Employee re-skilling and regulation are key AI considerations; the CEOs of Accenture, IBM and Qualcomm share AI outlooks form the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
Generative artificial intelligence (gen AI), how it works, how it should work, who should care, why and what it all means are discussion points widely set forth in the agenda for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland. In a panel discussion today involving the CEOs of three major U.S. technology companies—Accenture, IBM and Qualcomm—there was consensus that the technology will outpace attempts to regulate it, and that real innovation will be unlocked if AI is viewed as an augmentation to human capabilities rather than a replacement.
Generally speaking, the panelists were bullish on gen AI as a driver of economic growth and productivity, albeit one that has to be strategically considered and treated with some sense of urgency. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet cautioned against “dangerous complacency” regardless of business sector because AI stands to have a “material impact” on every part of a business. “There isn’t an area, there isn’t an industry, that’s not going to be impacted.”
To that point of moving fast, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that companies who enter the AI space with a focus on overall productivity and embrace the technology “are going to be advantaged forever.” He said that “digital labor”—functions like accounts receivable, Human Resources, finance, procurement, and the like—won’t necessarily see job displacement as AI proliferates, but there “absolutely” will be an impact. If you don’t embrace AI, “You’re going to find you may not have a job. You’ve got to embrace it. This is here and now…You’ve got to get going now.”
Asked by the panel moderator how the pace of AI adoption can be accelerated, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon contextualized the company’s approach to on-device AI as the path to proliferation, and democratization, of the technology for consumers and enterprises. It all comes down to access to data and distributed computing, he said. “AI processing is going to be the next way of doing compute,” Amon said. “Our job has been how we can create an incredible amount of processing power that we can put on every device,” from phones, personal computers and cars to smart meters, manufacturing equipment and other industrial devices. “I think that is what’s going to bring AI to scale.”
Fresh off of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Amon gave the example of gen AI capabilities running on your vehicle. If a warning light comes up on your dashboard, you could ask the car what’s wrong and how to mediate the issue; from there, the car would recommend the fix and, if needed, check availability for a service appointment at the dealership, then book that appointment. “It’s a revolution,” Amon said. “I think it’s a great opportunity for innovation.”
At Accenture, Sweet said, the company hires around 100,000 people per year and, regardless of function, all those new hires get asked the same question: “What have you learned in the last six months?” The point is identify and onboard people who “like to learn,” she said. As it relates to AI, “Our people understand the concepts so they’re not starting from ‘what is AI?’” Coupled with that culture of learning, Sweet’s goal is directing a workforce that has the ability to up skill themselves.
For other organizations thinking about AI—and for governments regulating those organizations—she said, “The single biggest differentiator between whether you will succeed or not is your leadership…You actually have to understand it at a very deep level. There are a million use cases…You have to operationalize it. When you operationalize it, you certainly have to do it in a responsible way…AI will create a lot of new jobs but you won’t be able to take the current people and put them in the new jobs unless you, government and company, re-skill them.”
Krishna’s take on developing a regulatory framework for AI is to regulate use cases, “hold the developers of these models accountable rom a legal sense,” and foster open ecosystems to ensure economic advantage is distributed rather than concentrated in a few small pockets.
As it directly relates to the panel topic, will gen AI be the steam roller of Industry 4.0, the CEOs all agreed that yes, that’s an apt metaphor. Amon hit this most directly by highlighting Qualcomm’s role in adding AI to a range of devices, including those used in industrial environments. “This technology is very broad,” he said, “and it’s going to have long-lasting applications. Over time we’ll see this technology everywhere.
