Ex-Ubisoft and EA executive talks AI's role in video games: "The governance, the strategy is missing"

As artificial intelligence continues to take a bigger and bigger role across the entire world, folks involved with the video game sector are increasingly facing the challenge of adapting to the technology. Some companies, like Krafton, are more willing to experiment with AI, while many others intend to use the technology as more of a productivity tool and not something that will define the end product they ship to consumers.

With this discourse and the wildly different approaches to utilising AI in the gaming world, we recently had the chance to quiz an experienced individual on the matter who has previously worked for both Ubisoft and EA. During our time at the Madeira Games Summit, we caught up with Erinrose Sullivan, who currently operates as the head of marketing for Level Up Gaming, and naturally we touched on the AI situation following Sullivan appearing at a panel talking about AI's role in games, to which she explained to us the following.

"So, one of the first things that came out from the work is that we all have questions, we all want to know what each other's doing, and sharing, so it was really about sharing. I would say some of the key things is about governance and policy. A lot of experimentation is happening, and some piloting from a publishing and a development side, but often the governance, the strategy is missing, and it's really a critical point to be able to have policies and guardrails in place as you roll this out slowly across an organisation, and to have HR and teams sort of engaged with that, and a transparency and clarity of process, because there's a lot of friction and concern for employees on this front with AI."

Sullivan then went on to talk about how AI's growing rise also affects the publishing side of video games and how companies have to be wary about using the technology as a marketing tool.

"Probably the first real opportunity from a commercial impact is AI on the publishing side of things, and I think we perhaps don't have as much technical expertise to integrate and implement in a way that would be more effective for us, so it's really an opportunity, particularly from the publishing side. There's always this concern from an implementation, workflow, and pipeline from a creative and development side, but I think the first commercial impact really could be from publishing, so it's really trying to develop more the technical skill to be able to implement that."

You can see the full interview with Sullivan below where we also talk about EA and Ubisoft and how the two companies compare based on her experience working with both gaming titans.