AI Meets Transformative Leaders at Innovate

UCLA Anderson’s Innovate conference, organized by the Easton Technology Management Center with the school’s student-led Technology Business Association — known as AnderTech — annually convenes an array of pioneering entrepreneurs, successful investors and veteran executives for conversations about the latest technological innovations and their impact on business and society.

The 2024 conference, dubbed “AI Innovation in a Tech-Driven World,” took a deep dive into advances in artificial intelligence, a transformative force that is both gradually and suddenly influencing how we live, work, create and recreate. The event featured topics that included digital entertainment, enterprise digital transformations, health tech and, especially, the future of work.

AI’s impact on employment and the economy was at the center of the conference. According to the Forrester Group, 2.5 million jobs in the U.S. are likely to be replaced by generative AI, and IBM estimates that 120 million people will need to be retrained for other jobs. On the positive side, the world will see a massive improvement in knowledge management, in productivity and in workforces of all types.

Thanks to “impressive use cases and rapid adoption,” said Terry Kramer, faculty director of the Easton Center, “the market now is huge, specifically for generative AI in a multitude of sectors . If you look at the rate of adoption for ChatGPT, the statistics are amazing. To get to one million users of the ChatGPT app, it took five days. It took Instagram took two and a half months to get to one million, it took Facebook 10 months and it took Twitter 24 months. Netflix? It took 41 months.”

“With this technology, the most powerful models are large, and it’ll actually be a very small number of companies that have the chips and the processing capability to take advantage of them,” said Kramer. “It’s going to be Google, it’s going to be Meta, it’s going to be Microsoft, and it will be interesting to see where these large players come out.”

One of the more popular examples of the use of AI is in the massive, multibillion-dollar gaming industry. But while the intelligence might be artificial, the experience is anything but.

According to Mihir Vaidya, chief strategy officer of Electronic Arts, one of the most profound things about games today is that they are they really social networks. Using an analogy from the “real world,” Vaidya compared the experiences he shared with his close friends with the experiences he shared with the other fans of his favorite sports teams. Gaming, he said, combines both types of shared experiences, allowing users to play with their personal social groups or bond with massive communities. “None of this would have been possible without the massive advancements we’ve seen in connectivity. I can’t wait to see where it goes,” Vaidya said.

In his concluding remarks, Kramer, noted that he is amazed by the number of use cases for artificial intelligence, as exemplified by the many applications discussed at the conference. He estimated that 80% of the use cases for AI discussed throughout the day were not theoretical, they exist today. As a result, it’s important to figure out how we, as individuals and companies, are going to use it ourselves. His advice: “Don’t hang back. There are a lot of dystopian views regarding AI technology, but many of those views are held by people who have not used it yet.

“I continue to reflect on Harvard Business School Professor Karim Lakhani’s message: ‘AI won’t take jobs but people who use AI will take jobs from those who don’t use AI,’” said Kramer. “The opportunity is now to learn the technology, the use cases, and think about the appropriate guardrails and how to create notable advances in almost every type of product and service we experience, while minimizing harm to society.”

Kramer encourages everyone to jump in because we can only be effective and creative in this space if we know how the technology works.