A month ago we reported that EA CEO Andrew Wilson is champing at the bit to increase the efficiency of EA's studios using generative AI tools, and he returned to the topic this week on a call with investors, saying that EA's developers themselves have a «hunger» to put AI to work on their projects. «We've done analysis across all of our development processes, and right now, based on our early assessment, we believe that more than 50% of our development processes will be positively impacted by the advances in generative AI,» said Wilson in response to a question about the technology. «And we've got teams across the company really looking to execute against that.» Wilson thinks that, with 40 years worth of proprietary data to «feed into» generative AI models (in some unspecified way), EA will increase efficiency over the next three years, and within five years or sooner, take things further by using AI and those efficiency gains to build «bigger worlds with more characters and more interesting storylines.» «And I would tell you, there's a real hunger amongst our developers to get to this as quickly as possible,» said Wilson, «because, again, the holy grail for us is to build bigger, more innovative, more creative, more fun games more quickly so that we can entertain more people around the world on a global basis at a faster rate.» It was, of course, just a couple years ago that we were hearing from games industry execs about the great potential of the blockchain and the «metaverse»—not so much anymore.
For his part, Wilson didn't go as all-in on crypto as some of his peers, calling NFTs «an important part of the future of our industry» and then later saying that «collectibility» in general is what's important.
Still, it bears repeating that executives are prone to overexcitement about tech they can hold up as a new magic bullet—or «holy grail,» as Wilson put it.