AI buzzes Davos, but CEOs wrestle with how to make it pay

DAVOS, Switzerland — Bright banners tout the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) along the main promenade of Davos, but executives at the World Economic Forum (WEF) say they are grappling with how to turn early demos into money-makers.

The arrival of OpenAI’s viral ChatGPT triggered a frenzy of venture investment and an abrupt change of course inside the world’s biggest technology companies since late 2022.

This year, several chief executive officers (CEOs) at the WEF meeting in Davos told Reuters that the latest generative AI still has a lot to prove. Cloud and internet security company Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Reuters that the months ahead may even feel like an “AI letdown.”

“Everyone’s like, yeah, I can build these cool demos, but where’s the real value?” he said, echoing a theme among business leaders attending the WEF meeting.

ChatGPT’s rapid rise is in some ways an outlier.

In the first two months since its November 2022 launch, the chatbot reached an estimated 100 million users, making it one of the fastest growing applications in history.

The program brought so-called generative AI to consumers’ fingertips, letting people write a short prompt and generate a poem, school essay or gather information as if with a search engine. It also proved a good collaborator for developing ideas in “low stakes, not businesscritical use cases,” said Victor Riparbelli, CEO of AI video generation startup Synthesia.

But “the enterprise is definitely not really ready” for this chat-based AI, he said in an interview.

One problem Mr. Riparbelli cited is there is no clear path to end so-called “hallucinations,” or false content generated by AI. While computer scientists have developed methods for constraining places from which chatbots can draw responses, business leaders may not want the risk.

Other concerns, said IBM’s Europe, Middle East & Africa Chair Ana Paula Assis, are stopping chatbot AI from reproducing human biases, and regulation.

Premier Li Qiang of China said in Davos that AI has to serve the common good but must be appropriately governed, because it “poses risks to security and to our ethics.” And China’s President Xi Jinping wants the United Nations to play a central role in AI discussions, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Wednesday. —