Big company CEOs ignore A.I. at their own peril

A.I. will transform my business. But how? And how quickly?

The A.I. revolution was well under way before ChatGPT launched a year ago. But generative A.I. turbocharged everyone’s interest, primarily because it was so easy to use. Suddenly, every executive with a computer had the equivalent of a second-year management consultant at their side; every software developer had a super speedy coder able to short cut the easy stuff; every graphic artist had an instant solution to many of their illustration challenges. The world changed overnight.

But generative A.I. also brought a host of new problems. Daunting data protection and copyright issues, for one. A flood of new pollution poured into an already polluted media environment, for another. And then the big one: ChatGPT, Bard, and other large language models had an unfortunate tendency to make stuff up. Their creators euphemistically call this “hallucination,” and technophile Marc Andreessen goes a step further, saying “hallucination” is just another word for “creativity.” But some of the output is stuff that would lead a journalist, lawyer, or any other professional in a business that cares about accuracy to be fired instantly.

The result is a world where big company CEOs recognize that A.I. will transform their business, but remain uncertain as to exactly how. And they aren’t sure they want the risk of being a first mover. Meanwhile, many smaller companies with less concern about risk smell an opportunity to disrupt. How this plays out over the next few years is impossible to predict. But CEOs ignore it at their peril.

At Fortune, we’ve called on the best minds available to help guide CEOs through this thicket at our various events this fall. At the CEO Initiative annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 3, we’ll be joined by a two people who I believe are best at understanding both the awesome transformational powers of the new technologies as well as the very real business risks: Accenture CEO Julie Sweet and IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. At the MPW Summit in California Oct. 10-12, the topic will be tackled by expert practitioners like Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, chief operating officer of Google Deepmind Lila Ibrahim, and Anthropic president and co-founder Daniela Amodei. A.I. also will be at the center of conversations at the Fortune Global Forum in Abu Dhabi Nov. 27-29, including a conversation with the world’s first minister of A.I., Omar Al Olama, as well as the president of the world’s first University of A.I., Eric Xing. And then we will end the year back in California on Dec. 11 and 12 for our annual Brainstorm A.I. conference, with speakers like Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla, and educator Sal Khan of Khan Academy. You can find more information about all of these events here.

Other news below. Tomorrow: the energy transition.

Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

TOP NEWS

Thiel pulls his funding

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel won't donate to any candidates in the 2024 presidential election, eight years after he backed Donald Trump in 2016. While Thiel was one of 2022’s largest donors, he’s not convinced that money matters at the presidential level, telling Fortune’s Jessica Mathews that “an extra $1 million or $10 million does not make any difference.” Still, Thiel says he’ll “vote for the Republican.” Fortune

Making climate change real

Firms like Ecolab, which specializes in water treatment, are benefiting from this year’s summer of extreme weather, which is “making climate change more real for people,” Ecolab CEO Christophe Beck says. Beck isn’t averse to helping dirty industries, like fossil fuels, clean up their act. “In the next 30 years, we will need more oil and gas than we use today,” he predicts. Fortune

OpenAI for business

OpenAI is releasing an enterprise version of its chatbot that promises better data privacy and high-speed access to its cutting-edge A.I. model. The developer promises that it won’t use enterprise data to train its chatbots, a major concern for large companies. Firms like Apple and Samsung have banned the use of ChatGPT due to concerns that employees might unintentionally leak sensitive information to OpenAI. The Verge

AROUND THE WATERCOOLER

Oil’s historic price surge in 2008 will look like ‘child’s play’ compared with the expected copper boom by 2025, Citi says by Will Daniel

Commentary: Trump is gearing up for the Second Trade War. Congress tried something similar in the 1930s–and it didn’t end well by Alan Wolff

Smucker’s return-to-office plan is a full embrace of remote work—with the big catch that it creates an entirely new kind of super-commuter by Jane Thier

Foxconn’s billionaire founder seeks presidency of Taiwan to stop island from becoming ‘the next Ukraine’ by Nicholas Gordon

What we know so far about a mysterious Tiger Global memo that’s making its way around Wall Street by Anne Sraders and Jessica Mathews

Over one-third of hiring managers admit to lying to candidates. It’s creating a trust issue with HR and damaging company reputations by Paige McGlauflin and Joseph Abrams

This edition of CEO Daily was curated by Nicholas Gordon.