Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Josh Sutton, Data & Artificial Intelligence Global Head at Publicis.Sapient (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: There’s a clear trend of these more complex plumbing of the AI systems becoming available as platforms and then abstraction layers being created such that AI can become a lot more ubiquitous. Where would you start a new company today if you wanted to do something in AI?

Josh Sutton: Where I would look at and where I get excited about the investment opportunities is not in a technology play directly, but in a business transformation play. If you think about it simply, the suite of AI tools right now enables you to make better decisions faster, engage with customers conversationally without having the human capital cost associated with that model, and the ability to perform certain tasks and functions that require limited human interactions. Andrew Ng came out with a simplified but still great litmus test of if you can do it, then it’s probably a good use case.

We take those three things as levers of change and then look at industry problems today and how they’re being solved. In particular, problems that are being solved with a high degree of human capital. These are areas like financial management and pharmaceutical sales. These are industries that I think are going to be ripe for disruption by AI-backed companies.

I don’t believe companies should lead with being an AI company. I believe they should lead with, “We have a better business model that can disrupt this industry.” They get to that model by leveraging the power of what’s possible with some of these technologies. They should be a means to an end rather than the primary starting point.

Sramana Mitra: I completely agree with you. I had exactly this conversation with Mark Russinovich last year. People have domain knowledge in different business processes to the extent that a platform can be made available to them that can be easily programmed with AI capabilities to dramatically impact those business processes. It’s going to create a huge amount of innovation in different industry sectors.

Josh Sutton: Some people look at AI as the fourth industrial revolution. I like the conversation better about it being the third wave of the computer era. If you look as the Internet as the first, mobile as the second, and AI as the third, each of them have created some real winners in the technology space, but the bigger winners have been the companies that use that technology to disrupt. Amazon in the case of the web. Uber in the case of mobility. These are the players that you’re looking at that are really creating meaningful societal impact by leveraging technology and not just by creating it.

Sramana Mitra: Not only meaningful societal impact. I actually happen to be of the opinion that these are also the moves that are going to destroy society as we know it.

Josh Sutton: That gets into a very interesting, slippery slope conversation. It comes down to a question of the time-frame. What you’re seeing is a rate of change that, for the first time in history, we’re having a fundamental transformative impact on how society operates in a generation span. Historically, we’ve seen these changes but they happen over a multi-generational period. With AI, many jobs will go away and many new jobs will be created but the ability to react to that in the time-frame that is happening is something that we’ve never seen before.

Sramana Mitra: That’s one. The other thing is that the number of jobs that will go away is much greater than the new jobs that are going to be created.

Josh Sutton: I don’t actually agree with that. I based this not on any of the studies. I base this on the history of mankind. If you look at every major improvement we have made related to automation or enhancing our own capabilities, we wind up always going into those cycles saying, “Now that we no longer have to do X, we’re going to be working less. When it’s all said and done, we wind up with society working more, not less.”

Sramana Mitra: I fundamentally disagree with that point of view. Your point of view is the rank-and-file point of view. A lot of people believe that it’s going to be the same thing over again. I think it’s absolutely going to be a different story in the next 15 to 30 years. I just started a series called Man and Superman.

Josh Sutton: I’d love to dig deeper into that topic. I’m continually trying to push my own point of view on it as well.

Sramana Mitra: It has been a pleasure. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Josh Sutton, Data & Artificial Intelligence Global Head at Publicis.Sapient
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