Depending on whom you talk to, artificial intelligence is a lot of hype, the downfall of the tech industry or the savior of the planet — or all of those at once.

Mark Hurd, the chief executive of Oracle Corp., thinks AI is an “overused” term. John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco Systems Inc., is worried that AI could lead the tech industry to become highly unpopular. And Al Gore (pictured), the 45th vice president of the United States, believes it could be a key tool for helping to save the climate, but tech entrepreneurs will need to step up their game.

AI didn’t completely dominate the discussion at Collision 2018 in New Orleans this week, but it occupied the thoughts of quite a few opinion makers during the four-day gathering. The technology is neither universally hated nor loved, but everyone is definitely talking about it.

“I’m not as bullish on somebody who says ‘I have an AI solution in the cloud, come to me,’” said Hurd during an appearance at the conference on Tuesday. “AI is going to turn out to be less of a solution and more features that are integrated deeply into applications.”

Hurd’s company has recently promoted its expanded AI offerings integrated in various enterprise cloud applications, including autonomous management and security of databases. Oracle’s senior executive took the opportunity to bemoan the difficulty of upgrading or making money from these systems in the current climate. “That’s a lot of what you hear in the industry right now,” Hurd said. “How do I go back to simple?”

Critical role for business

For Al Gore, the challenge is not simplicity, but rather enlisting the technology industry in his quest to strengthen the world’s environmental health, a cause which has earned him a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar award over the past 12 years.

The former vice president singled out Google’s acquisition of Deep Mind in 2014 as a prime example for how AI can bring greater efficiencies to energy usage. Google employed DeepMind’s AI to reduce the amount of energy used in its data centers by 40 percent. “The business community and tech entrepreneurs, keenly aware of what’s at stake… can the play the crucial role,” Gore said.

Since stepping down as CEO of Cisco in 2015, Chambers has embarked on a crusade of his own, this time as a champion of the startup tech community. In an appearance at Collision on Wednesday, the head of JC2 Ventures urged the U.S. government to take a more active role in fostering innovation for areas such as AI and financial technology.

However, Chambers also expressed concern that the potential for AI adoption to hurt the employment of people around the world could generate ill will toward the tech community as a whole. “Technology has always been the good guys,” Chambers said. “If we’re not careful, we’ll become the bad guys and cost people jobs.”

Lost jobs and societal concerns

Yet some tech entrepreneurs have their own response to Chambers’ concern about the impact of AI on jobs: So what? In a discussion during the conference on Wednesday, Sairah Ashman, CEO of the brand consultancy firm Wolff Olins, outlined her belief that anything logic-driven is going to be automated and this will lead to the creation of new jobs instead.

“Of course jobs are going to disappear, they disappear all of the time,” Ashman said. “There will be new jobs created that we can’t imagine at the moment.”

Whether jobs are truly lost or not, the societal impact of AI’s wider use remains a subject of continued debate. Ashman was joined on a Collision panel by Hicham Oudghiri, co-founder and CEO of the big-data firm Enigma Technologies, who outlined a worrisome scenario in which AI algorithms such as those that might make decisions in child custody cases could influence lives forever — not always for the better.

“I’m worried about losing the one thing that we take for granted, the right for a human being to be judged by another human,” Oudghiri said. “We need to make sure that there’s strong guardrails there.”

Meanwhile, the AI train rolls relentlessly onward, including in enterprise computing, as a recent Wikibon research documented. Whether the outcome is positive or not, AI is going to have an influence on just about every area of business and everyday life, even the fate of the planet.

“The larger sustainability revolution will be based on digital tools such as AI,” said Gore. “It’s changing everything.”

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE