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On the Road

On the Road provides business insights and thought-provoking takeaways at key corporate conferences.

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Show Transcript

Welcome to On the Road at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. When AI can be both your greatest defense and your biggest vulnerability, how do security leaders navigate the future? Here's what they told us. Trust is a big part of the conversation among EY leaders and others when it comes to AI. Why is that such a critical concept for organizations at RSA? Security is no longer just a tech issue. It's a trust issue. As AI is becoming more complex, it is executing on your decisions. It is patching systems and it's moving your money. 2026 is a year where our clients are looking to become AI-native. You cannot get to that level of efficiency if you don't have trust in the system. Trust is so critical. It is the new currency for us. It is so important to us that trust isn't just process and controls. It is a layer that includes resilience as well as culture. EY's cybersecurity study found only 20 percent of organizations have fully embedded AI governance into their culture. What's at stake for the other 80%? The 80% who are not looking at having that trust layer is going to also wake up realizing that they're left behind. And having the right trust layer in AI governance, starting from now, is going to give them a transformational roadmap so that when the time comes, they can evolve into a world that we believe is potentially one knowledge worker plus 20 or 30 AI systems. As AI becomes more embedded in security operations, what will it take for organizations to truly trust the systems defending them? I think there's a lot of work and a lot of thought that's going to be put into that as we continue to adopt AI. How do we trust it from an operations perspective? How do trust it, from a management and leadership perspective? And how do we, trust it form a regulatory perspective? Can management defend the decision that the AI made? And then can we defend those decisions to satisfy an audit or a regulatory compliance? These are all varying levels of trust that we need to work through. To be able to truly trust. Manufacturing is now one of the most targeted sectors globally. CrowdStrike found attacks surged over 50% last year. How should cybersecurity evolve as IT and OT environments converge? At Mondelez, we're producing snacks around the world, so it's important that as we develop AI agents and we step into this space, we're incorporating our legal and privacy and all the different teams that are needed at the table to ensure that we're doing what's right as we adopt AI. So working with partners like EY gives us the opportunity to see more of that landscape and what that looks like and how that's worked for other organizations and be able to move faster and adopt quicker. What does it mean to be a successful CISO these days? To be successful in security these days, we oftentimes deal with things on the worst days of people's lives, is the worst times of an organization when things are going wrong. So it's important to maintain our calm in the storm and be prepared and have strong process and resilience when those things happen. Thanks so much for your time. What are the biggest shifts in the threat landscape you're seeing at the conference this year? It's no surprise, agentic AI is all over the place. How does agentic help from an offense standpoint, from a defense standpoint? What do we need to do to be ready for this new threat landscape of all the agents being released? So that's been one big theme that I've been saying. How is agentic AI changing the cyber security playbook? Any good technology has both an offense and a defense. Phishing had less than 10% hit rate before. Now it's almost close to 50% hit rate when an email is crafted with some kind of an agentic AI module. Because they take into context where you are, what are you doing, who are your vendor partners, all of that. They do all that research, and then they give you a well-crafted email. And we want to make sure we're building those defensive technologies which can go help us defend against those kind of very much targeted spear phishing attacks that's coming in. What we are building within AI is like the trust layer. So these agents go from being a proof of concept implementation to actually being a scalable adoption. Ganesh, thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you so much, Alison. How do you balance the urgent need to deploy AI defenses with making sure that it's used as ethical and compliant? I think a lot of companies think that there's a key trade-off, speed versus safety, and it's really both. This is where you link your cybersecurity strategy with your governance and risk management to make sure it's fit for purpose. A lot of our board members are asking three key questions. What's the risk of doing AI? What's a risk of not doing AI, and also, are we getting the right ROI for our AI transformational investments? Without right AI governance, you're not going to be able to answer any of the three questions. So great talking with you. Thank you. This has been On the Road at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. Join us again from business events throughout the year.

