Companies are finding new ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for both cost-cutting and revenue generation, driving major innovations in productivity and business models.
Databricks chief AI scientist Jonathan Frankle joins Catalysts to discuss how businesses are seeing a clear return on investment (ROI) from AI investments.
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On the ROI of AI, which do you foresee as being more likely, companies being able to use AI to be more productive and therefore cut costs or companies being able to charge for their AI and that being a potential profit margin driver?
So, I think the answer is yes. I'm I'm seeing anything and everything right now. We're still in the discovery phase where people are trying all sorts of things, but with any productivity enhancing technology, it allows you to do two things. You can do what you did today or what you did yesterday only cheaper, and it allows you to do entirely new things that simply didn't make sense before. I think there are certain things, like we can look at all these deep research and thinking and reasoning models that have come out recently. They're allowing people to do things that a human could not physically do, to read all the papers on a particular topic and develop a report on that. That's, you can think of it as a productivity booster, but you can think of that as net new technology that was simply impossible before. A human couldn't do that in their lifetime.
Okay. So Jonathan, you know, what we saw emerge in the last year plus is concerns that companies would slow down their investment in AI. And of course, I think that that has only been amplified, um, by what we've seen recently in terms of a big increase in economic policy uncertainty, which tends to have a chilling effect on all kinds of business investment. Do you see that happening?
No, I see a huge amount of investment in AI. I spend a lot of time. My title may be Chief AI scientist. I spent a ton of time with our customers because I need to figure out what science to do. What I'm seeing is they're starting to get clear ROI from AI, and that means they're investing even more. I think more broadly, you know, we can look at, you know, the state of the market today or the state of the market yesterday, but, you know, in 1997, if you would said, you know, are we investing too much in the web or too little in the web? Look at where the web is now. Look at where the internet is now, you know, any amount of money you could invest looked like a great value back then. And the companies who really jumped in immediately got ahead and have stayed ahead. And I think the same thing is going to be true about AI. I'm looking at our customers who are tech forward, willing to take some risks and willing to try things. I think they're going to be the leaders in their categories going forward.