Good morning.
Technology adoption in the computer era has generally started in the consumer sector and then moved—often slowly—into the enterprise, but Generative AI is different. While consumer adoption has been rapid, enterprise adoption has happened almost simultaneously. Fortune brought together a small group of CEOs on Friday, in partnership with BCG, to explore that change and identify both the opportunities and risks. Some excerpts.
“You need to embrace Gen AI now to develop the muscle. The muscle will change over time. But it's important to embrace it now. And make sure you have someone who's responsible for it, at the top of the organization—don't delegate it down. And then ensure that risk protection is embedded in your risk processes, but also your core processes, like product development, so that it really becomes a cultural element.”
— Sharon Marcil, managing director North America, BCG
“We’ve moved from a strategy supported by technology to a technology-driven strategy that requires a different kind of expertise….You need creativity, people who can think beyond the usual….So for us, it’s more about building the internal capabilities that we can’t get from the outside, and then making sure we have the right partnerships with the people who are outside, who can bring us their best thinking.”
— Tom Wilson, CEO, Allstate
“What happens if I knowingly or unknowingly infringe somebody's IP?...The bulk of that concern today is coming from clients is in the area of code. Let’s take a maybe not-so-random example. If you are somebody in the payments industry, and you are going to use this for your deep developers to go write something, which is then going to be in place for 20 years, that means in year 15 somebody could come around and say, ‘Wait a moment. Those 10 lines look remarkably similar to what I did.’”
— Arvind Krishna, CEO, IBM
“I think about two ends of the spectrum. There is risk mitigation…making sure we have the guard rails to protect data. Then the question is, how do we refine it? And then, how do we innovate? We are working our way there with lots of experiments”
— Kim Keck, CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
“I think there is a bit of an overestimation of how fast and how big the immediate savings can be from Generative AI. I think it can be meaningful. But it takes time and a bit more work and expertise to get beyond the very first low-hanging fruits.”
— Barak Eilam, CEO, NICE Systems
“Technology discontinuities in the past with enterprise software…really empowered developers to create great applications. With Generative AI, we are humanizing the technology, and handing over agency to the end user. It’s not developers being more productive. It’s users being more productive…That means you can create upward social mobility in jobs.”
— Ravi Kumar, CEO, Cognizant
If you are eager to dive further into these issues, I’d recommend a study that the folks at BCG published last week, which provides some interesting insight into where Gen AI improves productivity—creative ideation and content creation—and where it doesn’t—business problem solving. In the BCG study, participants using OpenAI’s GPT-4 for solving business problems actually performed 23% worse than those doing the task without GPT-4. Read more here.
Other news below. And read why the folks at Microsoft believe their Gen AI-powered “copilots” will help people navigate a hybrid workplace.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
