EA CEO: AI is ‘augmenting’ people's jobs at EA, not really displacing them

A dispatch from iicon, the new game industry event run by the organizers of E3. It kicked off this morning.

EA’s Andrew Wilson and Fox Business’ Liz Claman on stage at iicon. Photo: Game File

LAS VEGAS — Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson repeatedly downplayed the idea that AI might take the jobs of workers at the maker of Madden and Battlefield, during a talk this morning at the new iicon gaming event in Las Vegas.

“I saw some data recently, I think, now almost all—like 85%—of our quality assurance [work] is done with some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm,” Wilson told Fox Business Network’s Liz Claman, who interviewed the EA boss on stage in front of hundreds of industry attendees in a conference room at the Fontainebleau Resort.

“Yet as a company, we hire more QA people than we ever have.”

AI is being used for rudimentary QA work, Wilson said, giving examples of it being tasked with “the simple stuff: turn the box on, turn the box off, boot it up, shut it down, does it crash, all these things.”

But, he said, droves of QA hires are needed to analyze the AI’s findings.

Asked by Claman where she might see AI replacing jobs at EA, instead of augmenting them, Wilson said, “So far, it’s been almost entirely augmentation.”

Wilson’s panel kicked off iicon, a new event operated by the Entertainment Software Association, the former organizers of E3. That big trade show in Los Angeles, used to provide the peak moment of hype in the game industry’s calendar each year. At E3, the world’s biggest video game companies showed off their most important upcoming releases in a cavernous convention center. The ESA last held an in-person E3 in 2019 and officially got out of the E3 business in 2023.

Iicon is comparatively much lower profile and is focused on convening the heads of the game industry with leaders from tech, entertainment and sports to discuss gaming and the other fields with which it does or could overlap. An executive at an ad firm who I rode the elevator with en route to an iicon mixer last night told me he’d been pitched that iicon could be the “Davos of gaming.” (It was unclear who he heard that from.)

The attendance list is dazzling.