AI "might be the biggest" tech cycle of his career, General Atlantic CEO says

DAVOS, Switzerland – General Atlantic CEO Bill Ford is optimistic about AI's potential in investing, telling Axios' Dan Primack that the company has added a non-voting AI member to augment its intimate investment committee.

Why it matters: AI is becoming more integrated into business, with AI agents offering advice to help some leaders make high-stakes decisions.

Primack moderated conversations with Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and Ford in Davos. The Jan. 22 conversations were sponsored by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

What they're saying: "This is the fifth big tech cycle of my career," Ford said. "Now we have AI, which might be the biggest of all."

• Ford said that significant amounts of capital have been invested in AI because the long-term potential is "very, very real."

Ford said General Atlantic now has a non-voting AI member on their five person investment committee. "She's the sixth member, we call her Ada."

• "What she's done is look at 45 years of investment history, investment memos, deals we did, how they turned out, financial models incorporating all that information. Think of it as a private LLM," Ford said.
• Ada has disagreed with the human voters before, Ford added.

Many enterprise customers are not yet sure what to do with AI and may feel rushed to do so, Robbins said.

• "13% of the customers feel like they know what they need to do with AI. 85% say 'I've got 18 months or less to figure it out,'" Robbins said, noting the results of a recent survey.
• "So there's a big gap. If you look at that, that tells you in the next 18 months there's going to be a lot of activity," Robbins added.

Separately, Ford, who's a board member of Bytedance, said he expects a deal on TikTok as soon as this week.

• "[W]e'll get on with it, maybe even as early as the end of the week, in terms of negotiating what might work," Ford said.
• When asked whether he believes a deal will get done, Ford swiftly answered "Yes."

Sponsored content:

In a View From the Top sponsored segment, Guru Chahal, partner in Lightspeed Venture Partners, said the amount of investment and revenue growth is something he has never seen before.

• "The size of this wave supersedes the size of the internet, mobile and cloud waves combined," Chahal said.