Axios House: Takeda, NYT and Meta execs share their outlooks on AI

DAVOS, Switzerland — Leaders from health care, media and tech shared how artificial intelligence is changing their companies' bottom lines at an event at Axios House this week.

Why it matters: AI is transforming how businesses in emerging and legacy industries operate and generate revenue. This introduction of new product capabilities also raises concerns about consumer data privacy and intellectual property rights.

Axios' Eleanor Hawkins and Ina Fried spoke with Takeda president and CEO Christophe Weber, New York Times Company president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, and Meta CTO and head of Reality Labs Andrew Bosworth at the event, which was sponsored by Automation Anywhere.

The big picture: "Six years ago, we realized that we need to be a data-driven, tech-driven company. … It is completely transforming the entire company," Weber said.

Case in point: Takeda is using AI to accelerate research and clinical development. The technology is also being applied to make predictions about medicine's effects, patient clinical trial numbers and the need for maintenance in manufacturing, Weber said.

Follow the money: Meta downsized its metaverse efforts and is focusing investments toward its fast-growing wearables business, Bosworth said.

• Meta's smart glasses have a built-in AI assistant and offer a glimpse of what's possible with AI-powered devices.
• "These are all products that the consumers are coming [to] because they like the AI features, and they're staying because you've built a great product here that does a bunch of other things really well," he said. He added that includes taking photos, making phone calls and listening to podcasts or music.

What they're saying: "If the AI understanding the types of questions you're asking, the specific context around those questions, means that in the future the AI is going to be better at answering those types of questions, you really run the risk of actually robbing future consumers of value by not allowing that kind of training," Bosworth said.

• This is going to be a market test, Bosworth said, to gauge sensitivities around AI access to consumer data. "Ultimately, consumers are going to decide what their level of comfort is in exchange for the value they're getting for a service."

The other side: Many media companies and publishers have been at odds with AI companies over intellectual property rights, including the New York Times, which has filed lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity.

• "The idea here is, how do we make sure that powerful companies can't steal our work, use it to build products to compete with us, and so that there is long-term, sustainable, fair-value exchange for journalism," Kopit Levien said.

Reality check: The belief that the Times is anti-AI is "a ridiculous idea on a couple of levels," Kopit Levien said.

• The Times has a strong record of using technology over its 175-year history and is certainly using AI now, she said.
• "This is in no way about trying to slow the future from coming," she said. "This is really about making sure there is a sustainable model for high-quality journalism for the New York Times and for everybody else who is doing it well into the future."

Content from the sponsor's segment:

In a View From the Top conversation, Automation Anywhere CEO and chair Mihir Shukla compared today's AI market to the AOL of the internet days. "If you think this is exciting, you haven't seen anything yet," he said.

• "We often get super excited about infrastructure, but in reality … as necessary as it is, it does not capture value. The value is always captured on applications that come on top of it."
• "I think we are super excited right now about infrastructure, and that's how normally it happens – 100 people bet on 100 things and not all 100 will succeed, but it is creating a necessary condition for the real wave."