Monty Chicola is the founder of a software business and is making a name for himself teaching the first artificial intelligence programming course at Northwestern State University.
He’s in the forefront of the artificial intelligence field and a trailblazer in digital media, but his roots started in Alexandria, where he now lives and where he was raised among five brothers and a sister by Nick and Olla Rae Chicola, who ran a grocery business for 40 years.
Olla Rae, his late mother, may best be remembered as the first director of the Manna House, an Alexandria soup kitchen that is located at the site of the family’s old grocery store.
“That grocery store is where I worked, and where all of us (siblings) worked, growing up,” the 67-year-old Monty said. “I worked there ’til college and then on weekends during college. My parents instilled in us the work ethic and values of honesty and hard work.”
Monty is a 1975 graduate of Menard, and he is an alumnus of NSU, where he got his degree in computer science and accounting.
Sensing that digital media had a future in the real estate business, he recruited local realtor Dave Woodring to help him start Real Vision Software a few years after his daughter was born. His business is an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and IBM Business Partner specializing in AI-powered IBM solutions.
Monty says he and Dave made many calls to the main IBM office in Atlanta in the early ’90s, trying to get them to agree to having Monty and Dave visit to show them a digital image on a computer screen.
“We’d talk to Zebedee Ducre, who had this booming deep voice, and he was a graduate from Southern University in Baton Rouge,” said Monty. Ducre, a Slidell native, is a member of the Southern University Basketball Hall of Fame and was a manager and consultant with IBM for more than 32 years.
“I got the feeling that since he was from Louisiana and we were a couple of Louisiana guys, he kind of felt sorry for us, and agreed and said, ‘come on.’ He had no idea at the time what a digital image was. We stayed ’til 5 p.m. one afternoon in one of two glass towers IBM has in Atlanta.”
Fast forward to today, when 60 percent of the employees at IBM, Monty noted, are working on AI.
It wasn’t the first time Monty managed to get someone in authority to come around to agreeing to a request. When he was a student at NSU, he and another student, each the president of their fraternity or sorority, got then NSU president and Colfax native Rene Bienvenu Jr. to start a four-year degree program in computer science.
More recently, he persuaded NSU president James Genovese to allow him to teach an IBM programming course at NSU, with the focus being on AI. The university sells it as a course that will “equip students with cutting-edge skills in a rapidly evolving industry.”
The idea, said Monty, a single grandfather who is expecting twin grandchildren to be born this week, was to lure kids to class with the subject of artificial intelligence.
“When I agreed, I didn’t think it’d be that big a deal, but that’s like 15 classes, and I have five left,” he said of the lectures he gives for 2 ½ hours once a week on Tuesday nights. “I’ll show them, for instance, how AI can create emails for people and send them out, or how AI can look through photos and classify them.”
NSU, Monty said, will soon be “state of the art” in its AI curriculum, and he thinks a realistic goal is for IBM to fully fund an AI class.
Contemplating the future of AI, Monty said, “You’re not going to believe what AI will do in one year. Every six months, it doubles its capacity in speed.” He said that’s more than three times faster than what PCs once did.
“We started writing a code for AI a year ago,” he said. “Now, it can create a code for you. God knows what it’ll be doing a year from now. And nothing is going to slow it down. It’s spooky.”
AI has the potential of taking over all manner of jobs. He worries of a time when nobody is going to talk with anybody else, but only with computers.
“This is going to be Door Dash on steroids,” he predicted. “I’m not sold on having AI do everything for people, but that’s where we’re going.
“Smart people will do well with AI,” he continued. “The ones who use it in a business environment to make, say, their industry more efficient, or help them get an upper hand on their competition, they’ll do fine.”