, our first AI Week has been a massive success. Across the business, colleagues with different backgrounds and experience shared ideas and knowledge. This very collaborative environment led to the exchange of many new ideas and a lot of enthusiasm for what the future will bring at the Fundamental Group.