Do you want to go deeper on business strategy? I want to suggest HBR's new podcast feed, HBR on Strategy. HBR editors like me hand select the best strategy case studies and conversations from across HBR's podcasts, videos and beyond. Listen for free to HBR on Strategy wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday.
你想进一步了解商业策略吗?我想推荐《哈佛商业评论》的新播客节目HBR on Strategy。像我这样的HBR编辑会精选最佳的策略案例研究和讨论,来自HBR的播客、视频等多个方面。您可以在任何您获取播客的地方免费收听HBR on Strategy。每周三都会有新的节目发布。
Chris, you've been a tech company CEO, your strategy headed Microsoft. You've seen a lot of technologies over the years. There's some that land and we think, okay, this is truly transformative, disruptive. This is an inflection point. Your mind is that where we are now or do we need to wait and see what the impact of generative AI will be on business and on everything? We're at a place where we see this as truly transformative.
I might actually draw a contrast to one of the trends that many people were very excited about in the tech landscape just a little bit over a year ago, which was Web 3 in the promise of blockchains and everything that would happen. There was definitely a segment of the world that was saying, well, interesting, but not sure what the practical applications are here. Not sure it's going to change everything. No one's saying that about AI. I think immediately many of us recognize that this is going to be completely game changing, not only for the tech landscape, but for humanity.
Welcome to how generative AI changes everything, a special series of the HPR IDA cast. There many shorthand definitions of strategy. One that I like is from the author Gary Hamill, who says that strategy is about making the future happen, not just reacting to it. Well, this sure feels like a time when it's possible to make the future happen. Generative AI has stormed into the consciousness of practically every business leader, and it's opening up new strategic paths and new ways to create new businesses. This week, how generative AI changes strategy.
欢迎来到HPR IDA Cast 的特别系列“How generative AI changes everything”。关于战略有许多简短的定义,我喜欢的一个来自作家Gary Hamill,他说战略是关于让未来发生,而不仅仅是应对它。嗯,现在似乎正是有可能让未来发生的时候。生成式AI已经风靡了几乎所有的商业领袖,它正在开辟全新的战略路径和创造新业务的新方法。本周,我们来探讨生成式AI如何改变战略。
I'm Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review and your host for this episode. In this special series, we're talking experts to find out how this new technology changes workforce productivity and innovation, and we're asking how leaders should adopt generative AI in their organizations and what it means for their strategy. Later on in this episode, you're going to hear from Andy Wu, a professor at Harvard Business School. I ask him to talk through the trade-offs that large and small companies alike will be making in this fast-changing market. But right now, I'm talking to Chris Young. He's the head of strategy at Microsoft, which is partnered with OpenAI and is rolling out generative AI in its search product, office productivity suite, and cloud computing services.
Chris, thanks for coming on the show. Great to be here, Adi. So, I want to jump right in. Do you feel that there's an urgency here as a provider that you need to be first mover to win in this market? You don't necessarily have to be the first mover, but there are significant advantages in being first mover. I do think that's one of the reasons why there's so much velocity in the startup community. Certainly, that's one of the things that we're sensitive to in our own business is making sure that we move quickly because the market is moving quickly.
This is, I will tell you, the cycles in and around AI are faster than we've ever seen in the tech landscape. Companies being built, changes every week. Much companies are moving faster more than we've ever seen. I think it's because of everybody sees the opportunity here and the promise for change.
That makes sense, but then, of course, you get the backlash, which is, let's slow down. Let's make sure that this technology, what it creates is safe, is not biased. You hear all the complaints. How do you balance the sense of wanting to innovate, but also not wanting to be reckless with a technology that's powerful and we're not even sure exactly everything can do?
We're very committed to safe and responsible AI. That's a core pillar of everything we're doing. Certainly at Microsoft and that's something I'm personal believer in. I will tell you that in some ways, while the cycles are moving quickly today, they've been many years in the making. There's a lot of work that's gone in behind the scenes to build the right foundational principles around AI, how we deliver it, the systems around which we bring AI to the market. Microsoft, our partner open AI and others have been very grounded in those sets of principles and practices for a while now. That's allowed us to move quickly as the market really shifted after chat. TPPT came out in the fall.
