Business and nonprofit leaders discussed the benefits of AI, the tension between sustainability and growth, and the need for collaboration to foster innovation in a wide-ranging TIME100 Talk at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21.
During the conversation, which was moderated by TIME executive editor and chief strategy officer Dan Macsai and focused on the theme “Innovating for Impact—Pioneering Solutions for a Better World,” Rob Thomas, IBM’s senior vice president, software and chief commercial officer, explained why he’s so optimistic about AI’s potential for businesses. “We’re at the start of what will be an incredible decade around what will happen in AI,” he said, noting that “the things we do today would have been considered AGI [artificial general intelligence] 20 years ago.” There’s little reason for people to fear the technology’s rise, he added: “We need the right guardrails, but I think what this can do in terms of productivity would be very powerful for the world.”
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Discussing PepsiCo’s mission to develop the “perfect Cheeto,” Athina Kanioura, executive vice president, chief strategy and transformation officer at the company, likewise praised AI’s abilities to help businesses move forward. She said that over the past few decades, PepsiCo has seen innovation cycles reduce from around two years to as little as eight weeks with the help of the technology. When the company was attempting to reformulate the snack to retain the same taste, texture, color, and shape for its “most demanding consumer base”—U.S. customers—it used AI to improve packaging and find ingredients that were less prone to breaking. Speaking about how PepsiCo is balancing its sustainability targets with growth, Kanioura also said the company has put its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets as a hard constraint into its business planning process, to ensure that it stays on track.
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The conversation also touched on what areas of innovation aren’t getting enough attention. Joseph Sentongo, chief executive officer of the Global Innovation Fund, said, “Climate change and gender remain very important issues to resolve for global development, because [they’re] chronically underfunded, and women and girls in particular are severely affected by the effects of climate change.” For every dollar invested in these efforts, the return on investment is up to $10, he noted. “So you can balance profit and purpose.” He also highlighted nature-based solutions, soil health, and regenerative agriculture, as other initiatives that require “a lot more investment to drive the type of transformative change that the world needs.”
And across these areas, panelists highlighted the benefits of businesses collaborating with each other. Thomas talked about collaboration in the context of IBM’s open source models. “When anybody can contribute around the world, it actually makes technology more safe. Could somebody see the bug or a problem? Somebody else will stick their hand up and help solve it. So we think it’s the right thing, and overall, has a positive commercial aspect to it.”
“The more you can bring companies together to be able to drive the next frontier of growth, to be able to create the next category of growth, to be able to create the next consumer frontier,” Kanioura said, “the more everyone will benefit.”
TIME100 Talks—Innovating for Impact: Pioneering Solutions for a Better World was presented by PMI.
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