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Large companies are behind on artificial intelligence, and much of the money they\u2019re spending isn\u2019t tied to a plan, futurist Amy Webb said at the Fortune AIQ Summit on Thursday, in conversation with Fortune<\/em>\u2019s AI editor, Jeremy Kahn.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s be fair, Fortune 500 companies are pretty late to the party on this,\u201d said Webb, founder and CEO of the consulting firm Future Today Strategy Group. \u201cArtificial intelligence didn\u2019t just show up a couple of years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Webb said she sees \u201cenormous amounts of capital\u201d going into pilots \u201cwith no strategy ahead of them.\u201d Companies, she said, then argue with their security teams and end up with orphaned projects that never do anything. She also said some executives hand the building of what becomes proprietary technology to third parties, and then get stuck. Employees get frustrated and start building their own tools, she said.<\/p>\n Webb argued that having AI everywhere doesn\u2019t matter if workers don\u2019t know how to use it, comparing it to taking a New York City cab and being handed a phone and asked to type in an address\u2014a constant pattern for about two years now, she estimated. Drivers are so reliant on navigation tools, she said, that there\u2019s \u201ca certain amount of learned helplessness,\u201d just like some leaders during this moment.<\/p>\n Her advice for companies wasn\u2019t to aim to be \u201cAI native\u201d but was more about \u201cbeing flexible.\u201d Still, she said, companies must build mechanisms for that. She said she hasn\u2019t yet seen large companies do so, even though many CEOs are working to understand AI.<\/p>\n Webb said part of the reason individual productivity gains don\u2019t add up across a company is how firms define return on investment. Most apply AI to the bottom line, she said. She contrasted that with Runway, an AI video company whose strategy she considers to be a clear vision for the future that its tools help advance.<\/p>\n She told a story about a friend at a giant company she wouldn\u2019t name. When the chief technology officer wouldn\u2019t approve a secure sandbox, the friend went directly to the CEO, built his own instance, got access to a supercomputer, and assembled a team. Webb said the group now plans to spend a couple hundred million dollars on AI tokens. She blamed the lack of \u201cstrong leadership and planning,\u201d and said many companies lead with \u201cfear and FOMO.\u201d<\/p>\n Michelle Kwon, Runway\u2019s chief operating officer, described a company built the opposite way. Runway was founded about nine years ago by three NYU graduates. She said it uses AI in \u201cessentially every part of what we do,\u201d and its whole staff writes code.<\/p>\n Employees have built about 215 apps for an internal app store since earlier this year, including teams outside engineering, and their newest product came from that approach, she said. (The company announced a pilot for an autonomous ad agent the day before the panel.) One worker built it in \u201ca handful of weeks,\u201d she said, adding that it raised ad output by more than 1,000% from a very small base, and is now being released publicly.<\/p>\n Runway still buys what isn\u2019t central to its business, she said. It won\u2019t build its own payment system or HR compliance software.<\/p>\n On productivity, Kwon said: \u201cJust because you are using AI, that is not a proxy for your productivity or you doing a good job at work.\u201d It should be a core part of how people work, she added\u2014as long as it is \u201cresponsible\u201d and \u201cdoesn\u2019t create work for other people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not helpful if I receive a 100-slide deck,\u201d Kwon said. \u201cWhat is someone asking me to do with that?\u201d The same goes for chatbot output, she said, which Runway sometimes gets: People \u201cjust copy and paste the output without having thought about, \u2018How do I synthesize this?\u2019 [It] isn\u2019t a productive use of anyone\u2019s time.\u201d<\/p>\n Peloton\u2019s chief technology officer, Francis Shanahan, offered a comment from the crowd about the opposite problem. Employees are \u201cinundated now because they can literally build anything,\u201d he said, and he is finding \u201cburnout to be more and more of an issue.\u201d Kwon responded that Runway makes a point to \u201ccelebrate the wins\u201d and \u201cshout people out.\u201d It gives the whole company the same day off, not tied to a holiday, because with summer Fridays, \u201cwho\u2019s taking a half day? Who\u2019s taking a full day? What\u2019s hard to track?\u201d When Kahn joked that AI agents could keep working on those days, Kwon replied, \u201cThey can work tirelessly.\u201d<\/p>\n Matt Maher, founder of M7 Innovations and a consortium partner with MIT Media Lab, asked who is liable when an AI agent breaches a contract or causes other harm. Webb relayed a story about a coding project she once built that spammed 1,000 people after she put it in a live environment with a loop in it. Such failures, she said, are ordinary human errors and not AI \u201cwaking up.\u201d Executives, she said, must \u201cstop anthropomorphizing\u201d AI.<\/p>\n Webb added that security and risk officers should say, \u201cTell me more\u201d before they say no, and that leaders should give them some leeway. She also warned that a wave of connected devices, such as glasses and charms that listen, will arrive over the next 18 months with little planning.<\/p>\n Asked about boards using AI, Webb said her firm has used it for a decade, but it is useless if directors don\u2019t understand what the data show. She compared it to her own cycling sensors. \u201cYou can\u2019t disassociate from what\u2019s happening,\u201d she said, \u201cor you are liable.\u201d<\/p>\n For this story,\u00a0<\/em>Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Top #futurist #Amy #Webb #sees #Fortune #firms #suffering #learned #helplessness<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Large companies are behind on … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5902,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8994,8906,1190,2055,133,8993,8996,2781,883,3002,187,8995],"class_list":["post-5901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-amy","tag-conferences","tag-consulting","tag-firms","tag-fortune","tag-futurist","tag-helplessness","tag-learned","tag-sees","tag-suffering","tag-top","tag-webb"],"yoast_head":"\n\nWhy gains don\u2019t add up<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Runway<\/strong>\u2019s counterpoint<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Risk and liability<\/strong><\/h2>\n