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Show Transcript

As AI continues to evolve, it's shaping how brands create, connect, and show up for customers in real time. We're here at South by Southwest with what you need to know. John, what stands out to you this year about AI's evolving role for consumer brands? I think the difference now with customer experience is that AI can move at the speed of machines, yet humans still need to be thoughtful about what it is they're deciding to do. And so this concept that we've been articulating, we call it the human tempo. And while speed is still important, it's not the whole story. Now it's speed plus human consideration, human involvement, human intuition when making a purchase decision. And then allowing the AI to enable that purchase. Do you have an example or experience where aligning an AI solution with human tempo had an impact on customer experience or business outcomes? So an example would be when you're online shopping and you're ready to check out. Imagine that it's auto-subscribing you to the newsletter and putting you in the loyalty program, and it's telling you how it's gonna ship it to you rather than giving you that decision. Rather than pausing and saying, hey, would you like to join the newsletter? Here's the value of that. So it's not actually giving you that moment of consequences, taking it away from you. And in that case, it erodes trust over time. What we're looking for is what we call creating agency, which is a system provides information. A human digests that information, makes a decision, and then the system reacts, rather than reacting before the human was even involved. Tomasso, there's a strong creative and innovative community here at South by Southwest. How can AI enhance human creativity and decision-making instead of replacing it? I do think that we're about to enter a new era where AI and creativity can really become one. Let me tell you a story. About a month ago, I had the first day where I felt like I was an AI agent manager. I was with a client and we wanted to start building something together using a team of agents. We started not by opening the laptop, but actually drawing on a whiteboard for hours, thinking about what is the problem that we are trying to solve and what are our ideas. Then we turn on the AI. And we translated those ideas into a prompt and then AI started executing on it for 20, 30 minutes. What happens in those 30 minutes is incredibly important. That sparked new conversations about what other new novel ideas can we bring to the table and by the time that our agents stopped running, we already knew what was next. This gives you a glimpse into ways of working of the future because as agents are getting our work done That's where our creativity our wisdom, our knowledge gets to thrive. What separates companies that successfully scale AI from those that remain stuck in experimentation? In order to go after growth, you need to have a reinvention mindset. Do not treat AI like a feature, like an add-on, but use AI to redesign an entire process to turn it into a value stream. Now all your end-to-end enterprise processes that are cross-functional can start working together with agents and people in the judgment seat to create transformational value. You're here at South by Southwest, and I'm curious what you're hearing from creatives and companies when it comes to the challenges around AI. I think there's this assumption and expectation that we're no longer going to need creativity, but we actually need more of it. And that creative judgment, that human intent, that creativity is going to be so important for companies to differentiate themselves. Tell us about EY Studio Plus and the problem that it was built to solve. EY Studio Plus is focused on building experiences, services, and products that really help enable growth, loyalty, and productivity. There's a lot of excitement and buzz and good vibes, if you will, about AI, but there's a of uncertainty right now. A lot of companies are focusing on what tool to use, but we're helping our clients think about what experiences it should be enabling and also thinking about the value it's gonna bring to customers and companies. What's your advice to consumer facing companies embarking on AI transformations so they put humanity at the center and thrive in the long run? What I would say is the first thing is focus on the human experience, focus on your customer experience and figure out intentionally where you should put in checkpoints to get the customer involved and engaged in that experience. The next would be is really around being bold and not being bold for technical sake, but being bold in that pushing this idea of tempo, constantly testing how do you know this is working. And then figuring out how temple alignment drives that midterm and longterm loyalty is really important.Thanks so much for all of your analysis and great conversation. Thanks so. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for joining us at South by Southwest in Austin On the Road. We'll be back soon with more insights from business events throughout the year.

