Anton Keyter is an AI specialist at DVT, a Dynamic Technologies group company. A key aspect of his job is assisting with AI adoption and products – bridging the gap between a rapidly evolving technology and the people who need to understand it. He joined DVT as a project manager over ten years ago and moved into his current position two and a half years ago, and it’s one that lends itself well to his role as a mentor and AI coach.
Keyter’s grasp of what AI is capable of is central to his success in teaching his teams how to understand and communicate effectively with AI and in guiding clients in their AI adoption. He knows that it can change business as well as lives – but he also knows that to do so, it must be guided by a human hand. “I work with the DVT AI Services (AIS) division under Karl Fischer. We run practical workshops for management and executives to help them understand the fundamentals of having a conversation with AI and to give them the chance to see the true potential of applied generative AI in their own space. We engage with areas of business where there’s sometimes a belief that this conversation needs to be highly technical when this is not the case.”
The most rewarding part of Keyter’s job is the people he interacts with. “Connecting what a business does with its people is where I find the greatest meaning,” he says. “Because I come from a technical background, it’s always inspiring to see how deeply people relate to their work and how passionately they speak about it. I live for the powerful moments when their passion aligns with the tough tasks at hand. In our AI workshops, this comes through when someone says, ‘I didn’t know you could ask that’ after seeing AI respond in an unexpected way. It’s a simple comment, but it shows that they’ve just discovered a new way of thinking about their work.”
Mentoring is a passion, and Keyter uses AI as both a teaching tool and a teachable moment. “We hear people say that AI is a challenge to our humanity, but I’ve seen the opposite. AI makes us ask ourselves, ‘How human are we?’. That question drives my passion for the work we do at DVT because we’re using AI in business both to solve problems and to increase our awareness of ourselves.”
He recognises that AI has a lot of potential beyond the obvious. “If we see AI as helping us do the same work just quicker, we miss its real power,” he explains. “Using AI to make current processes more efficient is a good place to start, however, what I often see in early planning is that a business recognises possibilities that sit outside the normal way of working, and then it explodes into a creative rush. If that energy is not well-managed, you get a confusing mix of trying to keep up with the AI wave while also trying to stay relevant in your core work. The goal is to keep and grow the value we have in our people, to accelerate their growth and enable them without crowding out their space. The position I take is to stay level-headed, enable individuals on a personal level and measure business AI maturity as you go so that adoption matches where you are and where you want to be.”
DVT is realistic and upfront with clients when it comes to this topic. Sometimes a small adjustment in how a process works may be a simple solution that steers a client toward bigger AI questions. Keyter says, “With DVT’s vast experience, we can help clients unblock many of these challenges, and of course AI plays a part in that. The next step in being realistic is to assist clients with the strategy, which then naturally leads to the technical questions. The people part is key to AI adoption, and it starts at the top; if C-level executives can understand the power of AI through a personal-use case, the picture becomes much clearer for the rest of the organisation.”
For Keyter, personal interaction with AI is fundamental to understanding it and how it impacts lives. “We need to allow people to use AI for personal scenarios or, to put it simply, to play with AI. This is the quickest path to making AI adoption more viable, understandable and practical. Every professional discipline will benefit from personal interaction with AI, and personal questions are a comfortable place to start. Finding that balance is key to unlocking an accelerator for adoption.”