Shaping the Future of Global Business

How can we regulate AI in a meaningful way?

The most important thing we need to recognize is that AI can only meaningfully be regulated where AI is flourishing as an industry. If America and other democracies decide to overregulate to the extent that we fall behind in the global AI race, then it doesn’t mean we’ll have less AI in our own future to benefit from. Worse, it will mean we have AI that was developed without our values and public interests taken into account. So, we don’t just want less bad AI; we also need more good AI. We need regulation that also encourages the growth of responsible AI by providing entrepreneurs with clear rules and opportunities. We have seen that more in the U.S. through President Biden’s Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.

In contrast, the EU’s AI act is far more concerned with restrictions without as much support for the development of responsible AI. But it’s also in America’s interest that Europe has a flourishing AI industry. If the concentration of AI innovation becomes too lopsided and Europe doesn’t see enough of its own AI industry to protect, then it’s more tempting for European politicians to overregulate in a way that negatively affects U.S. companies, too. We should be working together to ensure the flourishing of responsible AI and help steer responsible rules globally.

What is the true value proposition of AI in business?

AI enables superhuman capabilities. Although there are a lot of concerns about AI replacing humans, the best AI is augmenting human skills and extending the value they can deliver. Human-AI collaboration offers more value than AI left unmanaged, so companies seeking a competitive advantage should be urgently upskilling their human employees to embrace AI.

Which specific trends in your industry are you most excited about?

Pactum is the category creator and leader for autonomous negotiations, and we see that quickly evolving across the Fortune 500, many of which conduct autonomous negotiations with each other. The largest autonomously negotiated deal so far was for nearly $30 million and generated around $750,000 in savings, as well as better terms for both sides.

There is an even bigger picture here though. Senior analysts at Gartner predict that machine buying is the megatrend of AI, similar to how e-commerce was the business megatrend of the internet. That includes not only autonomous negotiations, but also AI agents acting on behalf of consumers. The current wave of interest in AI was sparked by large language models, but the next wave will be led by AI agents that do increasingly complex things for us, too. Purchasing will inevitably be a big part of that. I recommend reading “When Machines Become Customers” by Don Scheibenreif and Mark Raskino to better understand and start preparing for this future.