Our Guest: Thordur Arnason, Vice President, Global Gen AI GTM Lead, Capgemini Invent

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Design Mind frogcast Ep.54 – Confronting AI’s Prophecy

On this episode of the Design Mind frogcast take a deep dive into the role of AI in shaping our current and future world. To do this, we’re joined by Thordur Arnason, a Vice President and Global Gen AI GTM Lead at Capgemini Invent. Thordur, a contributor to frog’s recent <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/futurescape-25-trends-transforming-the-next-quarter-century">Futurescape report</a>, is here to help us understand the potential impact this continuously unfolding technology can and will have in all of our lives, but more importantly, our role as designers, technologists, business leads and consumers in shaping it.
Listen to the episode below. You can also find the Design Mind frogcast on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/design-mind-frogcast/id1541644073" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5mxbuRY6KtBwIrNhWhu0sx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Spotify</a> and anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Episode Transcript:
Design Mind frogcast
Episode 54: Confronting AI’s Prophecy
Guest: Thordur Arnason, Vice President, Global Gen AI GTM Lead, Capgemini Invent
[00:00:03] Elizabeth Wood: Welcome to the Design Mind frogcast. Each episode, we go behind the scenes to meet the people designing what’s next in the world of products, services and experiences, both here at frog and far, far outside the pond. I’m Elizabeth Wood.
[00:00:18] Elizabeth Wood: Today on our show, we’re diving deeper into the role of AI in shaping our current and future world. To do this, we’re joined by Thordur Arnason, a Vice President of Capgemini Invent focused on all things AI, and a contributor to frog’s recent Futurescape report. Thordur is here to help us understand the potential impact this continuously unfolding technology can and will have in all of our lives, but more importantly, our role as designers, technologists, business leads and consumers in shaping it. Here’s Thordur now.  
[00:00:50] Thordur Arnason: In my whole long career, ever since uni, and towards today, I&#8217;ve had a feeling twice. This feeling is something you feel with your whole body, your whole being, you just know that this is important, and you just happen to be at the right place at the right time. And you need to go all in.    
[00:01:08] Thordur Arnason: First time I felt this was when me and a friend, we snuck into a computer lab at the local uni before we were at the uni, because we knew that one of the labs had internet access. This is in the 80s, and we spent all night there, telnetting, FTP-ing, talking to people online, and we felt like the whole world opened up to us. And that was really when I knew that this… somehow, I would be doing this for the rest of my life.   
[00:01:33] Thordur Arnason: Same feeling I had in ’22, you just know it. You know, with every cell in your being, you just understand that this is huge. It is transformational, not in like, you know, we like to talk about transformational things, but really, you know, this has the power and potency of turning our society upside down. And when you get that feeling, I think you just need to act on it. You know, nothing else matters. You just need to go for it. 
[00:01:56] Thordur Arnason: My name is Thordur Arnason. I&#8217;m Icelandic originally, but I grew up in Norway. I work for Capgemini Invent in Norway, but currently I&#8217;m filling a global role. and the work I do for global is focused on generative AI and AI in general, and I lead the global effort on go to market, basically meaning I spend all my time talking to clients, figuring out their needs, and co-creating solutions together with them. 
[00:02:24] Elizabeth Wood: While he’s focused today on helping businesses understand applications and use cases for AI, Thordur’s early projects with generative AI started from a more playful, explorative, and, dare I say, tasty place.    
[00:02:37] Thordur Arnason: The engineering part of me was looking at generative AI and what, what was happening in early ‘22 and that&#8217;s before ChatGPT and all that stuff. But what we were seeing is there were some really interesting models turning up. So summer of ‘22 I decided, instead of taking a break, I had AI write a cookbook. So that was my summer project. To prove that these models and this technology was, already back then, mature enough to do real stuff, to do real world stuff. Basically over 10 weeks, co-writing a whole cookbook with language models and taking all the food photos to follow the recipes in this cookbook with diffusion models. So image generation models, which was a super fun project. And after doing that project, I decided I can&#8217;t focus on anything else than generative AI. 
[00:03:26] Thordur Arnason:  Well, we always have, you know, a playful and joking side to everything we do. So what? What is the weirdest thing you can get a large language model to do? Yeah, well, that is focusing on human nutrition, human foods. Because in theory, this is so far removed from what a computer system should be able to help you have opinion on and create on that&#8217;s why we did that. We did it playfully by not allowing any cooks, any humans, anyone to check what the LLM was creating. The only thing we did was editing. This is just out of curiosity to see and understand the power of the then-interesting language models at the time, and we got we were so surprised over what came out of it. We didn&#8217;t expect the results we got, and that&#8217;s why we actually turned it into a full book that is available as an e-book, and even printed In some copies. 
[00:04:18] Thordur Arnason: The year after, I was doing a keynote at a FinTech conference, and I did a deal with the kitchen that did the catering, and they cooked three of the recipes from that book to serve at one of the dinners, and everyone was okay afterwards. So it turned out well. 
[00:04:35] Elizabeth Wood: As AI has evolved over the last years, Thordur has increasingly been working with teams in exploring new and emerging paradigms within the field, including an emphasis on agentic, or multi-agent systems, and the increasingly complex capabilities these technologies may bring.  
[00:04:52] Thordur Arnason: We have been with a team focusing solely on concluding on what is our definition of agentic AI and AI agents? Because what we started picking up early last year and gradually increasing in volume throughout the year, was that everyone was starting to talk about AI agents and then multi-agent systems, as some say, or agentic. Thing is that if you look at what we are really talking about, we are talking about taking AI from read-only mode to write mode. So we have read/write systems. That is the promise of AI agents not only helping us, providing us with information and making us more efficient, but also starting to do stuff for us.  