Show Transcript

Welcome to On the Road. We're here at CES 2026 with business leaders shaping the future to find out what key trends they're seeing. Here's their take. Great to see you, Lokesh. CES is the premier showcase for exciting new consumer product innovations. What's caught your eye so far? There are three things that really catch my attention. Physical AI, using AI and moving it from where it is today to actually into robots, into the physical devices that are going to change the value chain and interact with real context. The second is about moving from the cloud to the edge, and it's all about edge AI. How do we distribute the load and move it away from the Cloud and into the products and into hands of the people that actually need it so we can get real-time responses? And the third big thing is about contextual AI. Long-term context being within these AI models. So I see these three being the buzzwords of this year, physical, edge, and contextual, long-terms contextual AI, coming together to really redefine what we can do with this technology. In consumer products, what is changing in the process for how these products are getting here to the floor at CES? Is AI accelerating the time to market? It's all about moving from time to market to time to scale. And that is a real shift that we're going to see happening this year. Moving from the lab to the main stage, moving from what's happening today around prototypes to what we can do for everybody involved at a scale level. How do you do that as a company? It's really about rethinking how you apply this technology and the capabilities that it brings to your organization. It's about taking the process, but thinking about the business. It's thinking about whole operating model together. So it's really that big shift from lab all the way to the main stage. Thanks for joining us here at CES. I know you've walked the floor and you've had conversations, what has stood out to you? I think what's really interesting is there's such a disproportionate focus on the infrastructure, energy, everything that's needed to drive consumer electronics. Or in the case of my industry, which is industrials and energy, really how do you build AI into product versus bolding it on as an appendage? I see that everywhere here. Increased efficiency and saving money are two of the primary headlines around how AI is transforming companies. What should organizations be focused on? I think that cost savings and efficiency is a secondary benefit of AI. I think what we're really seeing, and you can see it here, is how do we use AI as a part of our growth agenda? We're really stepping back, taking an AI-first approach, and saying how do we build AI into our machinery so we can be much more productive, either by more quality output or by allowing our people to spend time doing things that they're really good at versus doing things a digital agent could do. The energy required to power AI systems continues to be a big concern. How do you see this evolving over the next year? So one of the things that's interesting here is just how many energy solutions are being showcased. And I think that's new. I think fixing the energy equation is one of biggest challenges we have. The investment companies years ago said the real money is in the infrastructure companies and the energy companies that are really what is powering the development of the data centers and our ability to use AI. Amy, great to have you join us here at CES. There's always a lot of excitement around the mobility sector with all the innovative technology on display. What trends are you noticing? I would say this event is really about the way AI is shaping products, experiences, and operations. How is it reshaping the mobility ecosystem from OEM to aftermarket service providers in 2026 and beyond? Mobility, as we think about it, is so broad and the spectrum of mobility is really on display at CES this year. I'd say one of the things that I see in terms of the ecosystem is the level of collaboration that's required to deliver these services to consumers is substantial. It's a must-have, a table stakes to really figure out how to have strong collaboration, not just for your product, but for the data that goes behind the product as well as the experiences. And the interaction with the customers. What shift should consumers expect as AI continues to be incorporated into their experiences with the mobility ecosystem? When you look at some of the capabilities around heads-up displays, around AI cockpits, the things that they're going to be bringing to you are really going to change the way that you interact with the products themselves. You're not just purchasing a product, you're purchasing an experience, and an experience that lasts not just from the time that you buy, but through the full life cycle of the product. We hear mix with when it comes to delivering the value expected with successful AI adoption. How are successful companies driving tangible business outcomes? When you think about AI, it's not an add-on, it's a built-in capability, just like many others, as part of re-engineering. And the companies that are getting that right are driving successful outcomes. Thanks for joining us at CES Las Vegas. Join us again for more insights from business events throughout the year.

