EA CEO talks AI, says the usual stuff before the bong rip hits and he starts blabbing about a future where 3 billion people are creating EA’s games with it

It's 2024 and everyone who's anyone is thinking about how to get AI to do the heavy lifting for them. Among that number? EA CEO Andrew Wilson, who recently had a natter with Morgan Stanley (via TechRaptor) about his vision for AI and how it could impact EA's development processes in the years to come. Are you nervous? I'm nervous.

Asked how EA was using AI, Wilson rhapsodised about the company's long and fruitful history with the tech, describing EA as «AI-native» and that games like Madden—specifically its player runs—had already been improved by the introduction of machine learning. Moving on, Wilson says EA is «embracing [generative AI] deeply,» and that's it in no small part down to how big games have gotten.

«The development cycle is very iterative, and incredibly time consuming, which is why games are now taking six and seven years to build, as they've gotten bigger and deeper,» said Wilson, «So the first thing for us is how do we make that more efficient?» Well, that one has an easy answer, apparently: According to EA's own studies, «About 60% of all of our development processes have high feasibility to be positively impacted by generative AI.»

Wilson even has examples of AI speeding up development workflows. «So we build a stadium in one of our sports games, that would typically take us six months. This past year, it took us six weeks. It's not unnatural for us to believe that in the coming years it will take us six days.»

That's got the CEO giddy, and he reckons that if you can just find a way to «roll that out across every aspect of development,» you can really start cooking with gas when it comes to development efficiency. Wilson says the question he's asking himself right now is «how can we use generative AI to make us 30% more efficient as a company?»

All of which sounds very dramatic indeed, but it's small potatoes compared to Wilson's grander vision for the AI-ified future he—and, I'd wager, every other tech CEO on the planet—has in mind. 

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