The transformative power of AI

Tom Chatfield: What is the most striking example you’ve encountered, in your reporting, of a company using AI in an innovative way?

Arjun Ramani, global business and economics correspondent*: One example that’s really stuck with me is a leading hedge fund that has a corpus of historical documents relating to past financial crises. It takes questions that an analyst might have, and uses AI to search through its documents and provide an answer by pulling up case studies from the past. This could revolutionise how research is done within the firm.

Tom Chatfield: What is an AI trend that you find especially interesting, impactful or exciting, and where might it be taking us?

Ludwig Siegele, senior editor, AI Initiatives: I would build on what Arjun said. So far, generative AI models have generally been pointed at textual or visual data. Increasingly, they will be pointed at other sorts of corporate data. I think companies will actually use AI to extract the structure of their firm, build a model of it and see how it really works. You can turn it into a kind of “digital twin” of the organisation.

Tom Chatfield: Imagine it’s a decade from now, and you’re looking back and picking one aspect of business or society that AI has transformed. What would that be?

Abby Bertics, science and technology correspondent*: I think AI is going to transform how we interface with information. Right now we have a tonne of data—it’s everywhere. But there’s so much that it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. AI lets you wrangle that data in a more ordered, organised and intuitive way.

Tom Chatfield: With regard to impacts on the world more generally, many people are pessimistic about AI’s effects, and many others are optimistic to an extraordinary degree.

Tom Standage, course advisor and deputy editor: Some people are saying, “It’s going to make us immortal. We’ll be able to upload ourselves. It’s going to be amazing.” Other people are saying, “No, actually, we’ll lose our jobs and then the robots will come and kill us all.” The most likely outcome is in the middle. This is going to be a useful tool that we all end up using in ways we can’t even foresee now. The trick will be to make sure the good parts of it outweigh the bad.

*Titles accurate at time of recording; Ramani and Bertics left The Economist to pursue graduate studies.

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