Show Transcript

Hello and welcome to On The Road. I'm Alison Kosik and I am here at the AI Summit New York. We're talking to industry leaders about their real-world impact of AI-driven change. Well, it's great to see you here at the AI Summit in New York. What's next when it comes to AI transformation? And what should companies be thinking about? I think we've moved from use cases and experimentation to moving towards something that is more akin to scale. A lot of companies are still on that journey, but those that aren't continuing to commit capital and commit their leaders to the journey just aren't seeing the returns that the other companies are. How can organizations go beyond these incremental productivity gains? We have to move away from incremental. We have move away use cases. We have think about scale. At EY, we recently released EY.ai Value Blueprints. And these allow our clients to take an agentic first view of end-to-end processes, of their enterprise, of their organization, to unlock value like they've never been able to even think about and imagine. That's what's so exciting. What about responsible AI use? What changes have you seen in the last year? But I'm seeing the conversation move from just responsible AI to trusted AI. And I think the more AI moves from just being ethical and compliant to, hey, we have the right security. We have the right humans in the loop. We can trust the output, the outcomes. And that's where I think there's a huge unlock because you can go way faster if you have trust, not just responsible, AI. You need that at its core, but you also need a real trust environment to go faster. Chris, I'm so glad that we can sit down together and talk here at the AI Summit in New York. Walk me through your role at Universal Destinations and Experiences. I'm the Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Universal Destination and Experiences. That is the Parks Resorts and the Consumer Products Division of NBCUniversal. Chris, you've just presented here at the AI Summit New York with all the different organizations showcasing the way they're implementing AI. How do you know where to place your focus at universal destinations and experiences? We're really outcome focused. So what I mean by that is we look for the business opportunity. We're exploring opportunities on the growth side of the business, the efficiency side of the business, and also how does AI transform how we build our immersive entertainment experiences around the world. We've heard from a number of leaders here at this event mention the importance of trust in implementing AI. How are you building that trust? So trust has always been a foundation of our relationship with our customers and our team members. And so I see it as an extension of that. I do think AI does raise the stakes on it. And so, I think we just have to be very, very diligent on making sure that we're being transparent about the use of it and what we're trying to do with it. And we're also giving team members and guests a way to either opt out of that or not be part of it as well. Talk me through how AI is incorporated into the guest experience. In the guest experience, a lot of it is around the generation of content. So it's about really getting us to the answer faster. We do have a few areas where we've used either advanced analytics or even forms of AI like machine learning to make processes faster like the arrival gates in Orlando are all based on facial recognition. Actually, that has been accepted really, really well by the guests. And our opt-outs rates have actually decreased since the implementation of that. Matt, it's great to see you again. As we return here to the AI Summit New York for, what, the third year, what stands out to you about what you're seeing at the event compared to last year? You're right, this is our third time together here. We are three years into this gen AI journey and we continue to see an explosion of use. What's been interesting over the last six months or so is the adoption curve for enterprises has grown exponentially too. In our AI Pulse survey, 97% of senior business leaders are saying they're seeing real ROI at this point. Over 50% of those have actually said they're getting a creative financial impact from those investments. Agenic AI has certainly become one of the big buzzwords. What are you hearing about how organizations should be approaching AI agents alongside their current workforce? As we think about how AI is gonna reshape roles and free our people up, pretty soon we're gonna move to a new era where the agents will act with autonomy. They'll have agency. And at that point, the humans are gonna be freed up to be on the loop and be orchestrating what's happening. This will be game-changing for every sector and every client. And you're gonna have to revamp the entirety of your work and your workforce over time. EY was just announced as the only professional services firm invited to join the inaugural cohort of the Frontier Firm Initiative. What does that mean for the organization? We were thrilled to be invited as one of the 14 enterprises in the first cohort that were identified as leading the way in AI, especially from an enterprise adoption perspective. To me, it was validation of the great work our teams have been doing over the last three years. You know, we've been taking this very seriously. We've been trying to adopt AI across the fabric of our business. We are leaning in with trying to figure out how we're going to change the way we do work and add more value to our clients. Secondly, moving forward, we're glad to be part of this cohort because a big piece of this will be to actually get research with data to back these emergent patterns that we're observing. And we think that's gonna be a critical. This has been On the Road at the AI Summit New York. Stay tuned for more updates from events from across the U.S. Thanks for watching.

Do you have an example or experience where aligning an AI solution with human tempo had an impact on customer experience or business outcomes? An example would be when you're online shopping and you're ready to check out. Imagine that it's auto-subscribing you to the newsletter and putting you in the loyalty program. And it's telling you how it's gonna ship it to you rather than giving you that decision. Rather than pausing and saying, hey, would you like to join the newsletter? Here's the value of that. So it's not actually giving you that moment of consequences, taking it away from you. And in that case, it erodes trust over time. What we're looking for is what we call creating agency, which is a system provides information, a human digests that information, makes a decision, and then the system reacts, rather than reacting before the human was even involved.