Axios House: "There's a little more friction" as businesses race to adopt AI, Mistral AI CEO says

DAVOS, Switzerland — Companies that publicly tout their quick embrace of AI often are facing private challenges, Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said in conversation with Axios' Ina Fried at an Axios House event last week.

Why it matters: Corporations are eager to lead in AI and see a return on their investments, but prioritizing strategy and not speed appears to be the best way to get there.

Axios' Fried, Mike Allen and Courtenay Brown spoke with Mensch and Bank of America chair and CEO Brian Moynihan at the event, which was sponsored by KPMG.

The big picture: "The question going forward is, with a new set of technologies … and a new set of efficiencies, how do people feel? And if you ask young colleagues and teammates, they're worried about it," Moynihan said to Allen and Brown.

• As part of the company's AI plan, Moynihan said Bank of America holds listening sessions with employees to ask, "How can we make your work better?"

Between the lines: "Enterprises will have a tendency to say that they're adopting fast, but if you go internally, in general, there's a little more friction than that," Mensch said.

• "But where we see success is when companies go with a certain function to fully automate and fully reorganize their own AI processes and AI management, and that's especially true in supply chain."
• Applying AI in supply chains can yield up to an 80% improvement in dispatching containers, he said.

State of play: "What we've seen from a competitive perspective in the last year is that we took the leadership in releasing open-source models in the West, meaning Europe and the U.S.," Mensch said.

• "We've been mostly head-to-head with Chinese companies that are releasing extremely strong models, and effectively that competition has led us to be around two, three months away from the closed-source model."

• "There are a lot of countries that are also looking for an alternative to U.S. providers and to Chinese providers, and we provide that edge."

Content from the sponsor's segment:

In a View From the Top conversation, KPMG U.S. deputy chair and managing principal Atif Zaim said many of the corporate officials he spoke with at Davos asked about what's next for AI and when they might see a return on their investment.

• "To be sure, everyone is very still gung-ho on investing," Zaim said. "We just had the CEO Outlook Survey, 85% of CEOs want to continue investing, it's going to be their top priority."
• "We've also had some of them, still a majority, that are saying even if there is a recession or economic headwinds, they're going to continue investing in it."

Go deeper: Watch the full interviews on YouTube.