One of the words in the air now is regulation. Is this a moment where regulation would be welcome in the industry or is that something you rather you brace yourself for? It's inevitable. We welcome it. It's going to be an important part of this. AI is such a powerful and these foundational models are really, really quite powerful. We at Microsoft are very, very committed to participating with government and shaping the future around this.
We've heard a lot of that in the media very recently. We think it's an important part of the evolution of AI in our society. How quickly is this market moving more generally in terms of just people out there developing products and services and doing incredible things? Well, I sit in San Francisco and in the startup world, I can tell you, in the fall, we were tracking about 80 companies that were working on AI. Today, we're tracking 8,000. It's literally a Cambrian explosion of organizations that are working on this.
Now, some of those 8,000, many of them were probably doing something else as a startup and now they're pivoting to making AI a bigger part of their offer. The way I think about it is any company that was a SaaS company before has now got to find a way to make AI a part of what they're doing because in many ways, in the fullness of time, AI is going to change the nature of how software and humans interact with one another. I think that'll be a very different way in which we expect services to happen.
Today, we use software to do things. We use software to bring experiences to us, to augment our capability. With AI, it's going to abstract a lot of that interface with the software and it's going to force us to think differently around what is in a software experience or a SaaS experience to look like for a customer. I think that's going to change a lot of businesses that exist today. It's also going to bring new businesses that we haven't yet thought about.
With any technology, we talk about how's it have nots and the gap between the two. With this technology, do you imagine this will widen the gap or narrow it again between the technological haves and have nots? One of the big productivity opportunities with AI is writing code. It's technology development. Traditionally, small companies or small organizations, they don't generally have the same access to great developers or lots of developers and big companies have been able to make those investments but with the capabilities that AI can bring to develop code, the promise of that is it can be really profound.
Think about bringing this capability to small community-based organizations where someone who's not technical now has the ability to create software, to create workflow, to build tooling that allows that organization to achieve its mission more efficiently and more effectively whereas before you would have had to hire consultants and spend money that you didn't have in order to technology enable that organization. If done well, this allows so many more organizations and people to be able to get the promise and the benefit of what technology can do for all of us. That argument is that it's really democratizing access to the highest level of technology. That's how I feel about it.
Imagine for a second, somebody who's heading a relatively small firm is aware of all this chatter and early developments with this technology, not quite sure how to get in. What was the head of strategy for Microsoft tell the head of strategy for a smaller firm how to get into this realm? The first thing I would do is start using it and get familiar with it. Then think about what can I do to improve productivity across different functions in my organization? What can I do then to apply it to workflows in my organization because there will be value there and then what new experiences can I create?
What new business models might be available to me? Again, I think that's a process that anyone can go through in a big company as well as a small company. To what extent does generative AI change the nature of strategy? How we approach it? The first thing I think it does to strategy is it speeds up the cycles. Anyone who's thinking, hey, I'm going to do an annual strategy process and that's going to be sufficient, it's no longer sufficient.
Certainly not in the tech landscape. You just got to be faster than that. You got to be more iterative than that. I also think that it's going to help us frame trade-offs and decisions in a more efficient way.
For example, one of the things that AI does for us is it brings access to information that you would normally have to send humans out to go gather a lot of information, maybe do a lot of interviewing, and finally you synthesize it down into, hey, how do I do that? How do we think about these trade-offs or these decisions that we want to make? This is just going to speed up all those cycles. You're going to be able to get at those conversations a lot more quickly than we've been able to as we've gone through these normal strategy processes.
We'll be able to ask ourselves some different questions because of what's possible. Then there's the whole, what are the new things we can go do? We can go create because AI is now available to us. That's a big strategy question for literally everyone. Whether you're a business, a nonprofit, or even a government agency.
