Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson spoke about generative, or content-creating, artificial intelligence during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

According to Wilson, more than half of development processes can be improved with generative AI to create bigger, more immersive worlds in the time it takes to develop them. He says Electronic Arts’ studios are “starved” for the technology. The goal, according to Wilson, is to develop and release better, more innovative games faster. (How many people will ultimately be laid off?)

“When we think about the first pillar of generative AI for us, we’re really looking at how it can make us more efficient, how it can give our developers more power, how it can give them more time back and allow them to get to the fun stuff faster. When we think about that, we expect there to be a significant opportunity for us. We’ve done analysis across all of our development processes. Right now, based on our early assessment, we believe that more than 50% of our development processes will be positively impacted by advances in generative AI. We’ve got teams across the company that are really trying to execute on that. The second phase for us, of course, is how do we continue to expand our games. How do we build bigger worlds with more characters and more interesting storylines? If the efficiencies really start to take hold over the next 1-3 years, we expect that over a 3-5 year time horizon, as part of our massive online communities and blockbuster storytelling, we will be able to build bigger, more immersive worlds that uniquely engage more players around the world.

Maybe on a five-year-plus time horizon, we are thinking about how we can take all of these tools that we create and make them available to the community at large so that we can actually get new and interesting and innovative and different types of gaming experiences. Again, not to replace what we do, but to augment, enhance, extend and expand the nature of what interactive entertainment can be, much like YouTube has done for traditional film and television. One of the big advantages we have, of course, is that we have 40 years of data. When I think about efficiency over 1-3 years, expansion over 3-5 years, and transformation over a 5-year time horizon, it’s actually very plausible that with 40 years of proprietary data that we have to feed into these models, we might be able to accelerate that time frame. There was a real hunger among our developers to get there as quickly as possible because, again, the holy grail for us is to build bigger, more innovative, more creative, more fun games faster so that we can entertain more people around the world on a global basis faster,” Wilson said.

He didn’t elaborate on which generative AI he was talking about, but the audiences he was targeting were Inworld and Convai, which could be of interest in terms of NPCs. Still, this is a businessman talking, not a CEO working for the players.

Source: WCCFTech, The Motley Fool