Artificial intelligence’s place in our world is growing rapidly, disrupting entire industries and changing the way people live and work.
CNBC spoke with several business and tech leaders at the CONVERGE LIVE event in Singapore about the challenges and opportunities presented by the adoption of AI.
“If you look at AI, what does it do? It actually improves human productivity,” Alibaba’s chairman Joe Tsai told CNBC’s David Faber.
“Look at global GDP. About $100 trillion of global GDP, 60% of that is labor income. Let’s say 20% of that $60 trillion can be enhanced by AI, and AI can do the job at a 20% discount on the price. That’s a $10 trillion total addressable market,” Tsai said.
“Name another industry that has a ten trillion TAM. That’s why everybody should be excited about AI,” he added.
Other industry heavyweights weighed in on AI’s biggest growth opportunities.
“The place to be is the infrastructure of AI because over the next two, three, five years, that’s where the multiple expansion occurs, and you want to extract profit from it, rather than the revenues,” said Kamal Bhatia, president and CEO of Principal Asset Management.
Discussions about the future of work were also high on the agenda.
“We’re moving from a ‘doing revolution’ to a ‘thinking revolution.’ And frankly, we’re moving away from something that impacted the blue collar and the lower workforce into a way that is impacting professional services and white collar, and leadership at a far faster capability,” Peta Latimer, president of Mercer Asia, told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin.
“When we talk about the worker, we can no longer talk about job descriptions. We need to start talking about workflows because when you talk about workflows, then the worker actually has a role in whatever job is coming up,” added Guy Diedrich, SVP and Global Innovation Officer at Cisco.
According to a 2025 report from McKinsey, more than 70% of all employees surveyed think that generative AI will change 30% or more of their work within two years. The same report states that 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments by 2028.
Watch the highlights from CNBC’s coverage of artificial intelligence from CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore by clicking on the video above.
