Generative AI has caught the attention of many large businesses in several industries, and the tech industry is one of them. Among the major corporations jumping on the AI bandwagon, there’s EA (Electronic Arts). During the EA Investor Day, the company’s CEO made a pretty bold comment. According to the CEO, generative AI is now the core of EA’s business.
This shouldn’t come as a shock, as just about every company wants to employ AI in some way, shape, or form, and that’s not good news for most workers who fear for their jobs. Sure, AI can benefit businesses when it comes to completing tasks. However, we’re still waiting to see how it can actually help the gaming industry.
EA makes AI the core of its business
Early on, we heard that EA was excited about AI technology, and that came as no shock. EA isn’t exactly the company for price-conscious folks. It’s been the subject of countless memes mocking its cash-grabby nature. Now, the company wants EA to be a huge part of its business.
Andrew Wilson, the company’s CEO, gave a keynote, and during the presentation, he spoke about three ways the company plans to use AI: Efficiency, Expansion, and Transformation. Firstly, there’s Efficiency. “Efficiency is doing what we do today faster, cheaper, and at a higher quality.” This is one thing that he said during the presentation, “It means removing obstacles for our game developers. It means culturalizing content across geographies so they can focus on finding more fun for more players around the world.”
Next, he talked about expansion. Basically, he wants generative AI to help the game developers build bigger and more immersive worlds. “Expansion is about giving our creative teams an exponentially bigger canvas upon which to create and richer colors so they might paint more brilliant worlds. It’s about our incredible teams creating characters with more depth and intelligence, telling stories that are more personal and nuanced, and bringing more authenticity and deeper immersion.”
Lastly, there’s Transformation. During this section, he talked about how he wants EA to look toward the future. He wants AI to help the company find “new ways to play, watch, create, and connect that aren’t imagined today.” He says that it will “accelerate how innovators and creators in entertainment are building and delivering experiences rooted in self-expression, content creation, curation, and instant gratification, the kind of entertainment that today’s players and fans deeply crave.”
Let’s not fool ourselves
This all sounds fine and dandy, but this is EA talking to investors and potential investors. It’s a public-facing event where it wants to make the company’s endeavors seem like they’re changing the world for the better. As such, we can’t take what Wilson is saying at face value.
Sure, AI can help, but this is a major corporation that we’re talking about. We know that much of the reason it’s using AI is to cut costs. AI gives EA and other companies the ability to cut their production staff and replace jobs with an AI model. That’s not it, but they can force their remaining workers to pick up the work from the fired workers and do double the work with the help of AI.
That’s not to say that EA is doing this, but the company hasn’t quite been the most charitable firm out there. It’s a major company that’s fishing for investors, so there’s no telling how far the company will go to cut costs.