So you've been talking today mostly about applications that are available right now. Throw this forward. What does the workplace look like? The AI-powered workplace look like in, say, five or ten years? I think the AI-powered workplace is going to change the nature of work for pretty much everyone because you're going to now have, at minimum, you're going to have a set of co-pilots that allow people who have certain job functions today to do their jobs more efficiently, more effectively, to produce better output.
I think the customer experience for everyone is going to be completely transformed. That's one of the things I'm honestly super excited about from a business perspective is the transformation of the customer experience. You call a company, you've got a problem, and it takes a lot of energy and effort to get the, particularly if it's a thorny problem, they get it fixed because people are searching through different systems. They might hand you off to three or four different reps, and then you've got to re-explain your issue. In a world where you have co-pilots that are AI enabled, I think you can make it far more efficient and pleasant for the user who's calling in, the customer who's calling in, who just wants to get whatever experience it is or product it is or issue it is handled, quickly, painlessly, so they can move on with their lives.
I think that's going to be completely transformed. For the user, it's going to allow you to get on with your life, and that's going to reshape some things inside of organizations, but it's going to, I think also open up a lot of different opportunities. There's so much that we still have to go do in our society, for example, we've got to electrify vehicles, we've got to make supply chains more efficient. We need to educate our students in ways where we've got shortages of teachers. We need to provide healthcare in a much more broad-based fashion at a cheaper cost basis.
I think AI's potential to change things in a way that's good for humanity is something I get very excited about when I think about the future. Chris Young, I really want to thank you. You're on the front lines and developing these technologies. I want to thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me.
Coming up after the break, I ask HBS Professor Andy Wu about navigating this emerging landscape. Should you build your own generative AI? Buy it? Something in between? It depends. He breaks down these strategic choices. Stay with us.
Welcome back to how generative AI changes strategy. I'm Adi Igdacias. Joining me now to discuss how to navigate this new strategic landscape is Andy Wu, a professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in technology in business. Andy, thank you for joining me. Adi, thank you for having me.
So let's start by talking money. I think a lot of us have been enjoying playing with some of these generative AI tools for free or at a nominal price tag. I get the sense that the generative AI requests costs a lot more, maybe 10 times more, as a commercial web search. I guess my question for you is, is that true? And what is the basic cost structure here?
Right. I think thinking about the economics is really important now. And Adi, you're absolutely right about the high cost of inference in terms of how we input and output information from these large language models or any other generative AI model. It is more expensive on a variable cost basis than anything we've ever done in computing. A relative to a simple Google search, doing a generative AI type output like Chatchy PT could be anywhere from 10 to 100 times or more expensive than just a basic Google search. And that's something that companies are going to have to reckon with. And shall we assume that those costs will come down? The way costs sometimes come down?
Cost will almost certainly come down. But at the same time, we have to remember that we are in an arms race right now of increasingly complicated and large models. So even as costs come down, the models are going to get more complicated that will raise costs again. So this is always going to be more expensive on a variable cost basis to how we've done computing in the past.
All right. So let's say you're a large corporation or a midsize company even. You see the potential for Gen AI in your company. You want to get in the game. But what do you need to know about what it is that you bring to the table to start thinking through these decisions and whether this technology would have value for you?
So there's three levels of increasing sophistication of how a company can get involved and really bring AI into their organization or their product. The most simple way of doing it is basically looking for the right applications that you can use in the market. Of course, Chat GPT has made its way into a lot of companies already. And that's not going to require a lot of deep thinking.
But when we get to the next level of perhaps integrating a third party application programming interface into your workflow, into your product, that's where we really got to think more about what are the ways that a custom integrated AI tool for your organization might be valuable. And so for instance, consider the example of two retailers. So think about the department store, Macy's, or the supermarket croakers. And so they might consider the possibility of using an API and application programming interface from open AI or elsewhere.
但是,当我们达到了将第三方应用程序编程接口(API)融合到您的工作流程或产品中的下一个级别时,我们就需要更加思考一下,定制集成 AI 工具对您的组织可能有哪些有价值的方式。例如,考虑两个零售商的示例。想象一下百货商店 Macy's 或超市 Kroger,它们可能考虑使用来自 Open AI 或其他地方的 API 和应用程序编程接口的可能性。
And then integrating that into their applications so that their customers can have like a Chat interface to learn about new products. Now there's going to be a lot of potential for custom modifications at that level to tailor that AI for your particular customer-based organization. And so in the example I just gave, imagine if a customer typed in the word dressing into the Chatbot. For Macy's and for croakers, they want the word dressing to deliver completely different responses.
