Top futurist Amy Webb sees Fortune 500 firms suffering from ‘learned helplessness’ with AI, like taxi drivers who need Google Maps

Large companies are behind on artificial intelligence, and much of the money they’re spending isn’t tied to a plan, futurist Amy Webb said at the Fortune AIQ Summit on Thursday, in conversation with Fortune‘s AI editor Jeremy Kahn.

“Let’s be fair, Fortune 500 companies are pretty late to the party on this,” said Webb, founder and CEO of the consulting firm Future Today Strategy Group. “Artificial intelligence didn’t just show up a couple of years ago.”

She said she sees “enormous amounts of capital” going into pilots “with no strategy ahead of them.” Companies, she said, then argue with their security teams and end up with orphaned projects that never do anything. She also said some executives hand the building of what becomes proprietary technology to third parties, and then get stuck. Employees get frustrated and start building their own tools, she said.

Webb argued that having AI everywhere doesn’t matter if workers don’t know how to use it, comparing it driving in a New York City cab and being handed a phone and asked to type in an address—a constant pattern for about two years now, she estimated. Drivers as so reliant on navigation tools, she said, that there’s “a certain amount of learned helplessness,” just like some leaders during this moment.

Her advice for companies wasn’t to aim to be “AI native” but more about “being flexible,” but she said companies must build mechanisms for that. She said she hasn’t yet........

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