[00:05:36] Thordur Arnason: In its simplest form, an AI agent is just a system that can, on our behalf, do things that can be banal things like simple office tasks or more serious things in a bigger system. And once you start talking about the more serious stuff and the more complex stuff, that&#8217;s when you&#8217;d start to talk about agentic, because then you&#8217;re not talking about one AI agent doing one well defined, distinct task. You&#8217;re talking about a group of agents, or an army of agents that somehow are orchestrated to do a lot of things for you within a defined system or a network. this is a new topic for most of us, and all the major labs, all the major tech players, are focusing on this. And we see the development is going hyper speed as we are getting accustomed to in the space of AI. So, no surprise there. But right now, we&#8217;re not seeing the huge real-world impact of it. But I think by the end of this year, we&#8217;ll start to see really interesting things happening, and hopefully mostly for the best. 
[00:06:40] Elizabeth Wood: Naturally, these early explorations of agentic AI require critical and sometimes difficult conversations about the potential impact offloading certain tasks onto AI agents can have on businesses and consumers alike.  
[00:06:54] Thordur Arnason: Right now, the focus is on the technology and developing these agentic systems, but we haven&#8217;t really started the serious discussion on how will a human feel in an organization where you&#8217;re working alongside AI. 
[00:07:09] Thordur Arnason: When you start to think of the impact this will have on organizations, the impact it will have on human psychology, the social impact this could have, the conversation becomes really interesting, because it&#8217;s not about technology. It&#8217;s about our role as humans in an organization where potentially half of your colleagues are agentic. And then you have to think about how do we feel about AI and decision-making? How do we feel about AI and agentic pushing the operational efficiency? How do you feel about trusting and collaborating with AI? What is the shift in the workforce structure that follows this? Not to forget, how will this impact human dynamics in an organization? All these things are really big topics that we are just starting to discuss. 
[00:07:59] Thordur Arnason: As long as things are mostly theoretical, you&#8217;re not able to fully grasp the impact of it in the near future. Once it becomes tangible, once we start to deploy these systems, then this conversation will happen real fast. So we need to redefine what change management is within organizations when a growing part of the workforce is agentic. What is HR’s role in an organization that is blended agentic-human? What if we start building personalized AI agents for every employee? So, imagine you have every employee in the organization has an AI twin or a digital twin, or call it what you want, that learns from you, and you learn from it. And it gradually understands more and more of you and your role and how you do things. So if you&#8217;re off, having a bad day or a bit busy, it can fill in for you. These are things that will start to happen, and that is interesting to think about.  
[00:08:55] Elizabeth Wood: Earlier this year, Thordur contributed to frog’s annual <a href="https://www.frog.co/designmind/futurescape-25-trends-transforming-the-next-quarter-century">Futurescape report</a>, all about emerging trends and provocations set to shape the next quarter-century and beyond. His trend called ‘Confronting AI’s Prophecy’ explores the real-time shifts our relationship with this emerging technology may affect. 
[00:09:13] Thordur Arnason: So when I started writing and thinking about this, I was really preoccupied with the cognitive limitations of humans coexisting with AIs. So that was my starting point. And I think this is interesting, because I have observed on myself and on others that we as humans, we get tired, we lose focus, we lose our cognitive abilities much faster than these systems do because they just go on and on and on. You have this super powerful helper that is always 100% present, 24/7 ready, always sharp, always ready to help you. But it&#8217;s not always easy, as a human, to be in a state of co-working with a perfect entity, so to speak, cognitively speaking, if you get my point. And this led me to the interesting discussion that is going on right now. Is AI actually making us more stupid, or is it making us smarter? 
[00:10:09] Thordur Arnason: Some argue that done right AI will actually make you, as a professional, as a human, much smarter, and it will improve your abilities. Some claim that AI is leveling the playing field. So it may it&#8217;s making non-experts quicker, gaining expertise in the field they don&#8217;t have expertise in, enabling us to do stuff we couldn&#8217;t really do before. Even though we have a little knowledge, we can do a lot more within that field, because AI helps us along. And that is the definitely the thinking of AI being a democratizing force, because it&#8217;s broadening our skill sets, so to speak. So if you know a little bit about coding, you can become a much better coder using AI. 
[00:10:46] Thordur Arnason: While others argue that people are lazy and attempt to go with the easy solution, making us dumber when we delegate blindly to AIs. 
[00:10:54] Thordur Arnason: When people are tired or people are overwhelmed, they seek the easiest solution to whatever is in front of them, and then it&#8217;s really easy to start using AI in a wrong way, leading to worse results and not better results of the technology.   
[00:11:09] Thordur Arnason: There are strong arguments on both sides, and I think that is something we need to take seriously as we now to an increasing degree, welcome AI into our everyday roles and work. The way we approach it and the way we work together with these systems we need to get right. Because if we get it wrong, it will make us less capable, not more capable. And I think to a large degree, it’s still unexplored as an area of, call it, change management, call it upskilling, call it how do you introduce these technologies in a good way in a workplace? 
[00:11:41] Elizabeth Wood: We’re going to take a short break. When we return, Thordur will be speaking to this very point: how do you effectively introduce these technologies in the workplace?

Featured in this episode is the recent frog report ‘Futurescape: 25 trends transforming the next quarter-century.’  

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