On Wednesday night, a panel of executives spoke at the TIME100 AI Leadership Forum in New York City about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the business landscape and how it is leading companies into a technologically capricious future.
The TIME Forum panel spotlighting AI-driven business leadership included Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient, a technology consulting firm that uses AI to help businesses modernize, and sponsor of Wednesday’s event. Deepa Soni, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, New York Life Insurance Company; Ravi Radhakrishnan, executive vice president and chief information officer of American Express.
Baz began the discussion about AI’s “exponential” ability to transform and enhance companies’ problem-solving capabilities and increase efficiency.
For his company, AI is a tool used to unlock value and optimize performance for clients by reducing time and costs. Many of them, he points out, involve bridging the gap between relatively outdated technologies and increasingly useful AI tools, or what he called “technology debt.” He says the challenge of implementing more efficient technology is weighing down many older companies with newer competitors pushing AI.
But for now, it’s unclear to Vaz who will win the race to transform the AI industry.
“We haven’t yet seen the conversation move to the point of, ‘What is Uber and Airbnb in the AI era?’ in the context of true transformation of the industry,” he said. “We are still focused on improving productivity and the added value we create, which is perfectly fine considering, as I said, we are still in the early stages.”
For Sony, AI is an internal “strategic enabler.” “There are real business problems that we can now solve with AI that we couldn’t solve before,” she says, adding that contrary to popular argument, she believes AI will not eliminate jobs, but rather expand the capabilities and services of the workforce.
“I think in the lifecycle of AI adoption, we are completely thinking about AI as a human amplifier,” she said. “We are on a growth trajectory and will be able to do more with the same people.”
American Express’ Radhakrishnan acknowledged that the company initially didn’t know exactly how best to use AI, but that it made some mistakes and found other ways to move forward and gain an advantage.
“Early on, we had assumptions about where we saw value in technology, and we quickly learned that some of those assumptions might not work. But the fundamental learnings we gained from technology turned out to be very useful,” he said.
Despite the rapid advances that AI has brought to companies including American Express, and the unpredictability of how it will continue to transform businesses and products in the coming years, Radhakrishnan believes that a company’s success and consumer opinion will be determined by the same factors as today.
“I think five years from now, after this situation has played out a little bit more, we’ll be talking about the same things we should always talk about: trust, service, security,” he says. “It is up to the consumer to decide which AI to trust.”