And so you'd need to modify the input, say, prompt engineering so that Macy's would want to append the word clothing in front of the word dressing. And croakers might want to append the word salad in front of the word dressing to make sure the Chat is giving the right kind of response.
One level even deeper than the API is many companies I think are going to need to look at the serious possibility of putting together their own model. And that doesn't mean starting from scratch. It means taking an open source model that's out there that Facebook or others have already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to developing. And then using your own proprietary data to then fine tune that model for your use case.
比 API 更深层次的是,我认为许多公司需要认真考虑建立自己的模型。这并不意味着要从头开始。它意味着利用已经投入了数亿美元开发的 Facebook 或其他公司的开源模型,然后使用自己专有的数据来对这个模型进行调整以适应自己的使用情况。
So Bloomberg has trained a model already of their own. And what I want managers to know is that the buried entry to doing this is actually pretty attainable. The numbers I'm hearing from the marketplace right now, it could cost you a million dollars or less. I've seen some people fine to models for under a thousand dollars. And you can have a custom model that is based on your data for your organization. And that's going to depend on whether or not you have the proprietary data and be whether or not a custom model for your specific vertical is going to dominate a more general model.
And then are you suggesting that companies could build these themselves or how do you think through the Bivers' build decision here, whether you develop in house or partner with somebody else that has this know how?
Yeah. Well, fortunately, there's a lot of resources now that you can have your own model but have other people help you put together that model. So for example, Amazon has something called SageMaker where let's say you have your own data available. You can just give it to Amazon and they will fine tune the model for you. And then boom, you've got your nice little custom model already.
At the same time, of course, the larger your organization and the more specific tweaks that you're going to need to the model, then you're going to want to consider the possibility bringing a lot more of this in house. Of course, right now the talent in AI is very expensive. And so that's something we'll have to run into.
How do you even know who to partner with? I mean, suddenly there is a whole generative AI industry that's springing up. So if you want to, if you want to partner, who do you partner with? How do you trust the expertise? Figure out who's who and who's a valuable partner.
The first is your trust of that partner in terms of their ability to potentially handle your secure data. Whether or not you're going to give them all your data at once to build a model or you're going to have your employees type in potentially confidential stuff into an application. And I think the process for evaluating that trust and safety and security is the same process our enterprise CTO has already been doing for two decades.
Second part of this is simply just price. In that, in the longer term, I think a lot of the more general technologies we're going to be using are going to be fairly competitive in the market. And so in the end, a lot of this is going to get driven down to just the variable cost of the cloud computing or computing technology. And so I think price is actually surprisingly important here.
Even across the big models that we've seen like from Meadow or from OpenAI, actually for most purposes, the difference in quality isn't that significant. So in most cases, I would pick the one that was cheaper on a variable cost basis especially.
And then the third thing, and this is particularly important in today's environment, is that you really got to think about the stability of your partner and their financial viability. And so a decent amount of the AI companies we're talking about, the most well-funded ones, they raised a lot of their money before the current downturn in the market. And many of them are going to be struggling with their cash situation this year. Certain number of them will not make it into next year. And so I would want to have a partner, a provider, who you think will make it into the coming years.
When you talk about this, there could be a lot of, I guess, new job categories, new specializations. I mean, even when you say, train the AI on the content. What does that mean in sort of layman's terms? What is the job of training an AI bought on a company's exclusive content or data?
Well, at least in today's world, and especially in the next couple of years, there is an increasing amount of tools that assist developers in doing the fine-tuning process. So I think in general, like any sort of backend data engineer, software engineer would increasingly be comfortable doing this kind of thing, particularly as we are updating undergraduate and graduate education around this kind of technology.
