Next week, I will be joining the cast for a Hollywood blockbuster. No, not the latest Marvel or James Bond movie (I am just not buff enough to compete with Aaron Taylor for the role of 007).
I am leading a panel at the at the Innvo8rs conference in Los Angeles focused on how to lead corporate ventures in the age of artificial intelligence.
There is a gold rush on. Companies everywhere are racing to apply AI and, particularly, large language models. There is an eagerness to get ahead of the curve. Nobody wants to repeat the story of the dot com era, when so many corporations seemed to lose to the emerging digital natives.
That is why it is so important to stop and reflect on what it takes to succeed. That’s what we will be doing on Wednesday April 10th at 5pm PST. I will have with me an extraordinary cast.
Yoky Matsuoka is a corporate officer of Panasonic. She is a former startup CEO, founding team member at Nest, founder of Google X, and technology guru with a Phd from Carnegie Mellon plus a decade teaching at MIT. Now, Yoky leads PanasonicWELL, the company’s exploration business based in Silicon Valley.
Yusuf Jamal is a technology executive responsible for leading multi-billion-dollar business units at firms such as Skyworks, Western Digital, and Analog Devices. What sets Yusuf apart, other than his dry wit and dedication to people leadership, is that he is a serial corporate explorer. Everywhere he goes his teams generate new innovations that win awards and break the mold for the semiconductor industry.
Balaji Bondili is a former management consultant at Deloitte. A decade ago, he was tired of the itinerant consulting life-style and he envisaged a whole new way of delivering professional services using expert crowds. Today, the business he built, Deloitte Pixel, is making a multi-billion-dollar impact to Deloitte’s P&L.
These three leaders are amongst the most successful and experienced leaders that I can imagine assembling to tackle the question: what does it take to build a new corporate venture in the age of artificial intelligence? Even with extraordinary levels of investment in AI, it is not easy to lead radical innovation from inside existing corporations. The pressure to deliver short-term business results outweighs efforts to build for the future.
The problem with a gold rush is that corporations want short-term results to burnish their innovation credentials. The struggle for the corporate explorer is to meet this expectation with integrity. We all know that today, people are getting asked to do impossible things with AI, when mostly we have not yet figured out what it is capable of doing.
Some of us have been here before. The late 1990s saw a similar frenzy of activity in search of internet-based innovation. One big lesson is that the fundamentals of innovation have not changed just because there is a transforming technology base. Customers still only pay to solve problems that matter to them. Corporations still tend to over invest in business ideas before they really understand the opportunity. Leaders are just as likely to pull back from major investments in taking innovation to scale.
I am looking forward to posing these questions and more to my A-list cast in Hollywood. I hope to see some of you there.
Eugen Boglaru is an AI aficionado covering the fascinating and rapidly advancing field of Artificial Intelligence. From machine learning breakthroughs to ethical considerations, Eugen provides readers with a deep dive into the world of AI, demystifying complex concepts and exploring the transformative impact of intelligent technologies.
