About 50 local business leaders gathered Wednesday to learn more about how they can leverage artificial intelligence.

The conversation was part of a panel discussion at the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s Manufacturers’ Council meeting held at McElroy Manufacturing, a family-owned pipe fusion company founded in 1954.

Greenheck Group’s Joey Lada moderated the panel discussion, which included Safety Radar’s Will Brueckner, KOM Analytics’ Tammy Torkleson and ProBound’s Kemi Olunloyo.

The meeting was sponsored by Arvest Bank.

Olunloyo is CEO of Tulsa-based ProBound, an AI-powered sales automation company.

“The reality is that it’s not taking your job, it’s making it easier,” she said of artificial intelligence. “It’s allowing you to focus on more important things.

“…What we’re doing on our end is educating the customers that we work with on how to best implement AI in their departments, whether it’s IT support, customers or sales.”

Brueckner is director of operations at Safety Radar, an AI-driven safety intelligence company.

“Companies want AI to make them more efficient, but they do not want AI running the business,” he said. “AI is not keeping people safer; humans are keeping people safer.

“So, AI helps empower humans to be out in the field keeping people safer rather than behind a screen, viewing the last report that came in and manually doing the assessment.”

Torkleson is president and CEO of Indigo Technology Group, which offers KOM Analytics, a software integration platform.

“We act as kind of a big, fancy library of the data you actually carry,” she said. “We actually say ‘What do you want? How do you want it? How do you report on it? What do you need to report on? Why do you need to report on that?’ We pull all that together.”

The Chamber sponsors bi-monthly meetings of the Manufacturers’ Council, which convenes Chamber-member manufacturers for networking and discussion on issues impacting their companies and the sector. For more information about the Manufacturers’ Council, please contact Brien Thorstenberg, the Chamber’s vice president of economic development, at 918-560-0231 or  [email protected].