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IBM is on a mission to become the most productive company in the world. Join SVP of Transformation and Operations Joanne Wright at the break to learn how its mission can benefit your enterprise and why AI is the catalyst for success.
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Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Tuesday, September 9th. I'm Bell Lin for the Wall Street Journal. According to a recent study, there's a huge gender gap when it comes to usage of generative a AI tools like ChatGPT and anthropics. Claude WSJ contributor Lisa Ward tells us what researchers are saying about who uses AI more and why. Then Salesforce, best known as a maker of business software, faces a big test over whether it can weather the threat that generative AI presents to its business. If Salesforce passes that test, it represents a huge sigh of relief for for all of the business software makers in its category. But first, one gender uses AI much more than the other. Can you guess which one? WSJ contributor Lisa Ward joins us to discuss the difference between how often men and women are using AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Anthropics. Claude and what can be done to remedy the gender gap. Lisa A recent study showed that by and large, men are much more likely to use genai tools than women. Did you get a sense that the researchers expected such a large gap?
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No, I really don't think they expected to see it at all. What was kind of remarkable about their findings was that they really found it across the globe. So they saw a gender gap in high income countries like the US and Canada and Japan and low and middle income countries like India, Brazil or Kenya. The author, when I was talking to him, really described it as shocking.
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This gender gap was even larger for smartphone downloads than for overall monthly usage of tools. Can you run us through some of those results?
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So they found that women made up about 42% of the roughly 200 million average users of ChatGPT, about 42.4% of perplexity and 31.2% for cloud. When they looked at smartphone users, they looked that number was about 27.2% for total ChatGPT users. So you see a real drop when you compare men to women overall and then with a smartphone. Also, just to note that it's a working paper, so they're still doing the research. And then they started to try to replicate the findings in other settings. So they did not just to the big sites like ChatGPT in general, but then they also looked at the smartphones and then they also looked at AI apps and then they were able to replicate the gender gap across all the different areas. Previous studies, general traffic, smartphone traffic, AI apps, and they were able to find this gap across multiple areas.
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When we talk about using large language models like the ones that power ChatGPT, we're often talking about work, but we also talk about the ones we use in our personal lives for things like meal prep and workout planning. So was this gender gap pervasive outside the work context as well?
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When they looked at previous research out there, they looked about 18 studies encompassing about 140,000 individuals, and they found the same trend in really diverse groups. So whether that's college kids, whether that's business owners, whether that was in Australia or in the US or in Canada. So it was really like they looked at different groups across the globe and they were able to see this.
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Lisa some of the women in the study said that they were concerned that using AI would penalize them professionally or allow their peers to question their competency. And that's a very valid concern. What did researchers say could help close the gender gap in Genai usage?
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When the researchers were looking for prescriptions, they really focused on employers and the idea was to make generative AI mandatory. This also probably applies to teachers and schools as well. The idea is that the reason why they believe this is that artificial intelligence learns from everybody and develops in a way that is gender neutral. If men are the primary users, gender value could exacerbate gender biases or stereotypes.
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That was WSJ contributor Lisa Ward coming up. Some investors are concerned about Salesforce, suggesting that the business software maker faces a major threat to its business because of AI. But are such fears overblown? That's after the break.
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In 2023, IBM set a goal to become the most productive company in the world. It started by asking questions, lots of questions, says Joanne Wright, SVP of Transformation and Operations at IBM.
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How can we radically simplify end to end workflow and processes? What can we eliminate? How do we automate everything that we can? And then how do we embed AI into everything we do? So far, over a two year period, we've delivered over $3.5 billion of productivity savings for the company.
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Salesforce has become synonymous with business software, the kind of tools that your employer might force you to use if you work at a desk job, especially in sales and marketing. While Salesforce is still doing well selling that software, there are concerns that AI could make its business obsolete. WSJ Heard on the street columnist Dan Gallagher tells us why some investors are worried about Salesforce's business. And why, if Salesforce wins out in the end, it's a win for all of business software. Dan, why is Salesforce under this immense pressure to show proof of life that the software business has legs in the age of AI?
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Because they're the largest company in the space of providing cloud based software to businesses. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle are a lot bigger, bigger, but they also have a more wide ranging business. Salesforce is the largest company in this category of companies where there's become this kind of existential fear that AI is just going to eliminate the need essentially for those types of companies that make dedicated software.
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How exactly did this existential fear come about? Is it that ChatGPT and tools like it could replace the software that these companies have built?
