Tech Bosses Weigh the Costs and Challenges of A.I.: CEO Daily
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A.I. was a top topic at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech in Aspen on Tuesday, with executives both highlighting the seismic opportunities and also identifying issues that are slowing its adoption. Intel CEO Bob Swan was on hand, and I had the opportunity to moderate a fascinating off-the-record lunch conversation with him and a dozen other executives that pinpointed some of the key issues, which I summarized with the four Cs below.
–Connectivity. Adoption of 5G will be a game-changer for A.I., making it easier to store and quickly recover massive amounts of data in the cloud. Land O’ Lakes CEO Beth Ford told the Brainstorm crowd earlier in the day that this is particularly an issue in agriculture, where as many as 30% of farmers don’t have access to broadband.
–Cost. Getting a robust data infrastructure in place can be costly, and the payback is often three to five years down the road, discouraging adoption among companies focused on the short term.
–Culture. Creating a company culture that focuses on data is no simple task, but it’s critical to the success of the transformation.
–Creativity. Our survey of Fortune 500 CEOs found 69% are focused on using data and A.I. to reduce business process costs . . . not to create new value for customers. That won’t lead to a new industrial revolution. Corporate leaders will have to get far more creative in rethinking their companies to unlock the full value of new technologies.
Also on stage yesterday: Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman and her co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, an odd couple who have teamed up to create a new short-form video platform and who provided the entertainment for the end of the day.
When Fortune editor Andrew Nusca asked a provocative question and Whitman tried to give a diplomatic answer, Katzenberg jumped in with a feisty attack on Nusca. “It’s a duel, Meg, not an engagement!” He shouted. Said Whitman: “We see almost everything differently . . . Our superpower is we are completely different.”
On the agenda for Brainstorm’s final day: Postmates’ Bastian Lehmann, ConsenSys’s Joseph Lubin, and Steve Mollenkopf, CEO of Qualcomm. You can watch the livestream here.
News below.
Alan Murray
alan.murray@fortune.com