EA’s Andrew Wilson: AI is at the very core of our business

• EA claims to have more than 100 active AI projects
• CEO Andrew Wilson talked efficiency, expansion and transformation at Investor Day 2024

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AI is not just a buzzword for EA but it lies at “the very core of our business”, says EA CEO Andrew Wilson.

The publisher’s Investor Day 2024 has been crammed full of AI talk, from the mobile experiment Project Air and bolstering NPC potential, to removing development barriers and driving efficiency.

And taking to the stage to discuss the company’s ambitions with this hot-topic tech, Wilson revealed that EA already has more than 100 “active novel AI projects” across three strategic categories: efficiency, expansion and transformation.

Three key categories

To Wilson, ‘efficiency’ means EA driving more quality content for players, more quickly and at less cost to the developer.

‘Expansion’, meanwhile, is about giving devs an exponentially bigger canvas on which to create, enhancing games’ immersion factor and using AI to advance characters’ “depth and intelligence”.

Lastly, EA’s take on ‘transformation’ is to look much further into the future at new ways players will connect, create and watch video game content.

“Our creative teams always try to see farther, always empowered by the latest technology,” Wilson said.

“This pursuit of innovation has led our games to be at the forefront of the technology curve. AI in its different forms has always been central to this creative journey. We all remember playing against the AI and it has evolved into today’s innovations in generative AI.

“For years we’ve talked about our games delivering experiences that are always new and different. We predict that with generative AI we will finally be able to fulfill this promise for billions of people for billions and billions of hours.”

Custom creation models

EA chief strategy officer Mihir Vaidya also took to the stage, not only to reveal the AI-empowered mobile product Project Air, but to highlight the billions of gameplay hours EA has to draw from when training of its own custom AI creation models.

“Our dataset grows by the minute, as we’re a digital live services company with millions of daily touchpoints with our communities,” Vaidya explained.

And in discussing AI’s ‘transformation’ potential at EA, he suggested that the company’s vast amounts of data could be leveraged in user-generated content to create whole new games, representing “a new level of symbiotic relationship between our own developers and UGX creators”.

Through AI, EA believes it has the potential to serve as a “launchpad” for new businesses.

Head here for more of our coverage from EA’s Investor Day 2024.