Name: NetApp CEO: The Promise of AI is 'Much More Real Today'
Uploaded: 2022-09-27
Duration: 4 min 10 s
Description: George Kurian says companies that hold out on AI are missing the opportunity for business success

George Kurian says companies that hold out on AI are missing the opportunity for business success

NetApp CEO: The Promise of AI is "Much More Real Today"

Leadership

George, you're a big believer in AI and of course artificial intelligence generates a lot of growth at your company net app. We've seen that there are some companies that are quick adopters of Ai, others are skeptics and are holding back. How do you read? Who's who? I think first of all, what we've seen over the last few years is That a series of technology advancements have made the promise of industrialized Ai become much more real today than it was 20 years ago. The leaders are using AI to propel their business forward. They've made the use of AI a corporate business priority and have moved it from the remit of sciences and data engineers in the back office to actually enabling front office capabilities, serving your customers better detecting fraud in real time, driving your supply chain forecasting to be way more accurate than it used to be in the past. And I think that is sort of perhaps the mindset of leadership is the biggest difference that I see between the leaders and the ladders and what about the mindset of those who are waiting and observing but not participating with all the hype about AI, is there still an advantage to being cautious? Every industry has the opportunity to use AI tools in specific use cases. And so one of the challenges of waiting forever is that you may be missing opportunities to apply aI not as a broad based corporate transformational prerogatives, but at least to progress, a specific function in its capabilities and its well you sound very enthusiastic about this technology and I'm sure that there have been occasions where you've turned some of your customers from skeptics into believers of what is it that you've been able to say or do to convince them to embrace Ai. I think the most important things that we help them understand is that there are very specific use cases where the Ai tools are mature and where there are many customer examples of peers of our of our customers who are being successful with AI. So that removes the basic skepticism, that is the technology ready. And then it becomes a lot about how do you as a leader and how do you as a customer set up for success? Well, as you know, cost is also an important consideration. How do you make a case about spending money on a I we have found that the return on marketing investment when with an Ai led propensity model is seven times better than a generic marketing investment that we make. So that really solves the RI for itself. So how do you see A I technology evolving over let's say the next five years, what are we going to be able to do with Ai that we're not doing now and I think the but the technological foundations to make AI much more widely applicable and available there today, I think it's you know, for a larger business, it is moving a i from the experiment to large scale production, which is really the responsibility of leadership. But I also think one of the real big opportunities over the next few years is to make a I get democratized so that the tools that are available to the largest corporations are now available to businesses around the world. That's a phenomenal opportunity ahead.