The World Economic Forum, no stranger to hot topics and the subject of protests for its very existence, recently concluded another high-profile annual meeting with divided views on AI.
Babak Hodjat, Chief AI Officer from Cognizant Technology shared with InformationWeek his experience at the think tank’s recent event in Davos, Switzerland.
Hojat said the business community at Davos had a greater interest in AI than political actors.
“Surprisingly, this year it felt like we were in two worlds,” Hodjat said. “There’s a world of technology and AI, and then there’s geopolitics, and that’s completely out of scope for me.” This is Hojat’s third visit to the forum.
He said AI was also talked about among the politicians and decision-makers in attendance, but for them “it was really an afterthought.” The shift in attention is understandable given the spread of protests and other forms of unrest in various countries.
Trust and safety in AI will be on the agenda. Meanwhile, the business community in Davos is enthusiastically discussing AI, likely driven by heavy investment in the future of the technology. But Hodjat said some of the hype and expectations have cooled and a more grounded focus on risk awareness is emerging.
“We were going through a period of, ‘Wow, AI is amazing,’ forgetting about responsible AI and safety and reliability,” he said.
The well-founded sentiment about AI at Davos was in sharp contrast to the hype and fear that preceded it.
“If AI is something that doesn’t involve you directly, it can be too powerful or very scary in your head,” Hodjat said.
The business world also wants more employees to adopt AI. During the conversation at Davos, Hodjat said some clients and other attendees asked what could be done to foster acceptance of AI within corporate culture.
Vibe coding practice
He explained to Davos attendees what worked for Cognizant when it wanted to accelerate AI adoption within the company.
“We did this vibe coding This included using a chatbot to explain in plain language the type of code it was generating, and demonstrating at Davos how to give your code flavor.
Hodjat noted that despite all this attention, the business world still wants to know that AI is worth paying for. “People are expecting ROI. They’re expecting it like it was yesterday. There’s a lot of investment going into it,” he said. To meet that demand, he shared some of Cognizant’s experience with AI efforts.
ROI questions
“A week before I flew to Davos, I received this report from hundreds of people within my company. Agents who operate our intranetAnd it is used across our entire employee base,” he said.
This data comes from a three-month report on Cognizant’s internal use of AI, which shows that approximately 11.3 million transactions were completed internally on behalf of employees. “The rate at which people are opening tickets internally has gone down significantly. This seems to have already paid for itself,” Hodjat said.
According to his calculations, much of the business in Davos was primarily focused on: Efficient use of AI Manage costs early on, Future benefits of technology Must be considered in conjunction with other IT developments.
“This all started in 2023. How long did it take you to start seeing the ROI you were hoping for from your cloud migration, your modernization, your API modernization, or your data integration and modernization? The fact is, technology is new and always improving,” he said.
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