Hi, I'm Manveen Rana here in Davos, and I'm joined by Ralph
from Microsoft and Matthias from BCG.
Thank you both for being here.
Thanks.
Great to be here.
I wanted to talk to you about AI.
So much has changed and there's been so much innovation over
just the last year.
I'd love to know how you both think this is already playing
out in terms of people, economies, and the planet.
So Ralph, your thoughts first.
Yeah, thanks for the question.
I mean, we had the first show-off of ChatGPT, now a
product literally a year ago in Davos in some small corners and
then we did some work.
The last 12 months have been really meaningful to go along
these lines where you say, I think you have seen and
understand what's possible for people.
You have seen actually now the first real impact on what we
think it can do on helping climate and help the planet.
But also in places where we see crisis and economy coming
forward, we see AI in many ways being a way to open chapters,
and attack and solve problems in that space.
So a massive change in the last 12 months on what we see today
being as seen forward, going to happen with AI. Matthias, for
you?
Yeah, I can only echo that.
Maybe doubling down on planet and on people.
I think planet is going to be real.
In a recent study we did, we found that about 5-10% of
greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by the use of GenAI
by 2030, which is amazing and shows the real potential of the
technology. And people,
similarly, I think people is going to be the major, both the
major unlock for the technology, but it's also going to be a
major issue to work on.
We always used to say AI or deploying GenAI
is about 10/20/70, so it's 10% the algorithm, 20% tech, and 70%
the people aspect.
So people really play a crucial role in many dimensions.
Well, Matthias has brought up people.
Ralph for you, you work across Europe, the Middle East, and
Africa.
What sort of impact are you already seeing on today's
workforce?
I mean we actually, to support and understand better the
impact, we did a study on the impact index on productivity.
And so the data tells us right now, even on the basis of having
now more than a million people using Copilot as an example, we
see slightly more than 70% productivity on people's work.
But I think the more interesting KPI is that more than 60%
actually feel the quality of work is coming forward.
So when you see us going, we talk about Copilot and that's
the spirit of what we do, enabling people to do their job
in a different way, in a more productive way, but also find
new ways to do jobs differently, and with more fun, and more
efficiency.
Ourself,
we had put that technology forward now in our services.
So you have seen 31% more productivity on services, but
you've also seen 27% more quality of customer engagement.
So it's very people-oriented
outcomes we see right now in the way we roll it out and really
people use Copilot technology and we're excited on that
specific data points.
Yeah.
It sounds like this going very much the future. Matthias,
how much are you already seeing companies, across the regions
that you're covering,
how much are they already benefiting?
What are the real sort of opportunities for them, and the
exciting developments for them coming from the adoption of AI
into the way they work?
So we see a lot of that.
I mean, in a recent survey amongst 1,400 executives, 87%
had GenAI
as one of their top three priorities for '24.
So this answers your first question, right?
This is top of mind, clearly.
Now what are they doing with this?
We would distinguish three big streams of actions.
The first one is deploy: that is sort of, it's literally across
the board to the organization.
It's your everyday function, right.
That's the sweet spot of Copilot.
And there you can gain 5-10% productivity gains very easily.
So that's the first one.
The second one is all about reshaping.
That's for the more business critical processes on the sales
side,
on the marketing side, depends a bit on the company you're in.
There,
the gains are higher. They're up to 20-30% because you also sort
of tap into the effectiveness part, not just the efficiency
part, but also into the effectiveness part of the
technology potential.
And lastly then, it's of course also about reinventing.
There is entirely new business models that can be built on this
technology and that's of course also where the potentials are
the highest, so leaders in the field,
they do all three of them. They deploy it, they use it to
reshape processes, and they reinvent business models.
Ralph, are you see are you seeing the same? Look, I mean
data, as he says, IDC is giving us 25% more increase of
productivity on using technology.
For me, the exciting part is that we now see, by industry,
specific use cases coming forward.
So if I take financial industries as an example, very
excited on customer engagements or everything which is sales,
everything, which is customer engagement, everything which is
customer support, is just such a simple, straightforward,
meaningful case they have, which is mind-blowing
to see how the uptake is. You take now the next wave of what
is coming the last month,
I would say marketing.
So the demand of reshaping marketing campaigns, the speed
you have through technology, individualizing marketing and
customer reach is so different. Now, material science, just us
seeing recently coming forward where we tested the technology
to bring out a new way of batteries, and we saved 70% of
critical earth in batteries by just applying material science
AI capabilities. Which is kind of incredible to just see the
example going forward.
And lastly, I think what we see is companies really being now
able to unleash the full information of a company on
their assets.
And so what we do by that one, we see something which you
called Copilot studios, you're building access to simple chat
mechanics to all information of a company across the
organization.
So when you do an RFP today, you can actually get access to
existing, when you go and do pricing, you get access to
existing pricing.
And then you don't have the whole data research work to be
done because it comes through a questioning methodology to your
hands, and that is really reshaping what we see right now,
and it is cross-industries, with specific industry examples. It
makes a huge difference.
So interesting hearing about some of these partnerships with
industry. Give us a sense of the sort of momentum you're seeing
behind generative AI and also sort of for Microsoft, you know,
what is your go-to-market strategy on this.
Look, the demand on modeling the Copilot we had over the last
weeks has just asked us to reshape how we think what is
possible.
So that's exciting.
But the real data point for us is we have more than 11,000
customers right now are using Azure OpenAI.
That was the single biggest uptake we ever had on any
product, across the company history, at any time.
So this signal is also kind of bringing us in these very unique
situations where we need like BCG as a partner to help us go
through and really scale actually what we can do, because
we don't have capacity, and we don't have expertise in all
industries, in all scenarios.
And the demand is there and now it's on us in these partnerships
just to be very pointed, very targeted, and bring it
effectively to customers what they can use with technology.
Well, Ralph, Matthias, thank you both for joining us.
Thank you.
Been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
I'm Manveen Rana.