No stranger to hot-button topics — and a target of protests for simply existing — the World Economic Forum wrapped another of its celebrity-laden annual meetings recently with a split perspective on AI.
Babak Hodjat, chief AI officer at Cognizant Technology, walked InformationWeek through some of his experiences at the recent think tank event in Davos, Switzerland.
Hodjat said the business community that descended on Davos took a greater interest in AI than the political players did.
“Surprisingly, this year it felt like we were in two worlds,” Hodjat said. “There was the technology and AI world, and then there was the geopolitical stuff, which is really out of scope for me.” This was Hodjat’s third trip to the forum.
While there was some talk about AI among the politicos and decision-makers in attendance, “it was really a side note” for them, he said. Given the spread of protests and other forms of upheaval across various countries, the shift in attention is understandable.
AI trust and safety move up the agenda. Meanwhile, the business community at Davos eagerly discussed AI, likely driven by significant investments into the technology’s future. Some of the hype and expectations, though, had cooled, with more grounded attention on risk awareness, Hodjat said.
“We kind of went through this period of, ‘Wow, AI is awesome,’ forgetting about responsible AI and safety and trust,” he said.
The grounded sentiments on AI at Davos stood in contrast with prior hype and fears.
“When AI is something that you’re not directly involved with, it can become either really too super powerful in your head … or super scary,” Hodjat said.
The business community also wants to get more of its staff to embrace AI. In his conversations at Davos, Hodjat said some clients and other attendees asked what they could do to foster acceptance of AI within their company culture.
Vibe coding in action
He explained to Davos attendees what worked for Cognizant when it wanted to boost AI adoption in-house.
“We did this vibe coding thing, and it really was effective, and they latched onto it,” Hodjat said. That included demonstrating at Davos how to vibe code, which uses plain language with a chatbot to describe the type of code to generate.
Even with such attention, Hodjat noted that the business community still wants to know that AI is worth the money. “People expect ROI. They expect it like yesterday. There’s a lot of investment that’s gone into it,” he said. To meet that demand, he shared some of what Cognizant experienced with its AI efforts.
The ROI question
“A week before I flew out to Davos, I got this report from our own internal deployment, hundreds of agents operating our intranet, and it’s been in use by our entire employee base,” he said.
That data came from a three-month report on AI’s use within Cognizant, which showed some 11.3 million transactions were completed internally for its employees. “The rate at which people were opening tickets internally has gone down significantly. Like, this thing has paid for itself already,” Hodjat said.
By his reckoning, many of the businesses at Davos had focused primarily on efficient use of AI early on to keep costs under control, and the timeline for future benefits from the technology should be put into perspective with other IT developments.
“This whole thing started in 2023. How long did it take for you to start getting the ROI you expected from your cloud migration, modernization, or API modernization, or data integration and modernization? The fact is, the technology is new, and it’s getting better all the time,” he said.
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