EA CEO says generative AI is at the "very core of our business", almost three years after saying NFTs are "an important part of the future of our industry"

EA CEO Andrew Wilson spoke on-stage at this year's investment summit, and stated that Generative AI is at the "very core of our business". This bold stance coincidentally comes nearly three years since he spoke about the importance of NFTs to the future of the video game industry. Truly, a pioneer of brave and exciting technologies.

Wilson's statement on AI has also happened at an interesting time for tech investment, when the development of AI has led to a market boom that spans the video game industry and far beyond. However, EA surely knows that investors are getting impatient waiting for AI-enhanced companies to show a winning hand, especially as AI giants like OpenAI stand to lose around five billion dollars this year according to analysts. That's why EA and Wilson broke out the cardboard boxes.

The publisher's "Imagination to Creation" concept demo to investors featured peak E3 era gamer narration, mazes of randomly generated cardboard boxes, and generic community designed characters wielding one of various weapons pulled from EA-owned video game IPs. Then, two players run around and throw grenades at each other, shoot at boxes, and have a grand old time before the pair "make it more epic" by generating a big cardboard pyramid.

EA Chief Strategy officer Mihir Vaidya explained that the video is an illustration, rather than an actual game. He then spoke at length at how technically impressive this purely illustrative demo is, how the players could create the world in a matter of seconds, could pull assets from other EA games from a shared asset database, and how this was possible - again - in mere seconds. But remember, purely illustrative. A technically impressive and obviously investment-worthy bit of pure smoke and mirrors.

Sadly, such illustrative videos do little to convey genuine conundrums. Allow me to pull one out for example. It's quite hard to transfer assets between one engine to another - they often use totally different programming languages. In the video, we see characters from Apex Legends, and the Plasma Cutter from Dead Space. Apex Legends was created on the Source Engine, while the Dead Space Remake is a Frostbite game. Will EA have a team manually port assets over to a single game engine? Or will the company use the limitless power of generative AI to do so? If the latter, will the company make sure the details are right on these generated assets? How will the weapons be balanced? All questions with no answers, obviously.

Those who are old enough or were keeping track of the big crypto/NFT rush a few years back know what this is. Honeyed words for investors' ears, as EA hopes to bring in a fresh wave of cash for future projects. Will any of this money actually go towards AI projects? Maybe! Will they see the light of day? Who knows! EA never released any NFT games or NFT integration with its popular titles - it announced a partnership with Nike on Swoosh NFTs. Of course there's be no news on that since the announcement.

But, take a look at the stock price of Electronic Arts and it's clear to understand why this approach is appealing. The company is almost up 7% year-to-date. That's big money, and a sizable amount of that growth has come from following trends and keeping up with hot investment targets. It may seem weird or gross to me or you, but there'a reason why EA even holds these formal investor summits.

But yeah, AI folks. Either we'll see something come of this over the next few years, or it'll fizzle out as a now hot tech enters the spotlight. A big day for cardboard box fans, if nothing else.