AI is already capable of doing some incredible things, but its adoption at top companies might not have been as much as one would expect. And this might come down to incentive structures among different sets of employees at these companies.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that while top leadership at Fortune 500 companies is on board with adopting AI, rank-and-file employees have been slower to embrace it. “How AI-adopted, are (Fortune 500 companies) compared to how much they should be?” Amodei was asked in a a conversation with Stripe founder John Collison. “Certainly much less than there should be,” he replied. “But is it like 5%? 30%?” Collison probed.
“So what I would say is there is very often conviction at the top,” Amodei said. “You talk to the CEO, the CEO gets it. You talk to the CTO, the CTO gets it. The struggle they have is that they have a hundred thousand people whose job is to do something else. Their job is to do banking or insurance or drug development. And they’ve heard about this AI stuff, but you know, they’re not like, this is not what they’re an expert in. And so the challenge is often we are working with the leadership of the company to get the hundred thousand people in the company really familiar with and using the technology,” he explained.
Amodei said that not all job functions were showing the same enthusiasm for adopting AI. “I think again, the code stuff goes the fastest because the developers are the ones who are most adjacent and most watching the trend,” he said.
Top CEOs are likely closely watching the progress AI is making, and see its potential in improving efficiency and productivity. Also, CEOs have to be careful to be seen as being at the cutting edge of new developments — if they miss the AI train, and it turns out to be really consequential in the coming years, they could be personally held responsible for not adapting to changes fast enough. Regular employees, however, likely see no immediate benefits from adopting AI. If they adopt AI and automate some part of their jobs, they won’t necessarily benefit personally — the efficiency gains will flow up to the broader organization. Instead, they face the risk of automating away their jobs — if employees adopt AI too willingly, it could mean potential job losses for them or their colleagues in the long run. These diametrically different incentives for top management compared to rank-and-file employees present an interesting dynamic for AI, and how companies navigate these challenges could be crucial in how competitive they end up being in the coming years.