Aspirations for AI: Insights from IBM and Vanguard

Arvind Krishna: AI is a wonderful productivity tool. While there are areas that may not apply, I think you got to start with the enterprise or a government setting up a sandbox, so people can go try things.

Once you know you can try things, I think every employee, every business leader, every functional leader should go try some experiments to see where it could help. It's not going to help everywhere, but it will help half the time. That experimentation teaches people and gives them the confidence to go forward with AI. That's how they should integrate AI into daily life.

Joe Davis: I couldn’t agree more. It’s opportunities right now, learning by doing. I'm using in my day job in our research teams at Vanguard. I think it becomes a risk longer term when you don't have familiarity with it. So I think that is we're in exploratory phase, but I would encourage workers to get at it in their own life, and talk to colleagues in the industry and outside how are they using it because that's how some of the learnings can occur.

Arvind Krishna:  I heard this argument when I was in grade school that using calculators will destroy your mind for doing math. I think we can still do math even though we use calculators. Then when the Internet came along, people said, you know, nobody's going to do research and you're not going to go to the library. They were all right. We didn't go to the library that much, but we still do a lot of research.

I think in the end, it's just another tool. They'll use it for summarizing. They'll use it for doing some of their own research. Agents will come along. I think it'll just become another tool that they use.

Joe Davis: I think the younger employees in the workforce, the students of today, Arvind, will actually teach the rest of the workforce. I view it as an asset. It's sometimes cast as a liability when one doesn't know the technology. And so turning it into an asset as a student, it's fundamentally going to change I think learning.

So I would really encourage students to challenge themselves of not just memorizing the answers. Start thinking about the questions you can ask to harness the answers from the technology.

Arvind Krishna: Critical thinking becomes a key skill because the noncritical thinking maybe the tech can do, but critical thinking is still very much a human task.

Joe Davis: You don't have to always be in data science, but it could be wonderful. But pair data science familiarity with whatever discipline you're studying as a student, because that's the asset.

Arvind Krishna: The world is having a demographic problem in the sense that the number of people has stopped increasing for the first time in human history. If our quality of life has to increase, we need more workers.

A digital worker is a different form of AI. The hope is that AI being used to augment humans is going to lead to better quality of life and better economic growth. And in the end, what we all strive for are better lives for ourselves and our children.

Joe Davis:
I'm hopeful as well, Arvind, not just on the automation front. It's what I would think about transformation. I'm looking to two areas that I think every human being on the planet values and it's an unmet need. And that is around healthcare—live a longer or healthier life—and in education. Those are two high-cost areas. They're important for every citizen.