Axios House at the World Economic Forum 2024: AI and the Digital Transformation

1 big thing: Axios House programming at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland continued on Tuesday with a lunchtime reception event featuring interviews with Google DeepMind chief operating officer Lila Ibrahim and Stanford's Digital Economy Lab director Erik Brynjolfsson led by managing editor Alison Snyder and chief technology correspondent Ina Fried.

Go deeper: Lila Ibrahim said that she feels more optimistic about AI this year than last.

• "It's been pretty great advancement that actually people are collaborating and having the conversation. Now, I think we need to move into how do we actually coordinate? But I think the fact that we're actually leaning into those conversations with a wide range of stakeholders is something in past technology trends, when I think about them, it always came later."

Erik Brynjolfsson analyzed a taxonomy that compiled over 200,000 individual tasks across various occupations to gauge the transformative potential of generative AI on specific jobs and workflows.

• "If you go through all of those tasks, somewhere between 40 and 50% of them can be significantly transformed by just generative AI, let alone the other flavors of AI, and when I say transformed, it doesn't mean automated necessarily. In many, in fact, in most cases, it's augmented, you can do something differently and better."

Sponsored content:

In a View From the Top sponsored segment, Qualcomm Incorporated senior vice president and chief marketing officer Don McGuire pointed to lessons learned from a lack of cohesive social media governance as a way to inform responsible AI oversight moving forward.

• "If we could learn lessons from social media and how ungoverned it had been for so long, we might be able to avoid some of the negative effects, right, that we are seeing on social media platforms that we could maybe avoid when AI gets to scale and is deployed in mass."

Thank you to Qualcomm Incorporated for sponsoring this event.