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These AI tools? One of the early selling points of them is that they can actually help software coders do their job. They can produce their own software code. When OpenAI demoed its latest ChatGPT release, they actually spent time in the demo making a software app live on stage. The whole point was to show how somebody who's not a software coder could actually just tell the AI engine, hey, I want an app that does this and give the parameters and it would do all this coding. And so that's created this idea that why would we need companies that make dedicated software when as a company you could just use an AI tool and say, hey, make me software to manage my human resources or Salesforce's specialty is software that manages customer relationships for really big companies.
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And do you think Salesforce deserves the reputation that it has as a sort of bellwether of whether the cloud software business will continue to exist and that it's sort of flailing as a cloud software business?
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I don't believe they're flailing. What they're dealing with is they've become a very large company and so driving big sales, big growth that they used to do. When they were a company that made 20 billion a year, they were able to grow their revenue double digits every year. Now they're making 40 billion a year and it just gets harder to do that. And so they're dealing with that sort of optical, like slowing of growth that comes with that size. And that's all true. What Wall Street's expecting is Salesforce now has a lot of their own AI stuff that they're trying to sell, these AI agents and Wall street is trying to see can this stuff sell and kind of rejuvenate that revenue growth and prove the case that a software company like Salesforce has a role to play in the age of AI. But the fear overall that's over all the software companies about AI tools are going to replace software that's way overblown because there's so much complexity to these types of software. And not just complexity, but there's a lot of rules and laws about what you can do with data.
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Dan, in your column, you write that Salesforce has this suite of AI agents called Agent Force. So it has AI tools of its own. Has Wall street seen the kind of traction that it wants to see out of tools like Agent Force?
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Yes and no. They've talked about a lot of customers who have signed deals to use Agent Force, but because that hasn't really impacted the revenue growth yet, there's an assumption that these deals are actually small and that fits with a lot of other that a lot of companies out there are testing various things in AI but haven't figured out how to widely adopt these kinds of things yet. So there's a lot of companies who have signed deals with Salesforce to start testing and playing with Agent Force but haven't widely deployed it yet in a way that's going to like, really boost up revenue.
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And what's Salesforce's point of view on how well it's performing?
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They always think they're doing great. They're very big on Agent Force. They've been selling it now hard for about a year. They've got their big annual conference here in San Francisco, Cisco, coming up later this month. Agent Force is going to be everywhere in the sense of, like, how hard they're going to be pushing it, selling it to their customers, the developers that come in. At the same point, investors are wanting to see the actual revenue dollars start to flow in in a bigger way.
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How have some of Salesforce's peers been performing in the same vein of do they come out under this cloud of concern around the existential fears of business software? And have they performed somewhat better by Wall Street's expectations?
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The stocks of all these companies have been lousy performers this year. If you look at the cloud software stocks as a category, they've been like the only tech subcategory that's actually lost this year that's in the red. So this fear has hung over all of them. Specific companies done better on some specific metrics for it. But the cloud of worry is hung over all of them. And it's going to take especially the big ones like Salesforce, and that's the case I make is that they're the biggest one in this category, they're very good at selling stuff when they have to sell it. So if they can kind of overcome this, it's going to help the category emerge from this worry in a much bigger way than if a smaller cloud company has some good AI numbers. You really need to see salesforce and workday in these types start to overcome this and drive revenue growth.
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To remove that fear, that was WSJ Heard on the street columnist Dan Gallagher. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Melanie Royce Logging off. I'm Bel Lin for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.
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It's not just IBM that benefits from its mission to be the most productive company in the world. So do its clients. Joanne Wright, SVP of Transformation and Operations at IBM explains We've created a playbook.
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As Client Zero for how to do really fast effective AI. The key has been to drive for progress over perfection. We built a solid foundation with data and taken the opportunity to really learn from the people who have a role to play in running IBM each and every day. Our own experience has taken us from far beyond just doing pilots and theory to real ROI and real productivity. A lot of our clients are very hungry to know what they can learn from us as Client Zero and then obviously how can they avoid perhaps some of the mistakes we've made or some of the failures we've had. The fact that we've been able to to derive and deliver our own use cases across everything that we do really transcends our clients experience.
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Visit IBM.com to learn how AI can drive enterprise wide productivity.
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Custom content from WSJ is a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising department.
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The Wall Street Journal news Organization was.
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Not involved in the creation of this content.