But what it does in tail is, I would say, some hard factors and some soft factors. So in terms of hard factors, there are technical skills about how to run the model and to a particular run the model efficiently when you're training it. I've heard stories of companies in Silicon Valley where some engineer made a very human mistake of typing a bracket instead of a coltlin or something. And then in the process of running the training, they literally just lit $500,000 of electricity and hardware on fire. Like, because they just started the process with the typo and then now we've got a completely wasted training cycle.
Now I think the soft factors here are also important when you're fine-tuning. And this is something that I was really surprised about to see engineers doing this. But a lot of this training process is based on fuel and intuition. And so what happens is that they will take data and then introduce it to the model to help re-weight the parameters of an existing, say, open source model. And there isn't an obvious point where you want to stop the apox or iteration process. And so what they're doing is they're feeling it out and eyeballing it and running some, there's some mathematical tests, but they're also just eyeballing the results that are coming out and then making a judgment call, okay, have we trained this model enough? Do we have enough data to do what we want?
Interesting. So when you think about the org chart of the future, what does AI, what does generative AI do to middle managers? I think middle managers are going to be here to stay and let me tell you why. If we think about this new job category of prompt engineers or people who specialize in interacting with the AI, what are they doing? They're asking good questions, they're giving detailed instructions. What does a middle manager do? They're a prompter of humans. And so in that sense, like the skill set of a middle manager, I think is actually more and more important. And actually what I think is different here is as we contrast managers with, say, individual or independent contributors, I think it's actually the middle managers that are coming out ahead in that there are the ones that actually have the skill set that are to actually work with the AI as opposed to someone who is, say, writing a contract or writing code as an independent contributor.
Yeah, so it's sort of all about the prompt. I mean, is that a burgeoning industry now, chief prompt officer or something like that? I think in the short term, it's going to be quite important. And we're still early on how that's exactly going to be organized. But I do imagine that a significant amount of managers and companies are themselves in addition to managing humans going to have to be managing an AI. And in that case, those people, I think, will also have to develop the skill set of working with the AI and building that intuition over time. And I imagine the training for that would be a combination, like kind of how we teach business and management of humans today. It's a mix of a good HBR article plus like years of experience on the job, right?
All right. So let's say you're a technology provider. How would you be thinking about these markets right now? This is a very tough one to look at right now as far as being a technology provider. But I think the upside is that there's a lot of places in the value chain here that you can compete in as a technology provider, you can compete in supplying data or you can compete in helping other people build models. There's also a burgeoning industry of going back to private data centers that I think will need more of. And of course, at the application layer, I think we will see a whole different category of applications that are going to be AI first. And then that's the area where I think we're going to have a whole new generation of entrepreneurs that are going to be quite disruptive to the older generation.
But what I do want to caution people here about is the open questions about the fundamental profitability of being just a model company. Isn't it interesting that Microsoft has essentially outsourced the model and that Google and Facebook has historically actually open sourced the model and Facebook today is very aggressive about open sourcing that model. And so what we think of is actually the core AI technology, these large companies are actually, it's not internal or they're handing it out for free. And what does that tell us about where the profitability is and may not actually be in that part of the technology? If we go back to the internet and look at what are the most important technologies for the rise of the internet, I would put the three technologies as telecommunications, like H&T Verizon, second would be TCPIP, third would be HTML. How much money did those people make on the internet? Approximately nothing.
And that's what we have to be careful about here is that I think there are going to be portions of the value chain for AI that will not capture a lot of the profitability. So if you had to guess right now, who's going to make the big money in this? Who stands to be the big winner? So I think that the providers of the hardware technology used for this kind of technology are going to come out very strong.
There's nobody in the world that prefer to be right now than Jensen Huang and Nvidia. And on the other end of the stack, I do think that entrepreneurs building AI first applications will be in a great position, particularly as they're using and thinking about AI and reimagining how we traditionally think about applications. In terms of industry verticals where I think there is the biggest growth opportunity, the two areas I'm most excited about right now are video gaming and media or social media.
