EA Paves an Aggressive Path to AI Integration with Latest AI Mandate

Like every other tech company, Entertainment Arts (EA) has been impacted by the AI wave and is scrambling to avoid being left behind. While this gold rush might be inflating a massive financial bubble, it’s also fundamentally reshaping corporate strategies. With Microsoft making AI proficiency mandatory for its workforce, EA is now aggressively following this playbook. So, is this push for AI integration actually boosting productivity or just creating a new set of problems?

From Playtesting to AI Requesting

EA’s leadership has taken a strong stance on incorporating AI, spending the last year urging its nearly 15,000 employees to adopt it for virtually every task. Ultimately, the company appears to be betting heavily on a digital future, with its initiative including:

• mandatory AI training courses
• promotion of an internal chatbot named ReefGPT
• push for widespread task automation

In one concrete example, a former senior QA worker at Respawn Entertainment believed that a part of his job could be done with a generative AI tool. Mainly, this worker’s job involved summarizing feedback from hundreds of playtesters. Given that they were laid off last April, he suspects that this new AI integration may have something to do with this redundancy. Whether this means that AI is reliably handling complex creative tasks remains unknown, but the evidence doesn’t support it.

EA’s AI Code is Buggy

In reality, it seems rather dubious to believe that AI tools streamline workflow, as one study suggests otherwise. According to reports, a significant majority of workers reported that AI tools actually added to their daily workload. Unfortunately, EA is also dealing with this problem. For instance, employees found ReefGPT prone to inventing facts and writing code of such poor quality that it required extensive human correction. Even the company Slack channel couldn’t escape this internal scepticism, when a meme mocking the executive team’s directionless AI fervor racked up laughing emoji reactions.

Despite the public backlash throughout the gaming industry, Generative AI is becoming deeply embedded in game development. In fact, a vast majority of studios are already using it in some capacity. Investors continuing to pour money into the technology have been used as a justification for layoffs. So, is replacing employees with AI worth it, or is it another flimsy excuse in the industry’s growing collection? With the corporate chatbot hallucinating and writing broken code, one has to wonder if the real intelligence is in the room.