Wednesday, April 29th 2026
EA CEO Defends Company-Wide AI Push Despite Recent Employee Claims of Productivity Drop
Not long after EA announced that it was being acquired by a group of private investors, the company's new management announced an AI pivot that would see the company cut operating costs significantly. As it turned out, though, workers at EA would later reveal that the company had been pushing AI hard internally long before the takeover, and that the AI push was causing more harm than good and ultimately costing them time. Now, EA CEO, Andrew Wilson, has pushed back on this notion during a recent talk at the Iicon gaming event in Las Vegas.
According to Wilson, "almost all, like 85%, of our quality assurance is done with some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm." However, he also adds that EA's QA hiring is at an all-time high. His argument is that AI has been "almost entirely augmentation," and not a replacement for human workers. According to the CEO, AI is doing mundane checks, like "turn the box on, turn the box off, boot it up, shut it down, does it crash, all these things." Despite these claims, there is evidence of AI-generated assets in Battlefield, and the company has partnered with Stability AI to work on generative AI tools.
Source:
Game File
According to Wilson, "almost all, like 85%, of our quality assurance is done with some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm." However, he also adds that EA's QA hiring is at an all-time high. His argument is that AI has been "almost entirely augmentation," and not a replacement for human workers. According to the CEO, AI is doing mundane checks, like "turn the box on, turn the box off, boot it up, shut it down, does it crash, all these things." Despite these claims, there is evidence of AI-generated assets in Battlefield, and the company has partnered with Stability AI to work on generative AI tools.
13 Comments on EA CEO Defends Company-Wide AI Push Despite Recent Employee Claims of Productivity Drop
maybe for stuff like "street tags"? then again, this is also an art form of its own right so probably no on that as well... AI assisted procedural generation of maps maybe? like "7 days in Fallujah"? sounds fitting to me I suppose
still waiting on AI powered NPC behavior, so much AI crammed everywhere and this still hasn't appeared, even as a prototype *anywhere*??
AI is the exciting sexy new thing for a lot of executives to latch onto, but it is going to ruin so many businesses when they cut staff or over-rely on it and eventually find out that it's a detriment to their products and productivity.
Sometimes I use AI to give me draft of a script in language that I'm not quite familiar with.
It outputs a script, and of course, it does not work straight away. Getting errors. A lot. Telling AI that it does not work.
AI outputs another script, now saying it's "bulletproof". Again, another errors. And so it goes another few rounds
until I lose my patience with AI-driven trial&error approach. Human debugging is crucial.
Now, if coding is handled by AI so badly, imagine how bad (pointless) must be doing Q&A on that code.