And I think a lot of the conversation we're having today is focused on AI as a productivity tool. I think the better way to look at it is actually AI as enhancing consumption. And so what we are talking about here with generative AI is we now have the ability to provide infinite personalized content to any person to entertain them until the end of time. And so I think that's an area that is going to be very, very exciting.
So this is a super fast moving market, presumably the rules of classic strategy still apply. But I'd love to know, does this feel different from new technologies that you've studied before? Basically I like to think of this as a new type of computing platform. And so when I teach about technology, we teach students about the past in terms of the rise of operating systems and web browsers.
And in terms of the current age, platform technologies like metaverse virtual reality, telecommunications enhancement and through 5G, as well as a variety of other computing interfaces like voice. These are all platforms. This is a new kind of platform that allows us to do a much more human-like form of computing. And I would say that many observers in Silicon Valley, I think, were surprised by this type of chat GPT model being the thing that really resonated with people. And that part, you know, I'm still surprised by, but I think it speaks to the broader mission of artificial generative intelligence in terms of reaching sort of the singularity and sort of replicating a human that really does speak to people quite literally.
All right, so what's your basic message to senior leaders who, you know, want to lead their organizations into the future with a generative AI solution? So for leaders that are trying to lead their organizations into the future, my core message would be you need to chill out and panic at the same time. And so when you're thinking about making investments in AI today, I want you to do it with a sense of urgency, but I don't want you to play for the next two years. You're playing for the next 10 years.
Right now, it's a difficult time to make decisions around AI because at least my bed is we're almost certainly in the middle of a hype cycle around the technology. And so in that sense, it's not really about the current phase of the technology, but without a doubt in the next 10 years, advancements in computing and AI will continue to be transformative and they will have transformative effects around the same logic that you and I have talked about today. And that the same assumptions about the importance of data, the same assumptions about fixed costs and variable costs, all that will be the same. And the more you can start getting your organizations ready now, then you'll be ready for the next transformation.
Right now, there's a very specific set of technology to AI is based on that will almost certainly be different in five to 10 years. And I want you to be ready for the next one. The broader competitive part though, that's a little more frightening is that in fact, other companies, your competitors are almost certainly going through the same exercise. And so really we're on a treadmill here. And then if you're looking at AI right now, you've really got to take some action because your competitors are also going to be doing the same kind of thing.
Where can companies go wrong? You know, are you seeing misunderstanding or misconceptions that can push executives in the wrong direction as they try to figure out how to respond to this technological opportunity? There's two directions I would think about in terms of mistakes. And these are actually competing mistakes in that generally you make one or the other.
And so the first mistake is being suspicious about the technology and suspicious about particularly privacy of data and restricting your employees from experimenting and using it. And in particular, over the next couple of years, we're going to see a large battery of new applications that are AI based coming up. And the only way you're going to be able to figure out which of those applications is good and that you should diffuse to the organization is by letting some frontline employees play around with that new technology. But that does entail the risk of letting your employees submit some data that's privacy to the company to those applications and into those models. So there's a little bit of intellectual property risk there, perhaps a lot.
And the other risk here is the total opposite of that is that companies need to really think about how they're protecting intellectual property, particularly on the open internet. We're in kind of a pickle right now for intellectual property in that we've lived through an era where for, say, text-based information that there's a distinction between copyrighted and non-copy-righted text. And what is different now is that it's not just about copyrighted or not. It's also about whether or not that information is available publicly or privately.
So for example, a New York Times article would be copyrighted but public in that Google can index it through its search process and people can find it online. That is the data that is going to be used to train the next generation of models. And that's data that I think companies like the New York Times and elsewhere really need to think about actually blocking off from the open internet so that they can retain the ability to use it, sell that data or to train their own models with it as opposed to letting everybody train their models with it. So that's such a great point.
And I think for people who generate content, it feels like the generative AI bot have already scraped our information without our permission. And that's part of this great aggregation of language and data that's being used to generate these kind of amazing new things. And it seems like an IP question that at best is a gray area and at worst is actionable.
