AI boom will produce victors and carnage, tech boss warns

Winners will emerge from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom, but there will be “carnage along the way”, the boss of a US tech giant has warned.

Chuck Robbins, chairman and chief executive of Cisco Systems, told the BBC the technology will be “bigger than the internet”, but the current market is probably a bubble and some companies “won’t make it”.

Cisco, one of the world’s leading technology companies, is behind some of the critical IT infrastructure enabling day-to-day use of AI.

Robbins said some jobs will be changed, or even “eliminated”, by AI, particularly in areas like customer services where companies will need “fewer people”, but urged workers to embrace, not fear, the technology.

His comments follow a series of warnings over the recent surge in investment in AI, with some claiming the sector amounts to a bubble set to burst, rocking markets and bankrupting companies.

The BBC has been told of similar concerns by leading figures in finance and tech. JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon said some of the money invested in AI would “probably be lost”, while Google parent company Alphabet’s chief executive Sundar Pichai said there was some “irrationality” in the AI boom.

Sceptics compare the supposed bubble to the dotcom boom and bust of the late 90s.

Cisco was the world’s most valuable company in the year 2000, but saw its value fall by 80% when the dotcom bubble burst.

It has since rebuilt, and now partners with firms such as Nvidia, providing the essential infrastructure underpinning AI.

Despite having £1.3bn in orders in the current quarter alone, Robbins is alive to comparisons with the dotcom collapse.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about: ‘Is this a bubble?’. And the answer is probably yes, but we had a bubble in 2000 with the internet. And look at where we are today.

“So the winners emerge, and there’s carnage along the way, but it is going to be bigger than the internet,” he said.

“It feels a lot like it (the dotcom crash), but what happens is you’ll have money that will be invested in companies that won’t make it, but the winners will emerge, the applications and use cases will begin to evolve.”

Robbins compared AI to iPhones, with the constant development of new applications, saying new uses for the technology will develop over time.

He said it will make “lots of things better”, but also has “potential risks we all have to mitigate”.

One risk is to people’s livelihoods, with growing fears AI will lead to mass job losses.

Robbins said some jobs will be eliminated, while others will be changed, but workers can thrive if they embrace and learn to use the technology.

“You shouldn’t worry as much about AI taking your job as you should worry about someone who’s very good using AI taking your job,” he said.

Another risk of AI is online safety, Robbins warned.

“It’s going to make our cyber attacks better. It’s going to make the scams that people see in their inboxes seem more real,” he says.

But Cisco is using quantum technology in a bid to mitigate the risks of AI to security online.

Robbins said: “Every time we’ve had a big technological revolution, there’s always a security risk associated with it, and the industry is pretty good at figuring out and actually building technology that helps protect from those kinds of things.”

America and China are currently the dominant AI powers, with the countries battling it out for supremacy in the technology.

But Robbins said the UK was also making progress in the field and had “pretty good odds” of becoming an AI superpower itself.

“It’s early enough right now, and I think the one thing we know is that the countries who embrace AI are going to be the countries that win.

“And I think that the UK has always been forward-leaning on these technology transitions,” he said.

As well as driving the development of AI, Robbins has a key role as a go-between for the business community and US President Donald Trump.

Robbins is chair of the Business Roundtable, representing America’s leading companies, and speaks to the Trump administration on a regular basis.

On dealing with the sometimes unpredictable US president, he said there is “a misconception” that business leaders should be more vocal in questioning and critiquing his policies.

But he said the reality was that, if trying to achieve an outcome, “a better way to do it, particularly with this administration, is in small groups”.

He went on: “It’s probably the most accessible administration that we’ve had in decades. So they’re very open. We have lots of dialogue.”

“We don’t always agree, but we at least have the dialogue.”