EA CEO Defends Company-Wide AI Push Despite Recent Employee Claims of Productivity Drop

Not long after EA announced that it was being acquired by a group of private investors, the company’s new management announced an AI pivot that would see the company cut operating costs significantly. As it turned out, though, workers at EA would later reveal that the company had been pushing AI hard internally long before the takeover, and that the AI push was causing more harm than good and ultimately costing them time. Now, EA CEO, Andrew Wilson, has pushed back on this notion during a recent talk at the Iicon gaming event in Las Vegas.

According to Wilson, “almost all, like 85%, of our quality assurance is done with some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm.” However, he also adds that EA’s QA hiring is at an all-time high. His argument is that AI has been “almost entirely augmentation,” and not a replacement for human workers. According to the CEO, AI is doing mundane checks, like “turn the box on, turn the box off, boot it up, shut it down, does it crash, all these things.” Despite these claims, there is evidence of AI-generated assets in Battlefield, and the company has partnered with Stability AI to work on generative AI tools.