Right, it's definitely a gray area right now. There's a number of ongoing lawsuits and a lot of legal scholars have been really debating exactly what we should do here. Some have argued that we need to have more stringent protections to prevent people from training AI on some other person's copyrighted data. And if we don't make any change, then we are in the tough situation that companies will probably have to pull their data off or make it harder to access the general public, in which case our notion of an open internet is going to be much more challenged.
The internet could be much less open than we would imagine in the past. So with any of these big technological developments, there's sort of a split between techno optimists and techno pessimists. And they're usually the same arguments, you know, that well, this is going to improve efficiency and let us do new things and free up humans to do more creative things. The pessimists tend to be, well, yeah, one or two humans will be able to do creative things, but all the other humans will lose their jobs.
Where do you come down in terms of optimism versus pessimism in terms of this technology? You know, Adi, that's a super tough question. But I guess I would probably come down on the pessimistic side right now in terms of the broader impacts. And again, I'm not of the opinion. There's any real way to stop the current process that we're undergoing in society.
But the pessimism from my perspective comes from what we've seen already with the digitization of society in the last 20 years. And on the productivity side, on the employment side, automation has already had a tremendous impact on at least the American workforce in terms of lost jobs in middle America and manufacturing in the retailing sector, the broad transformation of brick and mortar to e-commerce has also cost a lot of jobs as well in local communities.
I'm actually more concerned about the transformation on the consumption side. Now we spend our time outside of work and I think that's actually where it's most dangerous. The analogy here would be if you look at the last 20 years, if you look at our young people, how much time they spend playing video games and on social media. And now we have the ability to at low cost generate unlimited video games and unlimited social media.
And in that world, the thing I would worry about is not necessarily whether or not your kids or my kids or anyone's kids can find a job. It's really whether or not they would want to ever work a job. Like if you can for very low cost just sit there and live in the digital world of unlimited perfectly personalized content, what's the point of doing anything else? And then we have to reckon with whether or not that's a world we want to live in.
Andy Wu, I want to thank you for for joining us. Thank you for your insights. All right, thank you for having me. That's Andy Wu, a professor at Harvard Business School.
安迪·吴,谢谢您加入我们。感谢您的见解。好的,感谢您邀请我。安迪·吴是哈佛商学院的教授。
Before that I spoke with Chris Young, had his strategy at Microsoft. This is the last episode in our series, How Generative AI Changes Everything. To listen to the other episodes, on the impact on productivity, creativity, and organizational culture, you could find them in the HBR IDA cast feed. And for more on this topic, check out HBR's latest big idea on how to implement this new technology responsibly. That's at hbr.org slash tech ethics.
在此之前,我和Chris Young交谈,了解了他在微软的战略。这是我们系列节目《生成式人工智能如何彻底改变一切》的最后一集。想听关于生产力、创造力和组织文化影响的其他节目,可以在HBR IDA Cast平台上找到。还想了解更多相关话题,请查看HBR的最新大想法:如何负责任地实现这项新技术,网址是hbr.org/techethics。
This episode was produced by Kurt Nickish. We get technical help from Rob Eckhart, our audio product manager is Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates is our audio production assistant. Special thanks to Marine Hope. Thank you for listening to How Generative AI Changes Everything, a special series of the HBR IDA cast.
本集由 Kurt Nickish 制作。我们得到 Rob Eckhart 的技术支持,音频产品经理为 Ian Fox,Hannah Bates 是我们的音频制作助理。特别感谢 Marine Hope。感谢您收听 HBR IDA cast 的特别系列节目《生成式人工智能如何改变一切》。
I'm Adi Acations.
我是阿迪行动。
Hi, it's Allison. Before you go, I have a question. What do you love about HBR? I worked at newspapers before I came to HBR, and the thing that has impressed me most is the amount of attention and care that goes into each and every article. We have multiple editors working on each piece. They put their all into translating these ideas typically from academia or from companies in practice into advice that will really change people's lives in the workplace.
If you love HBR's work, the best thing you can do to support us is to become a subscriber. You can do that at hbr.org slash subscribe IDA cast, all one word, no spaces. That's hbr.org slash subscribe IDA cast. Thanks.