ChatGPT was released in late 2022, and David Martin says he expected more corporate apprehension about using it.
“When ChatGPT came out in, uh, late 2022, I expected a lot more apprehension from companies to to get their hands dirty.”
Person
David Martin
1 episodes · 21 quoted claims
David Martin worked as a software developer before joining Boston Consulting Group.
“I actually was one before I joined BCG.”
According to David Martin, GPT-5 was released the day before the interview, bringing new capabilities.
“You see, GPT-5 come out yesterday, you know, which brings a host of new capabilities.”
David Martin says data emerging in mid-2023 showed AI-augmented psychology and therapy providing great benefit.
“you saw data emerging in mid 2023 that actually augmented, uh, psychology was showing great benefit.”
Boston Consulting Group research found that companies showing positive return on AI investment were pursuing fewer initiatives.
“the companies who are showing success and positive ROI right now are actually doing fewer things.”
At one software company BCG studied, 80% of engineers expressed excitement about new AI tools.
“We saw actually at a software company, 80 of the engineers had actually expressed excitement about using the new tools.”
At that software company, only 20% of the engineers were actually using the AI tools deployed.
“only 20 of the engineers were actually using it.”
BCG's AI at Work study surveyed about 10,000 employees at all levels globally.
“this is a study we conducted globally across 10,000 employees of all levels.”
BCG's research found that 65% of employees whose leader is unsupportive or lacks a vision are fearful about AI.
“So 65 of employees, if they say their leader is not supportive or doesn't paint the vision, then they are fearful.”
BCG's research found that among employees with a supportive leader, only 15% are fearful about AI.
“Whereas for the 25 of employees who say their leader is supportive, it's only 15.”
David Martin says frontline AI adoption had not increased since BCG's previous survey.
“The adoption of of AI tools at the frontline actually had not increased, um, since the last time we were in the the survey.”
David Martin recommends that companies saving 25% of time with AI reinvest five to ten percentage points of it into employee training.
“And if you can cut 25 of time spent, you better be applying five or ten of that back into training the employee, the employee base.”
David Martin said Moderna integrated its chief information officer and chief human resources officer roles, referring to a comment attributed to Nvidia's Jensen Huang.
“You heard Jensen Wang talk about, you know, the CIO is the CHRO in the future. Moderna integrated those two roles.”
David Martin described clients asking how to run an eleven-person software development team with three people using AI agents.
“How do I take that eleven-person team and do it with three people using agents? That is a disruptive change”
David Martin said he has an 18-year-old daughter about to start college and discusses AI's career impact with her.
“I have an 18 year old daughter who's about to go off to college, so there's a lot of conversation about how AI is going to impact her”
David Martin described a company whose developers faced technical debt in legacy systems, including a Java 8 to Java 11 upgrade, and could use AI time savings for refactoring.
“Talking to a company about using AI to improve the productivity of the daily coding.”
David Martin said BCG has been measuring which components of the value it provides clients are replaced by AI.
“We actually have been measuring what components of the value we provide our clients are replaced by AI, to your point.”
David Martin described retrieval augmented generation as using an off-the-shelf large language model with a company's own data injected to make answers company-specific.
“where you're using off-the-shelf LLM. You're, you're injecting some first-party data in there to get something that's more company-specific.”
David Martin said India was among the highest countries in BCG's study for fear of AI-driven job loss.
“India was also one of the highest in terms of their fear of job loss with AI, which goes back to the leader point.”
David Martin said Indian respondents showed high use of unapproved 'shadow IT' tools, meaning employees use AI tools on their own when not given the right ones.
“Their interest in shadow IT was also pronounced and high.”
David Martin said one of his daughters died of pediatric cancer a few years earlier, and it informs his optimism about AI's impact on science.
“one of my daughters passed away from pediatric cancer a few years ago, and I viewed it so close to breakthrough.”