In an ever-changing world of U.S. tariffs, shifting trade policies, and rising geopolitical tensions, businesses are forced to make decisions at an expedited pace. AI is here to help: streamlining some productivity and allowing businesses and their leaders to gather and summarize information at a faster clip.
That’s why Hanneke Faber, the CEO of global tech manufacturing company Logitech, said she’d be open to the idea of having an AI-powered board member.
“We already use [AI agents] in almost every meeting,” Faber said at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference in Washington, D.C. on Monday.
While she said AI agents today (like Microsoft Copilot and internal bots) mostly take care of summarization and idea generation, that’s likely to change due to the pace at which the technology is developing.
“As they evolve, and some of the best agents or assistants that we’ve built actually do things themselves that comes with a whole bunch of governance things,” Faber said. “You have to keep in mind and make sure you really want that bot to take action. But if you don’t have an AI agent in every meeting, you’re missing out on some of the productivity.”
“That bot, in real time, has access to everything,” she continued.
Reshema Kemps-Polanco, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at global pharmaceutical company Novartis, also said she’s been training an AI bot to help run a “very rigorous commercial launch.” The bot is being trained to assess the team’s launch plan, and is getting “smarter and smarter” about asking strategic questions, she said.
“It’s trained to look for gaps in the plan,” said Kemps-Polanco during a session titled Dissecting the Global Economy, presented by Novartis. “In a couple of cases … it actually found two or three things that I may have missed—things that would still add value.”
The importance of data
Other panelists pointed out AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on.
“Garbage in, garbage out,” said Andrea Calise, president of U.S. strategy and communications at global consultancy Teneo. “We basically build synthetic stakeholders to understand stakeholders” by using AI to obtain and understand data.
Tracey Massey, chief operating officer of consumer intelligence company NIQ, said obtaining and using the wrong data can be very costly.
“It’s most important to have the really good data,” she said. “Then you build the analytics on top.”
That can be challenging, though, for smaller companies with fewer resources who still use legacy tech platforms to gather data. But Massey said even these companies still have time to “catch up” considering AI is still in its nascent phase.
Still, the “vast majority” of executive teams feel as if they’re behind in AI adoption, Teneo’s Calise said.
“Everyone feels like they’re one step behind,” Calise said. “Everyone feels like they’re chasing their peers, because it is moving so fast.”
But Calise reminded the audience AI development and adoption is very much still in the first inning, to use a baseball analogy.
“We’re not just in the first inning,” she said. “We’re in, like the first at-bat, in the first inning.”
