For the past six years, enterprise AI unicorn Dataiku has hosted an annual “field trip” for the executives of its customer base.
Last September, several CEOs who attended the gathering at the Four Seasons in Boston seemed a bit unnerved. AI was gaining traction across the corporate world, and many were concerned about whether they had the right strategies to leverage it.
Dataiku’s CEO Florian Douetteau shared with Business Insider the notes he took during the field trip.
“OpenAI is our brain, but tomorrow Google may come up with something — or another company,” Douetteau noted one of the attending CEOs saying in conversation. “If we go all-in with GPT enterprise, or go with Co-pilot, we’ll be locked into one ecosystem. DON’T WANT THIS!”
Another executive said: “If we can’t fully customize or govern the AI to fit our needs, it feels like we’re letting someone else decide how our business should run. That’s a level of risk I’m not comfortable with,” according to Douetteau.
Douetteau told Business Insider that among the more than 120 executives in attendance, he noticed a bit of stress” over how to translate the “potentially broad topic of AI” into tangible business gains.
Dataiku, which itself helps companies handle data, build no-code AI applications, and deploy machine learning models, began to further investigate how insecure CEOs were becoming in the age of AI.
On Tuesday, the company published the results of a survey conducted by Harris Poll of more than 500 CEOs across the UK, US, Germany, and France. The respondents lead companies with over $500 million in annual revenue and more than 500 employees — one quarter are tech companies and the remaining are what Dataiku calls “non-technical.”
Dataiku was especially interested in understanding how “non-technical” companies are thinking about AI, since they make up the majority of its customer base.
According to the survey, 74% CEOs admitted that they could be out of a job in two years if they fail to deliver meaningful AI-driven gains. And 94% believe that an AI agent could provide better business advice than a human board member.
AI has heightened concerns CEOs have about competitors, too. More than 70% of CEOs think a fellow CEO will be ousted before the end of 2025 due to a failed AI strategy. While 54% of CEOs think a competitor has already employed a better AI strategy than them.
One blind spot that Dataiku identified in its report is the “commodity trap” in which CEOs believe pre-built “off the shelf” AI agents are as effective as custom-built agents for a company’s core business operations and verticals.
Executives expressed anxiety in the survey about AI governance, with 94% of CEOs saying they suspect employees are secretly using generative AI tools without official approval. Dataiku, which was valued at $3.7 billion in 2022 and counts companies like Moderna, Sephora, Deloitte, and LVMH among its clients, has expanded governance tools on its platform to help companies properly manage the technology, Douetteau said.
For years companies have sought to differentiate themselves through talent, culture, operations, or marketing. Yet the reality of the next technological era is that “part of what makes a company different will be the type of AI system they have,” Douetteau said.
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