Today Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson spoke at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, and provided a look into his ideas for the use of generative AI in the company's development processes.
During the livestreamed conference, Wilson called the era of generative AI "incredibly exciting" adding that Electronic Arts is "embracing deeply" the new technology.
He also mentioned that there are three pillars to the way he thinks about using generative AI, efficiency, expansion, and transformation.
And now of course we're in the era of generative AI which is the most exciting yet by a fairly wide margin and something that we're embracing deeply. We think about it in three core vectors: efficiency, expansion, and transformation.
Speaking of efficiency, Wilson mentions that Electronic Arts' business involves an "incredibly iterative development cycle" as pressing a button in a game doesn't just need to trigger the desired effect, but it also needs to be fun.
As a result, game development is "incredibly time-consuming" and games are now taking six and seven years to build.
According to Wilson, a feasibility study across all of EA's game development processes and about 60% of them have "high feasibility to be positively impacted by generative AI."
He brought up the example that in the past building a stadium for a sports game took six months. In the past year, it took six weeks, and it's not unnatural to think that in the coming years, it'll take six days. Wilson believes that extending this concept to every aspect of development could drive "meaningful efficiency."
He then explained that the goal in his mind is to use generative AI to make the company approximately 30% more efficient.
And while we don't have the math on it yet, I would tell you in the back of my mind my orientation is "how can we use generative AI to make us 30% more efficient as a company? How in three years from today could we be 30% more efficient?"
Wilson also alleged that developers within EA are embracing the new technology.
And I would tell you, part of that is how do we get our people to embrace it and for creators of games, this is incredibly exciting: the ability to get to the fun faster and get to market faster is the Holy Grail for them.
And so we see a real embrace happening inside of our company around these things that can help them get to greatness much more quickly.
Moving on to expansion, Wilson argued that AI can expand the experience for gamers, bringing the example that FIFA 23 has 12 run cycles for the players (the way they run in the game), while EA Sports FC 24 has 1,200 all done with generative AI.
According to Wilson, every time a game is made bigger, deeper, or more immersive, it attracts more people and they're more engaged. He also argued that it's possible to use personalization, culturalization, and deeper, more immersive experiences to draw 50% more people and to make them spend 10 to 20% more on the games thanks to generative AI.
So the math that we're doing right now is we have 700 million people in our network. We think it's not unreasonable to at least get 50% more people as a result of personalization, culturalization, deeper, more immersive experiences.
And we're watching right now how generative AI impacts monetization on other platforms, and what we're seeing is where there is real personalized content, bespoke to me and bespoke to my friends, monetization is 10 to 20% greater.
Wilson then put all these plans and percentages together as he summarized the impact he expects from generative AI on the company over five years from now.
If you fast forward this over a five-year-plus time horizon, you think about where we've gotten to in terms of efficiency, what I would like to believe is 30% more efficient as a company, where we can attract 50% more people into our network, and hopefully by virtue of the nature of the content that we can create through generative AI, which will be created faster, and more personal to every player, then there's 10 to 20% more monetization opportunity to us on an ARPU level.
The executive then moved on to talk about the "Longer term play" which for him is the most exciting, transformation.
What we've seen every time there's been a meaningful technological advancement in media and in technology, where you are able to democratize an industry and hand it over to the population at large, incredible things happen.
And so the way we think about this is how do we build these things to be more efficient? How do we build these things to allow us to build deeper, broader, more deep, more personal experiences? And then how do we give that to the world.
And once you give that to the world where you have 3 billion players around the world creating personal content and expanding and enhancing the universes that we create, and building and creating their own universe on our technology platform, all of a sudden we are the beneficiaries of platform economics.
And for me that's a multi-billion dollar opportunity for us in addition to what we would otherwise get from our regular growth.
Wilson admitted that it's still early days for the technology and every day we read about incredible advancements or incredible mistakes made by chatbots.
Yet he concluded by mentioning that EA is a company that basically built its business on AI and has driven through the various incarnations of AI, and now that generative AI is here, they're "more excited than they've ever been."
This comes just a few days after the company announced the termination of 5% of its workforce, following what has been an annus terribilis for employment in the gaming industry, despite the fact that EA's latest financial results have been defined as "strong."
In the meantime, several companies have expressed interest in using generative AI including Microsoft, Ubisoft, Square Enix, and more.
