FOMO (fear of missing out) was once a popular phrase among young people worried about not making it to the right party on a Saturday night. Today, CEOs increasingly have FOMO about applied AI. The financial stakes are large enough for boards to wince at the impact of capital spending. The results are shrouded in mystery, which can be especially frustrating for leadership teams obsessed with data and clarity.
Ayman Ezzat, CEO of technology and consulting business Capgemini, will step forward. French Fortune 500 European giant Capgemini Government Solutions is in the news after agreeing to sell its U.S. subsidiary that provided tracking and removal data to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Capgemini’s share price has languished amid a big sell-off in tech stocks on concerns about AI spending.
I spoke with Ezzat before the controversy over ICE erupted (Ezzat explained on LinkedIn that U.S. companies act voluntarily to protect sensitive U.S. information). He said business leaders are walking a fine line with AI. There’s a sweet spot somewhere between too far, too fast, and getting stuck in the starting blocks.
“You don’t want to get too far ahead of the learning curve,” he said. “if [you are]you’re investing in and building features that no one wants. ”
“Basically, we need to integrate AI with humans. How do we make humans trust agents? Agents can trust humans, but humans don’t really trust agents.”
Ayman Ezzat
AI is not a big bang moment. Change occurs in stages. Most leaders will remember the hype around the Metaverse, a virtual reality world where transactions and business could be conducted via dancing avatars (Capgemini itself experimented with it in its Metaverse Lab). Mark Zuckerberg was so enthusiastic about this idea that he renamed his company after it. Like the air fryer, those days may be over.
Agility is a new approach. Test and pilot on a small scale before scaling up. Capgemini currently has labs for 6G mobile technology, quantum computing and robotics. No one knows which part of these technologies will become the future metaverse.
“Are we ready for everything to mature? No,” says Ezzat. “But we’re on the ground to be able to see when things start to mature, when they actually start to scale, and not wait and say, ‘Okay, it’s starting to move now.’ ”
“We’ve got to do something, right? So we’ve got to invest, but not invest too much, to recognize the technology and follow its speed to make sure we’re ready to scale when adoption starts to accelerate.”
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As I’ve written before, many large companies see AI primarily as a way to increase efficiency in individual business units. While this is a start, this is not a “whole enterprise” approach that integrates data and operations such as finance and HR, procurement and supply chain, and connects them in innovative ways.
“AI is a business, it’s not a technology,” Ezzat says, warning that leaders can easily fall into viewing AI as a “black box that is managed separately.” “There’s technology behind it, but it’s really meant to transform businesses. It can’t just be used to keep the house running.”
“Your question is [the CEO] The focus should not be on “how can we make our finance teams more efficient,” but rather, “how can AI radically disrupt our business?” I’m sure your CFO will eventually take care of that. ”
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A well-worn phrase about AI is “human involvement,” but one senior technology executive I spoke to recently challenged this phrase as “outside the box.” What we really need to talk about is that “humans are the main characters.” Welcome to “anthropocentrism.” This is a centuries-old social philosophy, formalized as an engineering approach by the ergonomics movement of the 1950s.
“How do you deal with what is called AI anthropocentrism?” Ezzat says. “Basically, we need to integrate AI with humans. How do we make humans trust agents? Agents can trust humans, but humans don’t really trust agents.”
Ergonomics was about chairs made for humans, not chairs designed to fit efficiently into offices or be easily stacked and moved. A similar challenge is how to shape AI to work with humans. If the chair is bad, your back will also be bad. Bad AI can have a bigger impact.
