Like the elevator or electricity, AI is a technology that expands what is possible for humans to do – better decision making, higher productivity, and improved resource efficiency. AI has the potential to spread very rapidly – but it’s not yet clear how it will be slowed by resistance, backlash and regulation.
Executives must think about AI as a deep portion of any product or process that requires data processing, perception, classification or actuation – today. Because, as with previous innovations, the opportunities for productivity will propel economic growth and society will adapt to it sooner or later.
In this episode of The Better Question podcast, EYQ Fellow Chris Meyer and Yassmin Abdel-Magied are joined by Stefan Heck, CEO of Nauto, and Eduardo Porter, economics writer for the New York Times.
Chris and Yassmin's guests discuss the potential of AI to increase productivity, and how society can prepare to harness the incredible potential of AI, to help leaders prepare their organizations for incorporating and harnessing this wide-ranging technology into their products and processes.
Learning outcomes
- AI will be pervasive – whatever your organization makes, or your processes are, AI will be a part of them
- Today, AI tends to replicate the biases of the past, because that is the data that trained it. To ensure that populations aren’t homogenized, that needs to change
- The development of AI will likely slow down if societal and institutional constraints are not addressed, but political and social systems aren’t set up to deploy technology efficiently
- The areas that will be affected first by AI are healthcare, Government services, marketing, transportation, energy and resource extraction
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available. Read the transcript.
Presenters

Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Writer, engineer and broadcaster
Christopher Meyer
Author. Innovator. Consultant. Entrepreneur.Organizers
Prianka Srinivasan
Associate Director, Technology Insights, Research Institute | Global Markets – EY KnowledgePodcast
Episode 09
Duration 25m 06s
In this series
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